In this blog I am describing a new way of relating to dreams and imagination to help us creatively deepen and expand a new story of the people and the Earth.

A few nights ago I had a dream with the following scene: I am part of a small group of people about to be shown around a large older warehouse. The outer sides of the space are divided into open cubicles. I am being shown around by an older man who is my mentor. He has us walk over to the first cubicle on the left. I see a younger man with dark hair sitting on a chair. He puts on a set of black headphones and then picks up an object in his right hand. I see that it is oblong, about a foot long and half as wide. There is a whitish dome over the top two thirds and at the open end the bottom is dug out in to a bowl. I see a hummingbird come out from under the dome and sit in the bowl. My mentor says the young man is learning to connect deeply with nature through the headphones. Then the young man takes off the headphones and holds out his left hand. The hummingbird flies out of the bowl and lands on the young man’s open palm. I feel a sense of grace blossom in myself as I watch the hummingbird land. My mentor says that they are one, in relationship out of their own choosing. I feel my heart resonate openly with all I am experiencing.

As soon as I woke up I remembered the dream going over it a few times in my mind. I attempted to notice where a scene would catch my attention and strike a chord in me. Later on in the day as I was doing other things the scene described above came to me unbidden. I feel the scene chose itself with me in relationship with it (like the young man with the hummingbird in his hand). In other words we chose each other. This scene spoke to my heart in a way that I didn’t experience in the rest of the dream. I experienced something new in what arose and in my dream ego’s response to it. There were old familiar patterns in the dream and in some of my reactions to them. Instead of interpreting what this fragment or the whole dream meant I looked for the feeling of an opening resonance in my heart. In another dream what catches my attention will be something else.

It was at this moment, when I and the part of the dream resonated with each other, that I let my imagination go to work. In the past I often sat waiting for something more to happen. Often nothing did. Nothing new moved or arose. Still it may for you.  I realized slowly that I needed to let these resonant parts rest in me like an embryo or and egg rather than focusing intently on having something happen with my mind.  With this approach a new image would arise later unexpectedly, usually when I was moving.

What came this time was the hummingbird flying away from the young man’s hand. Around the warehouse he went. I could hear the sound of him flying. He was humming. Yes a new song. I felt my spirits rise and move with him. There was a sense of freedom and intensity as I soared around. Then the hummingbird was back on his shell in the bowl. I could see his colours. He had light green iridescent breast feathers and a very soft yellow body with light grey sides. At first I felt a judgement in myself about his colouring. Kind of dull colouring a voice said in me. I let this voice fade away rather than engaging with it, or trying to figure out what part of me might be saying that, or what it meant. I take these parts and work with them at the end of the process. Otherwise I end up at a creative dead end conceptualizing and controlling the dream imagery with my ego.

Later that day I painted the hummingbird below.  He is beautiful to me even though the painting is not ‘technically’ very good, perhaps more in the realm of art brut. What stays with me is my being the hummingbird, experiencing his flight, his energy, and his freedom, being unfettered and connected to the air. A new song. I found the experience beautiful and I felt different in myself afterward.

The description of what I did in relationship to the dream scene above is not cast in stone thereby becoming dogma and technique. What I feel is most important here are all of the new and different experiences that I go through-noticing and relating to the nuances in the dream and then after I wake up. These experiences are new, gifts from our deeper selves and nature that begin to create new threads of seeing and relating to ourselves and other beings. We can also begin to experience new parts of ourselves through our imagination and creativity like in the painting above.

Does the hummingbird singing a new song trigger something in you? Maybe a poem?