Body Awareness involves the ability to recognize where your body is in relation to space. Dream Body Awareness involves being conscious of where your dreambody is located inside the space of your dreams. Body Image has to do with how we see our physical body, where as Dream Body Image has to do with how we show up in dreams, and being conscious of what shape we have taken.
Dreaming beyond the Physical
Dreams allow us to have experiences beyond physical reality, and concepts of time and space. We are not limited to the physical body, and can explore physical reality in other times and places. We may embody other forms of being in dreams, including gender, race, animal, plant, star, Earth, ancestor, element, and even Gods or Goddesses.
Dreaming into the Physical World
Scientific studies have shown that dreams, imagination and visualization, bring measurable impact upon our physical body, and can boost healing, learning and performance capacity. Sports psychology taps into this inner resource to boost athletic performance. Studies have shown that students who sleep and recall their dreams before taking a test, perform better than those who crammed all night before an exam. I know I have dreamt of studying for and taking a test before actually dong so, and been able to ace it. When I was a Ballet dancer, I would often imagine difficult moves in my mind perfectly, moments before actually performing it, and never had a single fall or accident.
Out of Body Dreaming Awake
As a dancer, I once had an anxiety attack, before it was my turn to practice a set of moves I had just learned. When it was my turn to perform, my mind went blank. I was so frustrated from being exposed to fear and humiliation as a common tactic in dance training. I decided I had enough, and instead chose to fully trust that my body knew the movements, even though my mind was blocked from fear. What happened next was both surprising and exciting. I found myself outside my physical body hovering above, watching as body wisdom took the helm and performed the movements perfectly. At the end of the sequence of dance moves, I popped right back into my body! I looked around the studio, wondering if anyone had seen that move!
Years ago, when I was a member of a Contact improv dance theater, a telepathic dream came over me in the middle of the day. I found myself in a secret meeting arranged by a rival dancer, who went behind my back to try to vote me out. Upon waking, I was able to act on the dream immediately, and went to the place my dream had shown me, only to discover the exact scenario playing out in real time in physical reality! They were very surprised to see me! Luckily, I was able to dream into resolving this conflict peacefully. I incubated a dream about it, and dreamt about seeing myself and my rival performing a dance of open hearted vulnerability and trust. We performed the dream dance together in waking reality bringing healing to both of us just like in the dream, and expanding also to the group as a whole. This amazing experience inspired me to create a form of embodied conflict transformation called Peace Moves. I now offer trainings for facilitators to share this form of embodied wisdom and conflict transformation within their own communities.
The Equality of Dreams
Our dream body is beyond the limits of race, gender, and sexual orientation. In dreams, we can embody different race, culture, class, gender or sexual orientation, to bring us more empathy and compassion into our everyday lived experience. By doing so we embody a wholistic view of humanity based on equality, that does not see one race, gender or sexual orientation, as more dominant over anyone else. The equality of dreams is a common bridge where we can stand shoulder to shoulder, because we all dream. It is a language we all share, and a potent opportunity to affect change on global and societal levels, as well as individual, ancestral, and cellular levels of healing trauma and transforming racism.
Social Dreaming and Natural Paths of Energy
As Dreamers, we are not just individuals concerned with the workings of the psyche and unconscious mind, nor gazing at our navels to bring enlightenment. Dreaming can be a social experience where we are dreaming together with others we may know and love, those who have passed on, those who have yet to be born, or those we have yet to meet. Dreams connect us with alternate personalities in other realms of experience, past lives lived, or glimpses of possible future timelines. They can bring us into contact with realms that are close to the Earth, where we may connect with relatives who are more than human. We can meet up with our wild instinctual nature and our animal allies, and flow with the elements and natural paths of our energy. We can connect with our cosmic counterparts in the upper realms where spiritual guides and star beings reside. Dreams are a place we can go to visit both human and beyond human, and they can also visit us.
Healing Patterns of Trauma
The place where our stories of trauma gets held is on the cellular level in the body. Each phase of our lives, from birth, childhood, teenage years, young adulthood, and into old age, our trauma stories reside within us physically and psychically, often disconnecting us from our Body, Soul and Spirit. The same stories and coping strategies of survival, get passed on to future generations with transgenerational trauma held in our DNA. Studies have shown the echoes of transgenerational trauma in historically oppressed populations, decreases resiliency in future generations. Ecopsychology posits the Earth as a sentient being, and like us, her stories of trauma are also held in her body. Generations of atrocities, creating community cycles of repetitive trauma. The body of the community, the Earth and the individual, can be healed from the stories of trauma held there, through bringing out those stories and honoring the victims, while also releasing them to transcend, and reveal the deeper stories of the Soul of the Earth. The time is now to dream into healing our relationship with our body, our connections with each other, and the Earth.
Valley Reed © December 2020
Years ago I was offered a position as Assistant Director at a non-profit organization where I volunteered. I was not so sure if this was a direction I wanted to focus my career at the time, so I asked my dreams to give me guidance. That night I had a dream of standing before a 3 tier water fountain with red rose petals floating in the water on each level. I woke from the dream feeling loved and blessed. It seemed a very good sign for me to take the position and so I did. Shortly there after, an event was organized to announce the new role I had been given as Assistant Director and when I walked into the atrium of the building, I found a three tier fountain with red rose petals floating in the water from a wedding that had taken place there the night before.
dreams over the years. Many of these dreams have been more related to big changes coming my way and times of upheaval beyond my control. I did have a dream however that was more specific and showed the biggest blackest Tornado I had ever seen and it was traveling down highway 35 North of Austin. I was told in the dream that this was an F5 Tornado, which at the time I had never heard of an F5 tornado because they used to be so rare. I decided not to go on a planned trip to drive to Austin that weekend based on this dream, and that very weekend the horrible F5 Tornado hit the small town of Jarrell, Tx. just North of Austin, Tx. on Hwy 35 and completely wiped out the town.
of a war zone. There were ashes coming down out of the sky and people running frantically through the streets in shock. I was conscious in the dream, aware I was dreaming and that I was there to help. A woman came over to me and told me she was so glad I was there. I looked at her and saw she was missing an arm. I realized she was dead and she did not even know it. I told her, “don’t you know you’re dead?” She looked down at her missing arm and realized it was true. I pointed her in the direction of a huge portal of light, bordered by two beams of bright blue light. I played the shamanic role of psycho-pomp in helping to guide her through the portal to the other side. Then I woke up! I thought it was one of the strangest dreams I had ever had. I got my kids ready and took them to school and on the way home, turned on the radio to hear the first plane had crashed the Twin Towers. I rushed home to turn on the Television and saw a seen that looked eerily like my dream of ashes coming down from the sky and people running frantically for their lives through the streets. The portal with the blue lights showed up 6 months later as the first memorial for those who lost their lives in the attacks.
Awaken the Sacred Dream 