Collecting Dreams Tracking the Dreamwork at Chartres 2010

Sallie Lee531 Crowfields LaneAsheville, NC 28803

828-277-0092sallielee@mac.com

New Chartres School 2010Intensive V: ArithmeticaCourse # 60176Program: MA, Wisdom Spirituality

I sleep but my heart is awake.

Song of Solomon

Dreaming

We subliminally pick things up during our daily lives. At night, the frontal lobes recede and feeling comes to the fore...When dreaming, we are flooded with the chemical, acetycholine, that focuses our attention. We then have a disinhibited limbic system, and our neurons are firing like mad. It’s the perfect conditions for learning.

Amy HardieThe Edge of Dreaming

PBS/POV Special08.24.10

Why Do Collective Dreamwork?

Sharing Dreams invites multiple ways of knowing:

Multiple imagery and metaphors

Multiple perceptions and perspectives/multiple frames of reference

The shared intention together makes a collective geometric pattern which changes its form every time you look at it.

The process offers deep ways to know one another and seed new ideas--we become more visible to one another.

Also, we need a collective to get a big message. The ancestors are trying to have a communication with us. [Apela Colorado]

Are We Wiser Together?What fields can we inhabit together?

We can be wiser when we create a collaborative mindset/environment for collective listening and interpreting—dream work is excellent practice to:

Become aware of our collective intelligence and wisdom

Commit to collective deep listening, not just to one another in the group, but also to the other ‘stakeholders’: the ancestors, the animals, the hill, the labyrinth.

Reach [together] to catch the message and become dream catchers together. Collectively, we are capable of receiving and embodying big messages.

When we are able to collectively tap deeper levels of consciousness, more wisdom becomes available and filters into our conscious minds. We hold the wisdom net together.

Key to holding the net is the awareness of the enormous importance of the message that is here for us—coming through to us in the field of collective wisdom. We prepare that field together--to listen and catch the message.

Questions to reflect on as we remember and offer our

dreamsWho is in conversation?

Are we having ongoing conversations with one another as we sleep?

Are the ancestors of Chartres having conversations with us?

What voices are coming through?

What doorways have opened?

What is the message? Are our dreams fractals of one

another this year at Chartres? Or Fibonacci spirals growing like nautilus shells??

What collective emotions are being expressed?

What are we hearing? What are we feeling?

What big patterns do we see? What is being repeated?

What seeds do we want to nurture?

Dream Circle

Those waking early laid waiting for others.  Eventually they would become a circle, still sleepy, but one person would begin to speak of their dream.  They thought of the dream world as the real world; the world in which we live as the shadow world.  There was a story created around  what four or five people remembered from that night in the real world, and it would set a framework for the day.  

Robert Wolff, ORIGINAL WISDOM: STORIES OF AN ANCIENT WAY OF KNOWING, p. 80.

A Model for Our Circle’s Dreamwork Interpretation

How do we get our arms around our collective dreaming?How can we make meaning together of the holographic text that emerges?

We can move through and share a clarifying and deepening process:

Layers of meaning making[deepening together in a spiral]

Interpreting our dreams from Chartres 2010

Applying this model to our work for 2010All Dream information pulled from the notes and glyphs of the

Dream Scribes: Apela Colorado, Nancy Holm, Maryka Paquette, Jeanne Creighton....and my own notes and journaling at Chartres

Our Collective Images into Patterns

Day by Day

Each day of the dream circle had a different tone and feel to it, as one day built on another and as the metaphors began to integrate.

The following slides show the key messages for each day of the week, images that surfaced each day and the glyphs that the Dream Scribes put together for each day [presented to the whole group on the final day at Chartres].

Key Images/Messages for Each Day of Our DreamWork

Collective Images: Monday

Monday’s Glyph

TuesdayThe Trickster is About!

Tuesday’s Glyphs

Wednesday

Wednesday’s Glyph

ThursdaySubtle Answers

Thursday’s Glyph

FridayTreading on the Tail of the Tiger

Friday’s Glyphs

SaturdayWhat are we taking on?

Saturday’s Glyph

Reflections on the Days of the Week

It feels important when the dreams were told—on what day of the week they came out to the group.

The god, goddess, or planet associated with the day of the week also feels important as part of the gestalt.

The peak day for reporting was Friday—there was a lot going on. Friday also flowed very easily into Saturday.

Saturday seemed to be about “how do we go on—what do we do when we are not sure of what we are being asked for....but feel we are in conversation.”

Collective Themes

From the Patterned Images to Collective themesWhat same messages did we all get?

Theme: Urgency and Peril

Theme: Call from Possible Futures

More Themes to Consider

‘Green Man’ on the North Portal of Chartres Cathedral

More themes to consider

Themes into Stories

Life hangs on a narrative thread. This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are, and where we come from, and where we might go. The thread is slender but strong; we trust it to hold us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream into words.

Christina Baldwin, STORYCATCHERS: MAKING SENSE OF OUR LIVES THROUGH THE POWER AND PRACTICE OF STORY, 2005,, p. 3

A Version of Our Dream Story

We have received an urgent call to action [from the future generations—the children who are irritated with us and seem difficult], despite the fact that we don’t know exactly what to do and how to be. We are told that staying where we are is perilous [ex; vulnerable flanks, exploding cathedral, floods, soldiers looking for us, cannibals]. Moving forward is uncertain and frightening, but not as hard as we thought—we have what we need [as symbolized by swords, suitcases left for us, knowing what to feed the dog, landing our planes on the highway, music, understanding old languages].

We are called from to look past illusion [ex: the diverting trickster energy, being served ‘dressed up’ rats to eat, being called by dark energies] to see the future coming toward us [ex: the greening of the Chartres Mound, Jim becoming one with nature, the Virgin—Divine Feminine--ready to get married to join Venus and Mars together, Fairchild/ Fairfax Wisdom locations] We are vehicles to transport the future from the dream world to our waking planetary reality.

We can continually ask for help—this is a bigger job than we can do on our own [ex: realizing as we go downhill on a truck that we have taken on more than we knew, realizing that the black snake meant to devour us]. The help comes from nature itself and the great mother.

It seems with all the cathedral and Chartrian imagery that the spirits of Chartres were willing to speak with us:

Reflection on Storying Alone

We never truly author stories alone—there is always influence and input from our social environments and our life experiences and partners, including our spiritual connections to the ancestors and all intelligences, to the archetypal and unconscious planes. I had all the reports of dreams, the captured images, the glyphs to pull from, and my memories of the morning conversations.

Yet, as the story began to speak to me, I was acutely aware that it would have been a different story if the Dream group had been in session together, if the nuances of the images and metaphors had been filtered and netted through all of us—it would have been richer and more elegant, with a sense of “Aha—that’s it! That’s it!”

What story can/do YOU tell from these dream themes?

For each of us to reflect on now individually or in group:

Conclusions, Learnings,

Instructions, Embodiment

Arithmetica is under the influence of Mars:

I am. I will.

Mars brings us from inner

intention into action.

Mars is also...after being wounded and rejected, do

we have the courage to go back with an offering?

Uranus just crossed into Aries for seven years. It wakes up

parts of ourselves, a new spark. Uranus in Aries is

lightning, the power of illuminated understanding.

It wakes us up to a new beauty in life.

Lynn Bell

What does our group’s collective story/ stories invite, request, and

change?

What new ideas and images are now part of us?

Conclusions,

learnings, instruction

s, embodime

nt

And now?

What aspects of the greater collective will show up as we go forward together? As we get better at dreaming together?

See you in 2011.

Artwork by Richard Henry

Conclusions,

learnings, instruction

s, embodime

nt

Notes•Thank you to the Dream Scribes for providing me with their great work:

• Apela Colorado, •Nancy Holm, •Maryka Paquette •Jeanne Creighton

•An additional thank you to Apela and Nancy for their feedback on the first draft of this.

•All the photos in the presentation were taken by Sallie Lee.