How to dream again

Ending the silence of the night

In my last post, In search of lost dreams, I resolved to end the insubstantial, trivial dreams I have been having - which I call ‘the silence of the night’ - and replace them with majestic, profound, and holy ones.

If my dreams reveal little to me, it is troubling. To be clear, I am not asking for divination: demon-given views into the future. I ask only for reflections of the beauty of a life well-lived, for holy images and great adventures. And I suspect I am not the only one who wakes unsated.

Over the last few months, I have researched various teachings on the subject: liminal dreaming techniques, Tibetan Dream Yoga, and relevant traditional Christian thought. I have been experimenting and iterating on the recommended approaches, and have settled on a strategy which I have found to be powerful in producing the desired effects.

This strategy is a fairly original blend, because none of the above schools of thought entirely satisfies what I’m attempting. I am not interested in having ‘trippy dreams’ for the sake of it, nor am I interested in becoming a Buddhist or a Yogi. Serious Christian teaching on the subject is quite limited, which is interesting, because Scripture tells of many striking and important dreams.

I am also not interested in a bio-hacking approach to inducing intense dreams, because this would ignore the fundamentally spiritual nature of this quest, which is to use the quality and intensity of dreams as a measure of the quality and intensity of the waking life and spirit.

In dreams, we experience emanations of the self - of our own minds - but it must be recognized that our experience of waking reality is also conditioned by the contours of the self: by our preoccupations, interpretations, and instincts. To resacralize one reality may necessitate resacralizing the other.

Architect Rafael Viñoly’s set design for Strauss's opera Die Liebe der Danae.

There will be no shortcuts. I do not wish to have artificially satisfying dreams: I desire dreams which are the natural continuation of a life rich in meaning, experience, and the numinous - the sense of the nearness of God and the sanctity of life.

I believe I have found a way: my dreams have come rushing back.