Instructions

If you believe you have a great dream you can do the following.

1. Record the dream as soon as possible, and as completely as possible. Also share it with an understanding friend. For in the retelling of it you can recall and relive more fully aspects of the dream. However, do not embellish the dream or add to it in any way. Show your integrity in remaining faithful to the dreaming experience itself, rather than change your dream report to fit an ego desire to put yourself in a special and positive light to yourself and others.

2. Write a summary of what this dream has done to enlighten and inspire you. Write freely about it. Also how it might tie in with changes your are making, or need to make, in your waking personality and life.

3. Go over the list of characteristics described about to evaluate what in your dream itself might illustrate each of the points. If you have trouble doing so, then enlist the help of a friend or colleague. Just doing this process alone will add meaning to your experience of the dream and your life itself. Take the easier items first so that you can be flowing in your analysis. Then write a summary of what you have found.

4. Make a list of principles, insights, values and attitudes that seem embedded in this dream's images and especially actions. These are for your personal and spiritual guidance. They will deepen your awareness about yourself and life. Some of the insights and principles can be turned into life practices. Make another list of things you will do out of any of these principles and values. Make them realistic actions and tasks that you can accomplish mostly within two to three months. Yet start now. Don't let your dreams inspiration escape you by doing nothing or avoiding. If you must resist, give yourself no more than three days to resist what you know is the value and truth for you. Often one day only of resistance is enough.

5. Make a commitment in journal writing or in other ways to doing a positive and challenging thing in your life that comes partly out of the inspiration of your Great Dream. It is not that the Great Dream tells you what to do. You alone develop insight and consciousness about yourself and your dreams. You alone make actual decisions in daily life. You alone make central life choices at the many crossroads that your life journey leads you to. However, Great Dreams do not come to people just as works of the imagination, as if you are viewing a film. Great Dreams come to you and I as specific moments of our lives. They also come to us partly individualized to our person and life. They are unique to us but also universal and transpersonal in their wholeness and fundamentals involving life. They may also show us new perspectives that lead us to create something new for ourselves and others. Thus Great Dreams can have a cultural effect as well.