How Dreaming Into Knowing Began
A Letter from the Innernaut
Audio Version
“To dream our way into knowledge we must not personalize any of it. We must not act from our beaten up, bombarded, bewilderment in the manifest reality, as to do so would be to act from amnesia and from our inborn tendency to reduce experience to an existing understanding, to a common sense frame, limiting it to perceive it, turning it into a common thing.”
— The Innernaut
Before we begin, I’d like to share my story of how it all began and what I learned that formed the process which brought the dreams in this book to you.
I had always assumed that everyone dreams. But I didn’t become aware of my own dreams until an undiagnosed illness expressed itself in my life. Previously, I had figured that life conditioned me so much that it kept me from being aware of my dreams and that this was why I couldn’t remember them. The illness that I learned of was an impetus to my discovering my own dreams and this would lead me to deepen my engagement with dreaming which is something that has changed my life and understanding of everything.
The illness first presented itself as a struggle to get things done. The feeling of stagnancy that I was experiencing became so severe that I could not find a reason to get out of bed. I looked out the window and felt unable to join the rest of the world and I wondered if I might be dying. I felt that I had been removed from the joys of life, including a joy that my work had always provided, in which I had the pleasure of exploring expansive and beautiful tracts of land in the West.
It was on Thanksgiving Day that something shifted. I was far from home and enjoying dinner at a railroad café when I felt as though I’d been hit by what I could only describe as an energetic. I had no reference for it. I felt that this new energy had something to do with me needing to move from where I was living. I didn’t know what to make of this impulse but I acted on it. The next day I made a call based on the intuition which lead me to buy a property in Wyoming and live there. Shortly after the decision my blood pressure went down and my health improved so much that I canceled an insurance policy that I had taken out when I thought that I was dying.
The next experience of an energetic came as a voice. It told me to go to the dentist. When I did, the dentist informed me of a condition that I had that would require multiple operations in order to have about a five percent chance of living. This sent me over the edge and all of a sudden I started to hear much more. I heard my name called out by my dad who was 400 miles away. His voice was loud and yet it sounded like he was in the room. I heard the doorbell ring when it had not been ringing. I had an old-timey wind up alarm clock that would I heard go off without my having set it. I remembered a clock like it, also a wind-up deal, it was the sound I had heard upon waking as a child. I thought that I had heard the phone ring. I decided to track these encounters and in no time I recorded 17 different kinds of sound events in one night; most of them hypnagogic, little thresholds, images, and glimpses that revealed to me a realm and a depth that bordered on what I had imagined to be the stuff of witches and wizards, and the sorts of things that I’d not previously thought about.
The dreams suggested that I do things like modify my breath so that I imagined ultraviolet at the top of the inbreath. Research on this led me to Bible stories about the Battle of Jericho and tales of its walls tumbling down. I felt a kind of temporary insanity while also sensing something, a realm. I began orienting more-and-more to an inner world. All the while aware that it was the enormous trauma of a life threatening illness that threw me outside the normal stabilized senses and into a new space.
I began to dream regularly. I sent my dreams to an interpreter who lived in California. After many back-and-fourths I received a sharp reply, “We’re just not prepared for this. We can’t handle this. You’ll have to figure out how to understand this yourself.” And so I committed to understanding them inside of myself, and over time I evolved a process. I wrote my dreams in notebooks that today amount to hundreds containing thousands of pages of barely legible scribble. Something did progress over the nearly 10 years that followed even though I had not been functioning like most people because I’d chosen to live in the dream world. What I learned during this time is what I have to share with you.
