About

I’ve been on a treasure hunt lately, and I invite you to come along with me if you have New York somewhere in your experience.

The treasures

Like most of the dream workers I know, I believe dreams offer us an immense wealth of insight and creativity, not to mention entertainment. New York, many times, does the same.

What this treasure hunt looks for is the cultural and other treasures of the New York City area, and the treasures in our dreams that reflect New York’s or are inspired by them. Dreaming with a sense of place.

When I say dreams, I’m referring mostly to the kind of dreams we have in our sleep. When I say cultural, I’m referring both to the arts and to expressions of ethnicity, nationality, and social structure. (Prior knowledge of these isn’t required in order to participate!) And when I say treasures, I have in mind not only the things that glitter and catch the eye, but more fundamentally, anything that nourishes us deeply. My idea of treasures includes the rarified beauty, the diamond in the rough (I’m fond of those!), the manufactured, the earthy, the sublime, the silly, and the painful—as long as it somehow, eventually, enhances understanding.

Because this treasure hunt focuses on the New York area, it’s grounded in a sense of place. But the very nature of New York is a place that pulls in the entire global experience, Our neighborhoods and restaurants and museums and performances and business sectors and subway rides give us tastes of the whole world and all of world history.

My commitment to this blog starts out as short-term—see my Dutch Dreaming post—but it might well go on much longer.

The hunt

Here are some ways to go about this treasure hunt:

Simple noticing: In the next couple of days after you go to the theater or walk through a local park, pay attention to whether your dreams incorporate anything from that experience. If so, what? And why do you suppose your dreaming mind chose that bit of “day residue” to depict? What meaning does it have for you?

Dream incubation: At least three possibilities here:

• If you’ve attended a celebration or visited a museum, and something in particular caught your attention, incubate a dream that night. Ask your dreaming mind to elaborate on why that “something” resonated for you, and ask it to help you incorporate the answer into your self-understanding.

• If you have plans to go out on the town in some way, incubate a dream the night before. Ask your dreaming mind what questions or attitudes will benefit you as you go about the activity.

• Before you make plans, incubate a dream that will help you choose an activity. And then follow up by noticing whether your dream advised you well, and in what way.

For information on how to incubate a dream, see this article by International Association for the Study of Dreams member Ryan Hurd: http://dreamstudies.org/2009/08/31/how-to-incubate-a-dream/.

Dream psi: Psi is the umbrella term that scientific researchers use to name, in a neutral manner, experiences such as precognition, telepathy, and remote viewing. Another phenomenon that often seems like psi is synchronicity (named by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung), which is the meaningful coincidence between an issue that’s been on your mind and something that happens externally. As you go about your New York–area activities, notice whether you experience a synchronicity or anything that might be psi, especially psi in connection with a dream. (Cautionary note: Exercise a healthy amount of skepticism and rational inquiry before concluding any particular connection you notice is indeed psi.) For a glossary of some psi and related terms, see International Association for the Study of Dreams member Dale Graff’s site: http://www.dalegraff.com/glossary.htm.

For all the above ways of treasure hunting, dream journaling will be extremely helpful. For information on journaling, see International Association for the Study of Dreams member Cynthia Pearson’s DreamJournalist.com Web site, particularly these suggestions for how to remember and record your dreams: http://www.nauticom.net/www/netcadet/NHOWTO.HTM.

Reflecting on the process of dreaming: A somewhat wide-open category, this allows for those times that our New York experiences give us insights into the process and purpose of dreaming without instigating a specific dream.

The online part

This blog is a place to display the treasures we find. For instructions on how post, see the How To page.

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