THE DREAMOSOPHY APPROACH: In addition to helping you remember your dreams, this guidebook by dream educators Paul Sheldon and Elizabeth Eagar is all about making your dreams your own, rather than just being there. It's about being free in your dreams and understanding and realizing your dreams. Many people go to bed and have a dream without remembering it. In many instances, they are really missing out on some of the cool things and some of the lessons and deeper experiences that can come up in dreams. The five basic Dream Opportunities, which are discussed in more detail throughout each chapter of this guidebook, include: How to be free in your dreams; How to feel good in your dreams; How to speak up in your dreams; How to make friends in your dreams; How to understand and realize your dreams.
Each Dream Opportunity is divided into three parts-noticing, identifying, and transforming or changing, to help you deepen and expand your experience of your dreams in a manner that is steady but slow enough not to cause too much strain for you. You will monitor your dreams for a week and write down how you feel in each of the dreams. By asking questions about how you feel, you can start to notice a few patterns. Then you are invited to identify these same feelings in your waking life, to invest time identifying the feelings that you have on most days and comparing them to your dream life. At this point, you still aren't taking any actions, just noticing the patterns. Finally, you will be invited to explore transformation, to shift some aspects of how you experience your daily life. The aspiration is to recognize patterns in your dream life and your waking life, and then consider what it would be like to make changes in your waking life. This guidebook goes into more depth about how these three levels work and what you can do with them based on the Dream Opportunity in each chapter.
The authors' ultimate aspiration is to invite people to become Dreambassadors - spokespersons for the value of dreaming - an opportunity that allows you to interact with others, who may need or want help with the different aspects of their dreams, so they can get the most out of their waking and dream lives.
For Paul Sheldon, a childhood filled with dancing, singing, gardening and open-hearted exploring of various aspects of consciousness and spiritual experience flowed smoothly into an adulthood of consulting and advising, tree planting, and social activism for institutional transformation, through helping people, organizations, and communities realize their fondest dreams. Paul is fascinated by all kinds of wisdom, especially as expressed through the use of water-based metaphors - a fascination which emerged from explorations of lucid dreaming. As a private Development Consultant, Paul Sheldon specializes in helping clients realize their fondest dreams. To do this, he works with dreams - both the dreams recalled from sleep, as well as all kinds of visualization, imagination, creativity, goal setting, and creative approaches to the realization of individual and collective dreams. He also works with clients to increase their access to the resources needed to realize their dreams, through real estate, organizational development, green jobs development, energy efficiency planning, implementing sustainability, staff training, the greening of jails, prisons, and other correctional institutions, and the co-creation of a regenerative world - Paul believes strongly that it is too late just to do no harm - we must participate actively in the healing of each other and the world in which we live - what in Hebrew is described as "Tikkun Olam" - the healing of the world. He consults widely for businesses, governments, non-profit groups, and philanthropists.
Elizabeth Eagar first became curious about dreams and dreaming as a teenager when she and some friends started sharing dreams with each other and keeping dream journals. Her interest deepened when she studied dreaming as an undergraduate psychology student. After graduating with her B.S. in psychology, she began to explore the ways that language and creativity influence one another - including how they relate to the world of dreams. She eventually decided to further this exploration by pursuing a master of arts degree. While completing her M.A. in English language and creative writing at the University of Westminster, Elizabeth began to explore the power of dreaming as part of the storytelling process. She used dreams as both a starting point for creative inquiry and as a way for written characters to explore their true identities and communicate with things larger than themselves. She is continuing to increase her knowledge by pursuing an M.Ed. in instructional design, with graduation anticipated in 2018. Elizabeth first encountered Dreamosophy when Paul Sheldon contacted her to assist in the creation of Wisdom of Dreaming: A Guide to an Effective Dream Life. Diving deep into Dreamosophy in order to help create this book led to changes in her own dream life. She soon learned that the proof was in the pudding - Dreamosophy works! As her understanding of Dreamosophy developed, Elizabeth grew increasingly interested in becoming a Dreambassador and sharing the Dreamosophy approach with others.
