Winter Dreaming, Course, and Exercise
By Dr. Angel Morgan
Winter Dreaming
Winter is here, with all of its accompanying feelings, traditions and ceremonies. As the weather contracts, we weave differently between inside and outside activities. In winter, how do you weave differently between waking life, and dreaming life? What remains the same?
Sofia University Course
For the Winter term, Dr. Stanley Krippner and I will once again teach the Psychology of Anomalous Experiences course in the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology’s Global PhD program at Sofia University. This course is not the same as the Extraordinary Dreams course, although it does include extraordinary “anomalous” dreams. From our course syllabus:
“Anomalous experiences are rare and/or poorly understood experiences that typically impact human behavior or that result from that behavior. Over the millennia, these experiences have intrigued scientists, artists, and others, having had a profound effect upon them and their social groups. They have resulted in Nobel Prizes, artistic awards, and creative breakthroughs – as well as violent and anti-social behavior... Anomalous dreams include those that appear to foretell future events, those that coincide with an event occurring at a distant location, those that match the thoughts of another person who is not present at the time, or those that seem to reflect a ‘past life’ of the dreamer. There are anomalous healing experiences, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, mystical experiences, among others. This course will emphasize the scientific evidence for their occurrence and explanation, while making the case that most of them are not symptomatic of mental illness but clues as to what the transpersonal psychologist A.H. Maslow called the further reaches of human nature.”
The Winter term at Sofia University begins mid-January, 2018.
Dream Exercise
As it gets colder outside and you huddle inside keeping warm by the fire, here is a winter dream incubation exercise from Rudolf Steiner: If you write your dreams down after each of the "Holy Nights" (12 days of Christmas) from December 25 through "Epiphany" on January 6, you can imagine each night's dream is a seed for each of the 12 months of the coming year. If you did this last year, take a look at your dream journal from the Holy Nights in 2016 and see how they compared to your 12 months in 2017. What insights do you discover?
