Closely related to lucid dreaming, dream development covers any attempt to develop the dreaming state. Carlos Casteneda offers a highly mystical description of a dream development process in ‘The Way of Dreaming’. Similarly, there are a number of accounts of the Senoi in dream literature that, while suffering from a sense of ‘what those people over there’ do, nonetheless points towards a different relationship with dreams.
In Western psychotherapy, we’re used to taking dreams and working on their content in a waking setting. The Senoi are described more as setting tasks to then take place in the dream itself. Much of what Casteneda describes as ‘gates of dreaming’ constitute specialised dream tasks to be performed in lucid dreams.
My own thought is that dreaming is a highly devalued area of human experience, at least in Western culture; when it *is* valued, it is in a very Western attitude of being something to mine for precious metal. We tend to mine our dreams for gold. Dreaming takes up a good proprotion of our lives, so I’m interested in how this area of experience might develop if given the same attention and encouragement we give to, for example, our intellectual or aesthetic faculties.
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