Garden of Dreams

Here’s an extract from my 2020 book, Bird of Paradise–Taming the Unconscious to Bring Your Dreams to Fruition.

And if this entices you to keep turning the pages, you’ll find more details about this, my seventh book, here.

Introduction: Garden of Dreams

This book that you have before you is part whimsical memoir, part healing balm, and part alchemical guide to navigating your human journey by observing some of the deeper mysteries of the human experience. It aims, in a larger sense, to be an inspiration to you, to be used in ways that will enrich your life.  Bird of Paradise is made up of stories I’ve wanted to share for a long time—stories whose time to be given a wider audience has now come.

But they’re not individual stories and this is not one of those “dip in and read” books, although I know you’ll be tempted to do just that! Accompany me from the beginning—where appropriately enough we begin with a story called “The Seed”—and progress all the way through to “Savasana.”

I am a dream analyst and dream therapist whose work is largely based on my own research and practice of more than twenty-seven years. As such, I have been privileged to spend much of my professional life engaged in exploring my clients’ dreams and witnessing their breakthroughs as they quite magically bloom and grow in  their amazing lives. When I haven’t been working with clients, I’ve been writing about dreams and dreaming, speaking about dreams and dreaming in the media, training students to work with dreams, and at night, dreaming my own dreams.

When I look back over my life so far, I see a path of dreams. I think of my early childhood, and there it is: My dream of snakes nesting at the foot of my bed. I think of being six or seven, and there it is, in full color and vivid heart-pounding emotion: My dream of being a shepherd boy encountering a pack of wolves gazing down at me from a mountain ridge with ominous intensity. I think of being nine or ten, and there it is: The plane flying at such a sharp incline that it flips over backward and explodes in the sky. I think of being thirteen, and there it is once more: A dream of my grandfather, a couple of days after his death, riding a motorbike into my dream and casually asking me if there’s anything I’d like to know before he rides off again.

As a child I was curious. Were these dreams a parallel reality? Did they offer glimpses into a more distant past, perhaps a past life? Or were they predictions of future accidents, or glimpses into the spirit world? As a child I was entranced by the magic of dreams, and always welcomed the promise of the nightly adventures that sleep would bring, even the scary ones.

As my dreams became increasingly surreal, I began to understand that they were rather more like energy pictures depicting my emotions and interactions with the world. Yet they were also larger than life—as if they offered a glimpse of a bigger and deeper part of myself and the nature of life than I could grasp while awake.

I can mark out my life in dreams, as if turning the pages of a photo album. Most key events and turning points of my life were preceded or accompanied by vivid dreams, and I know the same will hold true in the years to come.

It’s not that my dreams predicted my future. Like all dreams, they connected or reconnected me with the deepest parts of my being. When I learned how to understand my dreams I learned how to understand myself and my life, and how to use those insights to make powerful changes when that’s what was called for.

These are the blessings that dreams bestow, and since every one of us dreams about five dreams a night, whether or not we remember them, on a regular basis they are universal gifts available to each and every one of us. To accept these gifts we need to learn and practice the art and science of reading dreams, and allow the insights they bring to bestow the blessings that they hold.

There’s a certain magic that comes from spending so much of a life in dreams. Your eyes acclimate to seeing beyond the everyday and you experience quite astounding synchronicities and mysterious goings-on. You witness a greater tapestry that’s woven from the threads of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Among the vignettes contained herein, you’ll find tips and techniques to help you understand your dreams. That said, however, dreams are not the main subject of this book! They are markers on the path, inspiring you to look and discover the big picture of your life’s purpose.

The entire book is a story strewn with flowers, trees, and birds that bloom, shelter, and sing a direction for the reader to follow. (You may have noticed that most of the chapter titles refer to flowers!) The book also contains a subtle through line, one I have gently nurtured to build your understanding of the mysteries of the psyche as you turn its pages. Read slowly, read quickly, read and pause, read and ponder—but stay with the flow, page by page, and begin at the very beginning!

As this book wrote itself into being, I realized I had a cache of stories that had accumulated in various blogs I’d written over the years, so I gathered these together and wove them in. Most are slightly updated with the wisdom of hindsight or reworked to fit the style of this book, so if you’re reading and thinking I know this story from somewhere, well, now you know.

As regards the book’s title, there is such a creature as a bird of paradise, but that is not the bird of my story. My bird of paradise appears in several guises throughout these pages. You’ll first meet him as Joey the budgie in “The Seed,” and you’ll last meet her—yes, her!—in this book as a constellation of light in the epilogue. In the pages in between, you’ll also encounter the bird-of-paradise flower, and the bird-of-paradise yoga pose. Once you’ve finished reading, I imagine that the bird of paradise will cross your path in many forms, shedding a feather here and there or a petal or two, or challenging you to yoga-extend your limbs to fully embody her true nature. Or you will simply hear her calling to you in what may be some other mysterious, enigmatic way.

So let’s begin! Don’t think too hard and certainly don’t analyze as you go—just immerse yourself and read!

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