The Way Time Works in Dreams
For those of you drawn to dreamwork, I think it is a wonderful portal for learning to relate with Time in its fullness.
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This isn’t the post I’d originally planned for today, but I can’t stop thinking about this so I figured it was what was wanting to be written.
For a few years now, my guides have been telling me that we are collectively moving towards a more relational way of living (even though it might not always seem like it). For the last few millennia, humans have been focused on polarity and duality, on opposites and contrast. Now we are moving into a time when our focus is shifting to the spaces between, towards relationship. (Here’s a post of mine with an overview of these ideas.)
Given that my guides have been telling me this for a while, I was really excited when my dear friend and Substack author extraordinaire,
, introduced me to the work of Jean Gebser. His philosophy affirms just what my guides have been saying! Gebser was a brilliant 20th century philosopher who mapped the unfolding of human consciousness. He asserts that we are now unfolding into what he calls the integral structure of consciousness. This integral structure is all about integration and relationality.Being fascinated with Gebser’s work, I recently attended a seminar given by
who literally wrote the book on this philosophy.1 During the seminar, I was especially struck by the idea that, as we collectively move towards this more integral way, our relationship with Time profoundly shifts.I am admittedly new to this work, but as I understand it, as the integral structure unfolds, we will no longer be locked into experiencing time as duration, or as an ever-forward linear progression. Nor will we only see it as the increments of clock time. We will, at last, come to understand, or realize, Time as a living being with which we can be in relationship.
I found this quote from Cynthia Bourgeault that has a beautiful analogy for some of the ways we will shift our perception of Time.
“…time no longer functions as a duration, but as a volume. Cut free from the perspectival metronome, it expands and contracts to fill the “amount” of space needed to accomplish its intentions. The heart-fidelity of a lifetime can be compressed into a single glance exchanged across a banquet table…”2
These concepts, at least for me, can be hard to grasp in a tangible way. Even if we can conceive of the idea of non-linear time, what does it actually look like in our day-to-day lives?
I’ve written some about the Container of Time and broached the idea of Time as a not-necessarily-linear living entity, one that we are truly in relationship with. But as I was steeped in these concepts during Jeremy’s seminar, it occurred to me that there is a “place” where we’ve already been experiencing Time this way.
This place is the dream world.
I’ve been a life-long student of dreams. Dream work—recording and revisiting—is part of my daily morning ritual. For me, this is a primary way that Spirit communicates. Every dream is a visit, a message, an encounter with Divinity, the ancestors, and/or any other spirit guide. I’ve long said that life is a dialogue with the Divine, and the Divine speaks in infinite languages. Dreams are one of those languages, perhaps one of the most clear and potent.
In recent years, I’ve felt called to start paying particular attention to Time in dreams. And here’s what I’ve noticed:
When I stopped telling myself that waking life is real and the dream life is not, I could allow the dream to be what it is without rushing to put it in order upon waking. I could record individual scenes without needing them to make any sort of linear time sense. For example, I didn’t need the part of the dream when I went to the park to happen before the part when I called my mother to tell her about my trip to the park. I could loosen my grip on the order of events and, through that, learn to hold them ‘simultaneously’.
Maybe even more impactful, once I let go of the need for the dream to make sense within the limits of linear time, I began to notice that when I have a memory while dreaming, I am simultaneously experiencing both the memory and the present moment within the dream.
For example, here is a dream from Feb 19, 2023:
I am sitting on the couch with my instructor. He is concerned that I didn’t advance to the next level in the video game. I decide to tell him about the time the Marines shot at us. While I am telling him the story, I am simultaneously reliving it. I am still on the couch with my instructor, but I am also in the back seat of a car with my son who is little. A big military vehicle comes up behind us, filled with Marines. They begin shooting at us. I cover my son’s body with my own. Thankfully no one is hurt and they drive away. The instructor tells me to try the level again.
Once I started paying attention to this, I realized it happens in dreams all the time. In just about every dream, the present, past and future fluidly mix together and there is no confusion about it. In the dream world, we have the capacity to relate with Time this way. In fact, it is in our nature to do so.
A final thing I want to mention about Time and dreams is one of my very favorite sorts of experiences. Despite the traditional recommendations of recording dreams by hand, I like to record mine in an online journal. For one thing, I type much faster than I handwrite. Also, I really like that the online journal has a search function.
The particular journal I use has an additional feature where it sends me daily notifications along the lines of: “On this day three years ago, you wrote…” It seems to randomly choose a year to remind me about.
Dozens of times now, it has happened that the dream my journal reminds me about—one that I recorded at some point in waking life past—is wholly relevant to my present moment. And I’m talking about really specific things. Big, giant synchronicities.
As just one example, last weekend I was at an ancestral healing intensive. On one of the ritual journeys, a spirit guide talked to me about a particular line of grandmothers. The guide told me that these grandmothers had been Quakers in their lives and believed that everyone has within them a “signature light” and that one of the surnames in the lineage meant “bird holder”. I wrote the phrases “signature light” and “bird holder” in my notes after the journey.
The next morning, I got a notification from my dream journal: “On this day, four years ago, you wrote…
I am at a dinner table with friends. One of my friends stands up and hands me a hummingbird. He says, “You have to take this because you are a bird holder.” He then turns to the whole groups and tells us that every person has their own light, like a signature light. If the light gets a negativity build up, we can condense it into form and it will become a bird. We need to do this every once in a while so our light stays clean.
While I’m not yet entirely sure if there’s a particular bit of wisdom I’m supposed to glean about signature lights and bird holders, I do know for certain that I was experiencing a non-linear relationship with Time when I was reminded of a dream I’d had four years ago that is specifically relevant to me today. (It also shows me the importance of continuing to record my dreams.)
For those of you drawn to dreamwork, I think it is a wonderful portal for learning to relate with Time in its fullness.
I would really love to hear from you about the ways you’ve noticed Time in your dreams. Please send me an email, DM, or leave a comment below.
Blessings and love to all of you!
Johnson, Jeremy. Seeing through the world: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Seattle, WA: Revelore Press, 2019.
“The Faces of Time: Exploring Jean Gebser, Lesson 11.” Cynthia Bourgeault, December 12, 2022. https://www.cynthiabourgeault.org/blog/2021/02/21/faces-of-time.
Fascinating post, Jenna. Thank you. I’ve been thinking about time a lot recently because I’ve noticed it’s behaving differently, and my relationship with it has changed. It really doesn’t move at an even pace, and the more I’m in trance states, I.e. waking dreams, the more it seems to work with me, instead of against me. I’m a massage therapist and I used to really be counting the minutes to be honest, but since I was able to access light trance during massages, an hour seems like a few minutes. I’m curious to see if I can harness this experience to see if my body can also feel like it only worked five minutes. Maybe I will find it less draining.
That fluidity we experience in dreams is something I’ve been working on bringing into daily/awake time for a while now. Mixed results but it’s just practice, so I recognize it as play.
Love what you’re doing here!