The dreams we dream at night arise from a larger sphere of biological awareness rooted in our bodies and our brains, which predates our conceptual intelligence by untold millions of years. It informs us by means of seemingly nonsensical images that have the power to make a huge difference in our lives and in the trajectory of our civilization. Unfortunately, in the bulk of us it remains trapped within these and can neither get out into our lives nor into our endeavors. The problem is that, like Nazi physicists thought Einstein's theory nonsense, like the Roman Pagans thought Jesus's words nonsense, like the Catholic church thought Galileo's notions about the solar system nonsense, and like all too many of us today still view dreams as nonsense - when it does come forth to express itself to us, we dismiss it out of hand. We don't understand the language of our own dreams for the same reason that our predecessors couldn't understand the words of Einstein, Jesus, Galileo, Buddha, or the many others who managed to let out what was extraordinary in themselves. These individuals are now recognized as extraordinary for they changed the world, each in a most important way. They were initially misunderstood, it turns out, because they spoke in metaphor, the same language we find in dreams.There are any number of books on dreams that tell us what the authors presume to know about dreams from the vantage point of the particular science or psychological school of thought they ground themselves in. We've all read far too many dream books of that sort. This book is different. It's not a book about what anybody knows about dreams. Instead it focuses on what our dreams know about us, which is far, far more interesting, amazing, and potentially life-changing. Then, with a succession of real life examples it goes on to demonstrate exactly how we ourselves can avail ourselves of this knowledge. What's most impressive in these examples is how important and life-enhancing the information in each dream turns out to be for the dreamer and what a remarkable variety of intellectual, emotional, creative, sensual, and spiritual powers a simple dream can being forward in any one of us. This isn't just a book that informs, but one that transforms. It's impossible to read through the succession of interesting detective stories of dreamers making sense of their own dreams and not come away with a passing fluency in the language that released in each an understanding of their dream, which is the same language that released the genius of Jesus, Shakespeare, and Einstein. The language is metaphor - our native tongue.It's not that dreams don't make sense. It's that they make so much more sense than we do that it's not so easy to understand them. A group of individuals, like a chain of computers working together on the same problem, makes all the difference. It's like there is a super-mind in the room with us and to this larger intelligence the dream makes sense. Each example the book presents of this happening goes out of its way to detail exactly how the group process accomplishes this and precisely what kinds of mistakes can stifle its progress. So, in addition to being a book that concerns itself with the kinds of things dreams know about us, this is a book about exactly how we can find out precisely what dreams know. Expect the book not just to change the way you think about dreams. Expect it to change the way you live your life and do your work.
William R. Stimson is perhaps the first wildlife naturalist ever to take his passion for exploring nature, and his experience discovering new species of orchids in untouched wilderness areas, and turn these inward to discover himself. Throwing aside his coveted Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Columbia, and walking away from the academic life, he took a part-time job as waiter at an Italian restaurant so he could devote more of his time to reading, writing, meditation, yoga, kung fu, and trying to make sense of his dreams. What happened was that he re-discovered in dreams everything he most loved about the untamed wilds of the American tropics. The same enthusiasm he'd had since his childhood in Cuba for being out in wilderness areas never before touched by the hand of man, places that had remained completely virgin, he found the moment he began looking into his own dreams. He labored long and hard to make sense of his first dream, but what he learned from it utterly changed his sense of who he was, and the direction in which he would take his life. With the others he gathered around him, he founded The Dream Community of New York and began publishing The Dream Network Bulletin. His first article about dreams attracted the attention of the legendary dream psychiatrist Montague Ullman, M.D. who had developed an entirely new group approach to dreams that was not psychotherapy but self-discovery, and that was safe and effective for ordinary people. Ullman invited him as a guest to one of his dream group leadership trainings. Impressed by the younger man's passion for and ability with dreams, and by how sorely he needed training, Ullman kept inviting him back for some two decades. At that time Dr. Stimson followed his wife to Taiwan, where she had obtained an academic position. With her help he secured a position offering the Ullman dream group course at the University there. In this course there are no lectures, no exams, no reading assignments, and no term paper requirements. Each three-hour class is an actual Ullman dream group. Everything the students learn in the course they learn from dreams. What they learn is exactly what they most need to know in a time when it has become more imperative than ever for them to discover their most deep-seated passions, hidden abilities, intrinsic motivations, and humanistic moral imperatives so that they might access the creativity to invent a sustainable way forward in today's fast-changing economy.
