Guest Article
Consciousness Cartography: How mapping our dreams can help us live a more awakened life.
By Amanda Lux, BCPP, RPE, LMT
There is no question that energy medicine is reliant upon the imagination to guide us through the realms of intuition, phenomenology and symbology. But as we hone our deeper senses and learn to trust how the elemental energies are presenting, and how the subtle impulses within our client’s bodies or our own bodies are flowing, the magic of the session ripples out and permeates even the most mundane corners of our experience. As both a dream worker and a polarity practitioner, I have found that, the more awake I feel in my energy, the more dreamlike my waking life feels, and the more awake I am within the dreaming.
This intersection of energy medicine and dreaming is not only interesting but so helpful at times! The holism inherent in Polarity’s philosophy invites a kind of communion with the grand interplay of consciousness that exists both around and within us. Life ceases to be a one-way conversation as synchronicity drops its clues like sacred breadcrumbs leaving a trail to our inner wisdom and transformational insights that cross the bounds of ordinary waking reality.
Session work and DreamWork both foster consciousness and creativity. But we can get lost in the mystery if we are not tracking the deeper meanings or implementing and acting upon our findings. In a session this could mean responding in our bodywork to how the energy is moving rather than sticking to a protocol. Or speaking out loud the potentially strange advice that our inner voice whispers for our client in our ear.
In life, we can foster a keener awareness by engaging in dream mapping, or recording and marking where our night dreams take us. This could also include taking action in our waking life to honor the intelligence within our dreams by following through with the guidance we receive.
As an example of how dreamwork can offer us little nudges along our path, I will share a story of a dream I had last night. I seeded (or incubated) my dreams for inspiration around writing this article. I dreamt I was running through a house with many entryways. I was anxious and unsure about which way to go until suddenly I became awake within the dream. I started cackling and calling out, “I am lucid! I can do whatever I want!” I grabbed the wooden molding of the next entryway I came to and started to bend it like rubber just for fun.
When I woke up, I didn’t recall this dream right away. Instead, I started scrolling through this long list of old blog posts looking for one that could offer inspiration or an “entry way” into something I could rewrite for this article. I chose one on Consciousness Cartography and it wasn’t until I was midway through the rewrite that my dream came back to me. This didn’t necessarily give me any new information, but amusement and confirmation I was on the right track!
Through mapping our adventures in consciousness, we realize that our dreams are alive and interacting with our lives in fascinating ways on many levels at once, which is how we know we are never working alone. In many indigenous cultures, it is said that our waking life is the dream and that our dreams hold the keys to unlocking states of awake-ness that give us more agency to co-create our reality.
Yet we are not only here to be co-creators of the dream we are dreaming (or living). Our listening alone contributes to the larger fabric that connects us to all beings, the planet, and beyond…because we are dreaming for one-another as well.
Our dreams offer guidance and medicine for our waking lives that can help us with our own healing but the true medicine is in our interconnectedness. We dream for our clients, community, family, friends and even strangers. This is why tracking and sharing our dreams can offer powerful connections we couldn’t otherwise make or wouldn’t otherwise notice.
Learning to recognize the immense insights and connections that are available, is a skill not unlike learning to identify medicinal plants that often grow in our front yard:
If we don’t recognize their potential, we might just think of them as pesky weeds. But if we can learn how to identify and harvest them, they can offer the most potent medicine- that is often exactly what we need, free of cost and negative side effects, readily available and longing to heal us.
As random as our dreams might seem, the geography of our lives is woven throughout them. Dream mapping can further our personal growth by teaching us to honor the inexplicable, and notice connections that would otherwise be easy to miss by inhabiting our creativity and emotions, engaging the whimsical playful ways our intuition communicates, and by fully honoring our embodied experience.
Becoming a Consciousness Cartographer then, is not only about practicing the art of tracking our lives through our dreams. All layers of waking and dreaming intersect to help us navigate our soul path.
There is no external guide or reference for deciphering what your dreams mean that is more valuable than your own interpretation. Your body knows. Your heart knows. You are the expert of your own sacred symbology. The medicine of a session and of our dreaming is always seeking to reveal itself. We do not need to look far to find it. As long as we stay awake enough to trust our inner compass, the medicine will almost always find us.
Learn more at Elevationhive.com
Listen to the podcast “A Lone Traveler’s Guide to the Divine”