We can have no preconceived ideas or opinions about the meaning of dreams. Dreams are mostly compensatory or complementary to the conscious attitude. One always approached a dream without in any way anticipating what it was going to reveal. ~C.G. Jung

You can show a mask to the outer world, but why hide from dreams?

For thousands of years humanity has turned to dreams for intuitive knowledge, guidance, and a living connection with spiritual reality.

Anthropologists have reported that in cultures more primitive than our own, dreaming is a highly valued activity. Among some tribal societies, to neglect a "big" dream is to risk losing life and soul.

Why does our advanced society know so little about dreams and dreaming? Why has the art of conscious dreaming remained elusive, little understood, and rarely practiced?

Some have theorized that Western civilization had to cut itself off from inner experience in order to develop the outward looking consciousness that has helped us to "conquer" nature. It is said that inward looking and intraverted cultures tend to stabilize in a condition of enclosure in nature, and never develop the material and technological ambitions that have characterized the West.

That theory is surely debatable -- but whatever the case, this is a time when the "inward" parts of human awareness are coming forth with great force. More and more people are feeling a need to understand the intense and varied experiences of the nighttime mind.

The Affirmations for Conscious Dreaming offer a way to initiate a dialectic (or dialogue) between the waking mind and the mind of dreaming. Based on our experience, the best way to use them is to read them each night, just before going to sleep. In the morning (or when you awaken in the night) write down the dreams you will remember. Do this practice diligently, until the meaning of the Affirmations takes on greater clarity... Conscious dreaming has begun.

The following essay repeats each of the Affirmations in turn and expands upon it, giving additional insight into the lost art of conscious dreaming.

Dreams are the theater of my nighttime mind. I will enter the theater of dreams, and without fear, without denying, without censoring, I will let dreams be whatever they are. Attentive to the experiences and images of dreams, I will let the filmmaker of the mind show me whatever it wants to show me.

Observe the mind as it is. In conscious dreaming, everything is made known.

I will accept everything that arises in dreams "as it is", like a scientist observing nature.

I will allow dreams to reveal everything in the hidden parts of my totality. No matter what kind of person I imagine myself to be, no matter what my attainments, I will allow dreams to show me all my light and darkness.

The movement of dreaming describes a spiral around a core of hidden truth. Each dream brings to the surface fresh self-knowledge. A few turns around the spiral and my dreams will have given me, in the language of images, a detailed description of myself, as I am.

My dreams of the night before speak to me with amazing truthfulness and clarity of the shape of my consciousness in the moment. I must remember those dreams. I must examine them. I must hear their message. I must face myself in their mirror.

The imperative of dreaming is to admit to consciousness that which is unconscious. Why do we make ourselves blind and deaf to the night mind? Perhaps our dreams threaten our self-idea, our "ego" or the idealized self we imagine we are, or wish we could be. Rather than "lose face" we would throw away a third of our lives and all the riches offered to us in the hours of sleep.

A conscious attitude of fearless objectivity is a prerequisite to gaining access to the great secrets of the unconscious mind. A wide open mind remembers dreams easily.

I am the world already complete and whole, but I have forgotten my wholeness. I see all the facets of my forgotten self in the alembic of my dreaming. In dreams I act out dramas of opposition and victory, journeys of adventure and conquest. I may even strategize the subjugation of "others" or implement my own downfall.

Knowing that the myths of a divided world are contained in my vessel of wholeness, I dream fearlessly, without recoiling from the multi-faceted fragments of myself.

Dreams are stories told from our totality.

To the degree that I am unconscious of my wholeness, the energy of my wholeness is contained in and reflected back to me from the objects, states, and relations of my life -- and of my dreams. Just as I project my unconscious parts on the people and things in my life, so also do I invest the objects of dream reality with the latent energy of my hidden wholeness.

As I begin to focus attention on my dreams, each night's dreaming is always a greater revelation of the mystery of my totality. I understand what is being shown in the night, with the mind of day. The two realms must be brought together. The process of self-revelation, self-discovery, self-understanding, and self-transcendence never ends...but first it must begin.

I am the world. I am at the beginning of my life. I am in open-eyed scrutiny of a given body, a given mind, given circumstances. Very specific symbolic events transpire in my psyche -- and they trace the shape of my totality.

The unconsciousness of the world I live in is my own unconsciousness. The real condition of this world is my condition. The whole world is the warring of the dissociated elements of my being! To take up the art of conscious dreaming is to accept responsibility for the world.

The dream is a stage, and I the actors upon it...

Imagine a theatrical performance in a Magic Theater in which twelve actors play twelve personality types. Each actor represents a different aspect of human energy, a different modality of psyche, a different set of qualities and motivations -- but together they make a complete picture of a human being, like facets of a single jewel.

You, however, being one of the twelve actors, are able to play only one of the twelve parts in each performance.

Now suppose the actors get together and decide to exchange parts at each performance, so that after twelve performances, every actor will have tried his or her skill at playing all the parts. By so doing each actor will fill out his-her acting experience to include the twelve modalities of being human. At that point he-she will have transcended the specialized role and become a synthesis, with an expanded awareness of the human condition.

Conscious dreaming is like that. Except I already know before I begin that I am all the actors on stage in the Magic Theater. Every play of opposites is the chemistry of the parts of my totality, the form of my divided self, the shards of my shattered wholeness.

When my daylight mind meditates the mystery of the dream, I am transformed by the very process of meditating the dream. The next time I surrender to sleep, and enter the theater of dreams, my dreaming will, without fail, reflect the changes that have taken place in me. As my self-understanding grows, I am given more to understand.

A communication takes place between the mind and the "Deep Mind".

Like a letter from a far off place, when a dream is "opened," its "meaning" becomes apparent and even obvious to the conscious mind. A dialogue has begun, between the mind and the Deep Mind (or Objective Psyche), through the medium of dreams. From that day forward, a subtle change occurs in consciousness itself.

From this we can see that there is really no dissociated "scientific", or purely objective way to deal with dreams. Daylight understanding itself is part of the process that is conscious creaming. Indeed, the response and participation of the daylight mind is the very focal point of the process of conscious dreaming.

Nine questions that help open a dream.

1. What is this dream trying to show me about myself?
2. What is this dream revealing to me about my conscious attitude?
3. How does this dream complement or balance my conscious attitude?
4. What is this dream saying about my relationships to other people?
5. What is this dream saying about my relationship to God?
6. What is this dream telling me that could change my life?
7. Does this dream reveal an area of the mind in which I am contracted, afraid, angry, defensive, or unusually passive?
8. Does this dream bring to light some event in the past I am ashamed of or afraid to look at?
9. Does this dream focus on some difficulty I am experiencing in my daily life? Does it help me to resolve that difficulty?

Seven further questions to ask myself, about my feelings.

1. How conscious am I of my feelings?
2. How unconscious am I of my feelings?
3. What is my attitude toward feeling and feelings?
4. What recoil, if any, occurs in the field of energy and awareness that is my feelings?
5. What am I tending to dramatize relative to others in the theater of feelings?
6. How can my life realize equanimity in that aspect of wholeness?
7. Do I have a relationship to God in the depth of feeling?

These questions can be asked on examining a dream. If they are asked before going to sleep, they may arouse a response from the Deep Mind.

Note: The view (and experience) of this dreamer is that dreams are an aspect of our living relationship to God, and conscious dreaming is spiritual work. This is not a new idea, but a very ancient one, brought back to light. The essential understanding is that God, who is intimate with every human heart, speaks directly to each of us in dreams.

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days... We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions... If a theologian really believes in God, by what authority does he suggest that God is unable to speak through dreams? ~ C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

I am the river of awareness, and everything that appears to my dreaming mind is the shaping of water, the passing permutation of awareness itself. I am the water of consciousness, and all experience is the free play of my watery nature upon the stream bed of existence.

Dreaming teaches the mutability of awareness.

Impermanence is our natural state. There is no state of mind, awake or asleep, that is free of process or free of change. By its very nature, awareness flows, night to night, like water journeying from mountain to sea.

Dreaming shapes and is shaped, by the stream bed in which it flows. Conscious dreaming is process, change, metamorphosis, transformation...and understanding.

Dreaming is the heightened awareness of change. Dreaming is the acceleration of change. Conscious dreaming is the quickening of transcendence, the quickening of conscious action, and real awakening is the implication of the mutability of consciousness.

In conscious dreaming we learn to witness the water itself.

As my understanding grows, my dreams transcend one another, and each night's world enfolds the night before. Symbols swallow other symbols and the limitations of today are nested and dissolved in the expanded awareness of tomorrow.

Forever moving with Nature's change, I know I am not confined to the shape that awareness takes in any one moment.

Dreams are worlds within worlds, one contained in another.

Conscious dreaming is about transcendence of the sense of containment in images, high and low. Conscious dreaming is the journey of awareness from the microcosm to the macrocosm. As conscious dreaming advances, symbols disgorge (or swallow) other symbols, and these symbols in their turn are dissolved in awareness of the whole, which exists already complete in the Deep Mind of the Heart.

All the "realms" that appear in dreaming, including the highest and the lowest, are nested one within another and all together are contained in the simplicity that is the total field of human awareness.

There are no unbridgeable or impenetrable divisions between the realms of dreaming. All such places are highly mutable and subject to being joined together in consciousness.

Indeed all the worlds of dreaming are already joined at the deepest levels of the Mind. That is why, as conscious dreaming proceeds, all symbols have the potential to dissolve and disappear into consciousness itself.

Example: I remember one dream in which a whole series of dream realms I was leaving behind appeared as contained in a single large building. Later I saw this building from above, as one element of a cityscape. Then in another dream the city became a single circuit board in an electronic device of some kind.

Just to become aware of the propensity of consciousness to structure itself as "worlds within worlds" is to free consciousness from the belief in the reality or limitation of any one world. This knowledge is itself transcendence of self-limiting containment in images, high and low.

So liberated, consciousness as dreaming will proceed rapidly, discovering that it can compress whole areas of the unconscious psyche into simple diagrammatic images, dealing with "problems" in a quick and efficient manner. Thus does transcendence hasten onward to toward the greater dreaming of the Heart.

I am not struggling toward a goal. I am not seeking self-perfection. I am engaged in self-observation, self-understanding, and noticing everything that arises. I tend the fire upon which I cook the gods and demons of my dreams. I observe the process... and wait for the change to come.

The artifex should not identify with the figures of the work, but leave them in their objective, impersonal state. ~ C.G. Jung

In their essential nature the unconscious complexes that reveal themselves in dreams are energy loops which tend to persist by compelling consciousness to submit to their devouring logic.

Because of their very unconsciousness, these complexes nearly always manifest as compulsive drives toward an object, the urge to high drama in relationships, or states of mind that swallow awareness -- (manic or depressive, emotional-dramatic, angry, stubborn, passive, hysterical, neurotic, etc.).

Why let a split-off loop of energy and/or will rule the mind? Why fall from peacefulness into compulsive emotional and theatrical states?

Practice indifference toward the compulsions that arise from the unconscious to urge you to blind action. Do not identify with the permutations of awareness. Tend your fire...watch ...and wait for the process to complete itself.

Notice, understand, and the energy of dream phenomena is released into the emptiness of awareness itself. A "witness consciousness" will develop over time. For this you will receive no reward except seeing. There is no one to keep score, and no ego to receive an award. There is only understanding and becoming Love.

Who is there to give praise or blame to the one who dreams? She and he are completely responsible for dreaming. Her responsibility is her Freedom. His Freedom is his only reward. The process of change is release as the native root-state of wisdom and love.

In conscious dreaming I will, inevitably, uncover the dark regions of the heart. I must go toward that of which I am afraid, for it is there the separation and flaw in my being is found and healed. And it is in these nether realms of my lost wholeness that the gateway to visions and dreams of spiritual power is won.

Negative dreams and nightmares are a test of the dreamer.

I must take an attitude of humility before the hidden wholeness of the Deep Mind. But paradoxically, I must be fearless in releasing the shape of my own limitation. The communication between daylight consciousness and the nighttime awareness of dreaming is a descent into dark underground regions, or a night journey into the depths of the sea.

When dark dreams rise up to devour me, when monsters and giants rear up out of the abyss to attack me, I know that my assumption of littleness, weakness, limitation, and fear is what gives these phantoms their power.

"May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mindforms. May I fear not the bands of the Peaceful and the Wrathful, who are my own mindforms."

The mythological levels of Dreaming.

In the night journey of dreaming we uncover, inevitably, the mythological structures of the mind. (Jung's "archetypes of the collective unconscious.") The mythic images are the masks of psychic dominants of a transpersonal nature which function from outside "time, place, and milieu" as the very matrix of consciousness and guiding impulse of civilization.

In addition to these primary nodes of psyche there are countless other major symbols in the unconscious which can be called mythological. They are collective or nearly universal motifs, recognized by large numbers of people as representing transpersonal or pre-cultural consciousness and energy. Many animals, for instance, function in the Deep Mind as mythic symbols. Mythological creatures, like the unicorn, possess that kind of significance exclusively.

Stories of the gods, fairy tales, and heroic legends are cultural manifestations of the mythic layers of the psyche. Occultism, magic, and primitive psychology are mythic modes of awareness.

Virtually all religions are manifestations of the mythic in its purest form -- a meeting with the God who is pure Spirit, beyond all masks and images.

As children, and sometimes even well into adulthood, we project the magical power of the mythic images onto everything and everyone about us. (Advertisers know this and are ceaseless in their efforts to clothe their products in mythological power.)

For any understanding of dreams, the concept of mythic images is indispensable. The very power of transcendence depends on an awareness of how these images cast their spell over our lives.

Symbols seem full of living energy, and they cannot be simply dismissed or ignored.

Consciousness is the only content of dreams. And yet, because there is division in consciousness, consciousness is appearing to consciousness through the medium of symbols.

Symbols are images of something else. Everything in dreams is a representation of consciousness, therefore that "something else" is consciousness itself. All the energy and emotion locked in a symbol ultimately is shown to be consciousness.

Symbols grasp or shape my consciousness, lay claim to my attention, and engross, absorb, and involve me completely.

I experience symbols as emotional realities I can't step outside. I react to them constantly with fear, desire, attraction, repulsion, compulsion, and identification.

If I was fully conscious of the content of a symbol, I wouldn't need to be dramatically involved with that symbol. The symbol could disappear, with no loss of soul, or wholeness.

That in fact is the principle goal of spiritual work -- to release the conscious mind from the grip of symbols by penetrating the symbols, moving past their facades, relaxing the shape they give to the mind, joining our waking consciousness to their "sleeping" consciousness...thus transcending their duality.

The stuffed toy paradigm.

Highly energized dream symbols, such as giant animals, powerful machines, erotic goddesses, or figures of Satanic evil may, after their energy is absorbed by consciousness, reappear as stuffed dolls or children's toys. (The snake is in fact a rope.) This is a fairly common occurrence, and it clearly demonstrates we have nothing to fear by confronting the images that arise out of the unconscious psyche. Just as children invest their stuffed toys with all kinds of numinosity and psychic potency, we learn to de-energize the potent and sometimes overwhelming illusions of the psyche and toss them back into the toy box.

Dream symbols become water and light.

Another common sign of the relativities of Dreaming is the dream in which previously solid and "unforgiving" realities dissolve into water -- the "waters of consciousness."

Water is itself a symbol, but a symbol of consciousness prior to symbolic realities. Water is one of the most powerful symbols for that which is beyond form and symbol. As the New Testament tells us, the Holy Spirit is a spring of Living Water which wells up into a fountain of Eternal Life. (John 4:10-14)

Another transcendent symbol is light. Both light and water, as symbols, include and transcend each other. The union of fire and water, those apparently irreconcilable opposites, produces an ineffably sublime radiance, the silvery shimmering luminosity of pure Consciousness.

The sun (the transcendent symbol) represents a superior process, a gesture that begins at the living center of Reality, quite independent of the dreamer.

Everything that happens to me in life is prefigured in dreams. In dreams I have forgotten, I have abdicated my future in unconscious bargains with mythological phantoms of the mind.

In conscious dreaming I will bring these forgotten transactions to the light of day, examine them, and undo them in the waters of understanding.

In conscious dreaming I will meditate the probabilities of my life. To the degree I dream consciously, to that degree will I assume responsibility for my destiny.

How to assume responsibility for your destiny.

I have handed over my freedom to the powers of the Unconscious. I have lost the greatest parts of my totality. To the degree I am conscious of the causative process of dreaming, to that degree will I assume responsibility for my destiny...and to that degree will I be liberated from the binding power of my own mindforms.

Everything that happens to you, everything that currently seems to arise out of the Unknown to reward or punish you by 'the whim of fate', is written before it happens, in the secret books of your own psyche. It is your own hand, or a power you have abdicated to another's hand, or the force of impressions accepted in the past that create the story of your future. To the degree that you become conscious of the mechanics of this causative process, to that degree will you assume responsibility for your own destiny. And to that degree will you be liberated from the great fear and its power.

Unlocking the treasures and terrors of the Deep Mind.

The Deep Mind is waiting for you to give it your attention. Sometimes it is not waiting -- it advances upon the conscious mind, either through instigating powerful dramas in the external world, or by invading the mind in the form of dreams, visions, and other psychic phenomena.

The Deep Mind contains great treasures that are destined to be bestowed on consciousness. It also contains "dark unnameable things," all the negative emotions you've ever felt, all the horrible images which describe and release these emotions.

Somewhere in your imagination you are in retreat from these terrifying and dark images and emotions. You are literally shrinking the field of conscious awareness in order to hide from these "wrathful deities" and their kin. You are engaged in unconscious ritual magic relative to these "unconscious complexes" -- a magic that expresses itself both as outward superstitious behavior and as inward fantasies of submission, escape, conquest, crime, or even murder. To your way of thinking, the Unknown is being placated and held at bay by this ego magic. In fact the opposite is true: the Wrathful Unknown is being strengthened by your retreat.

In you the splitting of totality may even take the form of a conscious or unconscious deal, in which a psychic agreement is reached which guarantees the "autonomy" of the ego (and its freedom to pursue its fantasies in the world) -- in exchange you give permission for an unconscious complex to drain off quantities of psychic energy from the whole person (this is called "loss of soul").

Such agreements have to be unearthed and undone, of course, if consciousness is going to resume its native condition. And if the treasures of the Spirit are to be obtained, if the mode of transcendence and eventual Self-awakening is to be accomplished, a great resolve to gaze into the Deep Mind with a wide-open eye must possess the conscious mind and heart.

Pretense and defense are put aside. If there are any demons down there, any locked rooms, any "forbidden zones," let's have a look at them. Let's bare the facts. Let's see things as they are. Let's allow whatever emotions are hidden in the psyche to surface, and let's allow them to manifest as dreams rather than as life events which throw us into confusion and chaos.

Towards the Greatest Dreaming

There are two types of dreaming in which future events are prefigured. In one type we, as dreamers, make an active choice that determines the course of the dream, and by causality, the future. Some causative dreams are of an advanced type where the dreamer works with macrocosmic symbols, numbers, or archetypal designs. These "causal" may appear as an area of the psyche is perfectly subsumed into awareness.

The other type of dreaming in which the future is prefigured is the big dream that moves the dreamer with such force that he or she is presented with what amounts to a fait accompli.

Such a dream, for instance, may depict figures from the deep psyche, or in after-death states, declaring or suggesting to the dreamer that the time has come to make the transition of death.

Who are these figures? From where do they derive their authority? Certainly they are not the Self, for movements from that region carry an inherent certainty, an intuition of Truth. Are these dream figures seducers, in some way robbing the dreamer of the right to decide his-her own fate?

If the future the dream presents is a positive one, from the point of view of gaining greater consciousness, there is little sense in resisting it. If, however, the dream shows a negative fate, a loss of consciousness, or an undoing of work already accomplished, it should definitely be resisted, penetrated, broken, dissolved, and made to reenter the vat of metamorphosis. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of taking an active role in encountering and evaluating dream contents.

I am not as wise as the Deep Mind that dreams me. Through dreaming I learn to know what I am, but what I will ultimately become is unknown. If I am humble before the unknown in myself, the divine core of Being, which is intimate with the heart of every person, reveals Itself to me in dreams.

The Deep Mind does not seek to obscure but to reveal, and to bestow its treasures on the daylight mind. Dreams are not only objects like crystal or stone. Dreams are profound deeps which reflect the infinity of Self Awareness.

Dreams are an expression of our living relationship to the Divine.

Everything that appears to consciousness is in some sense a metaphor for a consciousness that parallels, precedes, or transcends it. Super-sensible existence is expressing itself in the medium of sensible existence. Super-sensible existence can be known and made conscious by observation of, communion with, and conscious transcendence of this metaphorical sensible medium.

It is as if nature, the world, and dreams were a great mirror revealing the Invisible to Itself. But how can that which is "nothing" (i.e., unmanifest) become something and manifest?

Truly, it can be said that the totality of multiple sensible and inanimate forms are Its dream and Its manifestation. But it is in knowing oneself as That which dreams, that we waken as the divine Awareness that exists before (and after) the dream of manifestation.

"The parameters of the infinite" are appearing all around us and in us. But if the infinite does not become Conscious in us, they are only the parameters of our unconscious dreaming.

Dream symbols are condensed, highly charged elements of those parameters. As such dream symbols express the relatedness of everything to everything else -- that relatedness which is the underlying Oneness, whose center is everywhere, whose perimeter is nowhere.

The correspondence and connection of one symbol with another is the release of an idea, an energy, and the primordial spirit of Oneness. We are that Spirit. The seeing of the connection between the symbol and the Spirit is the release of meaning which is release from containment in that which is merely symbolic. It is release from stepped down and fractional awareness. The act of dream interpretation is itself the affirmation of the One who is always already free of his own dream.

Dreams can initiate us to the open sky of Consciousness.

The meaning and implications of any one dream are virtually inexhaustible. A good dream leads not to closure and contraction around a hard knot of knowledge, but into the sky of open consciousness.

The Deep Mind will adapt itself to the inquisitive attitude of the conscious mind. The psyche does not seek to obscure, but to reveal. In each individual a characteristic symbology or dream language will develop that is wholly understandable to consciousness. This may not happen all at once -- everything depends on the willingness of the conscious mind to open itself to the unexpected. But based on this approach, the dialogue between the objective psyche and the conscious intelligence can move quickly past the iconography of symbols toward direct transformative fusion.

On the way to Oneness, dreaming will release the gods and demons of old for our inspection and understanding. These images have the power to overcome the dreamer's intention. Even experienced dreamers may find themselves taking an archaic, magical attitude toward the emerging mythological aspects of the psyche, becoming seduced and contained by them.

If we are to move beyond these artifacts and entities, we must realize our own inherent Light Self. We must, as limited consciousness, enter into a conscious relationship with the divine core of our existence.

Such a relationship to the divine core of Being transcends and dissolves, by direct confrontation, all the gods, demons, and archetypal personalities which float in splendid and awful (or artful) autonomy throughout the psyche-cosmos of the Body of Man.

The attitude we must cultivate in ourselves in order to perfect our art is twofold: we practice spiritual humility and we learn the concrete wisdom of yogis, shamans, and magicians.

In conscious dreaming the two dispositions are combined and transcended in the intuition of the Higher Self, the Self that is neither passive supplicant nor willful yogi, neither right hand nor left hand -- but awake in both hands. We must intuit the profound meaning in the words of Jesus, when he said, "You must be gentle as doves and wise as serpents."

First, simply observe the dream. Do not get pushed into a hasty response of any kind. Let the dream simply sit there, in the mind, in all its glowing detail. Do not push any of it back into the depths. Write it out immediately, if you tend to forget your dreams. Write it down later, in any case.

Second, simply wait. Be peaceful. How can a dream hurt you? Observe all the reactions that tend to arise in the body relative to the dream. Observe your emotions, misgivings, fears, etc.

Third, begin to ask yourself the questions we listed (see above). Consider your answers carefully, without prejudice, without feeling you have to prove anything to anyone. Think and feel and intuit and sense any possible contraction in yourself which can possibly be released in this very moment. Feel the chemistry of consciousness, feel your bodily energies, feel the sensations in the brain, chest, and abdomen. All these feelings are another description of the situation the dream describes.

Fourth, bring the dream fully into relationship with everything that is conscious in you, including all your previous spiritual realizations and including your conscious relationship to God. Move through the dream until you can accept its implications without being bound by them. Dream past the meaning of the dream. Understand you are seeing an aspect of your life that has been hidden from you. Meditate its release. This is not as difficult (or as easy) as it might sound. Submit the dream to the divine healer, the Spirit of God.

Then get up and have a good breakfast and go about your day. During the day let your mind turn to the dream from time to time. You will discover new insights arriving without notice, and new feelings and sensations in the body and brain as the complex of the dream spontaneously transmutes or dissolves.

Transformation is the key, you see. And as the dream changes and vanishes, consciousness fills out, more energy becomes available to consciousness, and the work continues with greater force.

Dreaming shapes and is shaped, by the stream bed in which it flows. Conscious dreaming is process, change, metamorphosis, transformation -- and awakening.