What is Magical Dreaming?

Magical dreaming describes the wide variety of practices for working with dreams through methods and for purposes beyond interpreting them for their personal, psychological symbolism. 

Throughout history, this has included intending specific dreams, becoming conscious of and controlling dreams, dreaming while awake and in liminal states, journeying through and mapping imaginal and spiritual realities, communicating with gods and other supernatural beings, divining and changing the future, healing the body and mind, protecting from and sending nightmares, sharing dreams, producing rituals and culture, learning information and practicing skills, performing alchemical processes and occult rituals, making and restoring the soul, persisting beyond death, having poetic epiphanies and spiritual revelations, manifesting changes in yourself and the world, and dreaming up new possibilities of being.    

While the term oneiromancy traditionally refers to the art of interpreting dreams in order to tell the future, it has become the most recognizable word for discussing magical approaches to dreaming. Similar to the way the terms for other mantic arts now contain wider practices that fall under their domain (for instance, necromancy is not just divination by the dead) oneiromancy now covers the broader field of magical dreaming.

One of the key beliefs that sets the magical approach to dreams apart from psychological theories of dreaming is that the content of dreams is taken as a fully objective and autonomous reality. In dreams we go to real places and interact with real beings, and the experiences we have there are just as real as our waking lives. Even when these dreams are symbolic and need interpretation, or clearly draw from our own psychic concerns, they are still first and foremost experienced as and participated in as real.   

The various uses of magical dreaming all rely on certain basic observations about the way dreams work that have been recognized in scientific studies of dreaming, and which allow for interactions between the waking and dreaming worlds. First, we tend to dream about the things that matter deeply to us, to the degree and in the ways in which these things matter to us, imagined through our personal and collective associational symbolic networks. Second, our brains and bodies respond to our dream experiences identically to if these were external waking experiences. This means that we can influence the things we dream about, and by participating in the symbolic reality of the dream, we can effect ourselves and our worlds.