When I was 5 years old I started having hypnagogic dreams. I’d wake up in the wee hours of the morning and see my mother, plain as day, offering me a glass of water.
As I’d reach out to take it from her, though, my mom would disappear, slowly fading away into the darkness of my room.
Needless to say, it was a very odd experience for a 5-year-old. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, studying dreamwork with Jeremy Taylor, that I discovered what had been happening.
Hypnagogic dreams are visions that occur between sleeping and waking, or waking and sleeping. They can be very real images, seen with eyes wide open, and can evoke any number of feelings depending on what the vision holds.
As a child I didn’t tell my parents what I was seeing, but even if I had I doubt they would have had a language to understand what was happening to me. “It’s only a dream” would most likely have been their response.
Fortunately for today’s kids, dream worker Patti Allen is trying to do something about that. She wants to educate parents and teach them how to talk with children about their dreams.
Patti is in the process of publishing a book, Once Upon a Dream, and has submitted a video to Hay House for their $10,000 advanced publishing competition. You can watch the video here…let us know what you think by sharing your comments below.
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Thanks for sharing your hypnagogic dreams Amy and the story of my work. The end of the story, which isn’t the “end” at all, is that Hay House didn’t pick up Once Upon A Dream. But my dream continues and the book already exists in my dreams (and partly in my computer). You know what they say, one door closes and another one opens…. This week I will have the privilege of hearing the dreams of 20 kids in 4th grade. What fun! I hope more and more dreamers will begin to talk about dreams at the breakfast table with their children.
[…] is important to treat children’s dreams with respect. The worst thing to say to a child is that the dream isn’t real, because, especially with emotionally charged dreams, the material seems quite real. Even though […]