Community: My Peter Pan Adventure

As Arnold Mindell demonstrates in Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24 Hour Lucid Dreaming, dreaming is happening during the day and not only when we sleep. Becoming aware of this Dreaming, and unfolding its meaning in the moment, is one key to living life more easily and more fully. It is not only a question of associating to dream figures, but of not dissociating in the first place. The Dreaming behind everyday reality is all of the non-consensus-reality that we experience, all that which is not measurable and repeatable – the world of fantasy and imagination, the mythic realm. Dreaming is known under other names: the Tao, the Unconscious, Dreamtime, the Great Spirit, to name a few. Mindell also suggests elsewhere that it is not possible to liberate Dreaming without liberating indigenous cultures.

One of the most helpful of Process Work concepts is the idea of secondary processes. Using the image of the double from Carlos Castaneda’s books, Mindell distinguishes between processes that are supported by the identity of a personality, and ones that are not. Incongruent signals, or behavior that is contrary to the primary process – creating double signals – is considered secondary. Using the second attention, or attention to secondary processes or double signals, one can expand awareness of what is happening and begin to integrate Dreaming as it is happening. Let me quote Arny: “Expanded awareness of the wisdom of one’s own process creates the power of the independent personality.”

In the Peter Pan story, the secondary process is the Indian Princess, the essence of indigenous culture, or the Dreaming. Just as the European father figure who has lost touch of his dream dominates Wendy, Captain Hook, the ranking pirate of Never-Never Land, captures the Indian Princess. It is up to our heroine guided by her ally, Peter Pan, to rescue the Indian Princess, or to reclaim her connection to Dreaming. Behind symptoms and addictive tendencies there can be secondary processes. A negative relationship with Dreaming is symbolized by Captain Hook’s relationship to the vengeful crocodile. The crocodile bit off his hand. In other words, an over-controlling primary process or identity will experience retaliation by the suppressed part of Nature, or his nature. Captain Hook is a pirate, he steals for a living. And he has a hook, a symbol for an addictive tendency. The crocodile is a symbol of the reptilian brain, survival instincts and deep emotional life. The crocodile has bitten off Captain Hook’s hand in a previous encounter, signaling the repetitive nature of addictive tendencies or chronic symptoms. As one of my teachers often says, “You can’t keep a good process down!”

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The domination of Nature automatically engenders revenge, and Captain Hook is haunted by the specter of his mortality and his imprisonment in chronological time – his impending death – through the periodic sound of the ticking clock in the crocodile’s belly, who is relentlessly pursuing him.

In contrast is Wendy, who rescues her own deep inner nature, the Indian Princess, by going deeply into her Dreaming process. She is able to move between worlds like a shaman, discovering the lost boys in the roots of the shamanic tree and ultimately the Indian Princess – soul retrieval – and returns to everyday life with a life-affirming experience that even wakes up her hardened father to his dreams.

Wake up, wake up, the Dreaming is all around us. It can be found in a big way in the very place we have avoided it the most, in our conflicts and troubles, in our pains and symptoms. These can all be seen as direct expressions of our Bigger selves trying to wake us up to what we can be, if we could stop the everyday world, get detached enough to see and rescue the essence from the domination of a limited perspective of who we think we are. “Wake up to the bigger Self” is what we can say to the one who would dominate, or to that part of ourselves that would dominate the other parts, when we feel depressed or hopeless. “I don’t need to lift a finger. You are self-destructing. Follow me and we can grow together, then we can truly survive and do wondrous things."

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