Abstract Index Conference Index

ABSTRACT

Tracking Coherence in Dreams and Life: A Journaling Roundtable

3. Authors
Gloria Sturzenacker (chair) (New York City) is a journalist, designer, and teacher. She's developed a symbol system, Inner Guide Mapping, to track the multilayered interaction of dreams and intuition with external experience. At last year's conference, she presented a paper on "Long-Term Coherence as a Growth Tip of Human Evolution."
e-mail: glsturz@cs.com

Cynthia Pearson (Pittsburgh), co-author of The Practical Psychic and Parting Company: Understanding the Loss of a Loved One, presides over "Dream Journalist: A Website for People Who Write Down Their Dreams." At past ASD conferences, she has chaired Long Term Journal Keeping panels and given papers on extended synchronicities and precognition.

4. Summary
To learn from one another how best to manage our dream records and share the sometimes astonishing coherences we find there, participants will review their journals at the beginning and end of the conference to report and reflect on the synchronicities that are so often observed but rarely documented.
5. Learning Objectives
(a) Learning objectives:
To discover the power of documenting dreams' interconnection with each other and with external events over time.
To discover methods for documenting coherence in dream-related stories.
To inspire an interest in long-term journal-keeping as a research and growth tool.
(b) Evaluation questions:
How did this experience of working with dreams differ from your customary methods?
Did this experience of connective journaling trigger any new insights?
How do you think you might refine your journaling practice as a result of this experience?

Tracking Coherence in Dreams and Life:
A Journaling Roundtable

Background
Many dreamworkers have witnessed a magical dimension of correspondences between dreams and waking life that go beyond normal cause and effect. As Dennis Schmidt has observed in the ASD journal Dreaming, these connections "reveal stories that are not arranged by the individual's everyday conscious mind, nor even just the individual's everyday unconscious mind. The stories have the appearance of being arranged across what seem to be temporal and interpersonal barriers." In many cases, these "hidden stories" involve some form of synchronicity-the non-causal meaning connection between an internal event and an external one.
The concentrated setting of an ASD conference often takes people farther into this dimension-beyond a one-to-one correspondence, to multiple connections among many events. A symbol in one person's dream connects with a dream another person tells in a workshop, which echoes an item in the news, which loops back to a different symbol in the first person's dream. The effect is extraordinary coherence. A thread of meaning holds together experiences in a puzzling way that's delightful or frightening or both.
In the short term, such coherence is easily viewed as a whole and remembered. But even a week-long coherence can be too complex to remember for long. It's the frustrated urge to remember an accumulation of short-term coherences that has inspired some dreamworkers, independently, to develop special connective journaling methods. These range from cross-referencing keywords to creating flow charts to mapping with picture symbols.
As they've accumulated stories through journaling, Cynthia Pearson and Gloria Sturzenacker have discovered that short-term coherences grow and link into grand, long-term coherences of astounding proportions. (Cynthia has dubbed these "arabesques" for their intricacy.) Cynthia and Gloria hope to make short-term coherence an entrée for others to this dimension of unlimited magic.
In past years, Cynthia and Gloria have appeared on a Long-Term Journal-Keeping (LTJK) panel at ASD conferences. The panel, which Cynthia proposes to chair this year, explores the breadth of what dreamers learn from journaling over time. This general event on coherence is an in-depth complement to the LTJK panel.
Description

This event consists of two parts. On the first day of the conference, the roundtable leaders will describe coherent experiences and their methods of discovering and recording them. Then they'll invite other LTJK panelists to share their own experiences and techniques concerning coherence.
During the ensuing week, event attendees will take note of any dream-related coherences that develop in their lives.
On the last day of the conference, participants will report and discuss their experiences. The leaders will coach participants in using the methods presented-or in developing their own-to trace the many elements of coherence. (Attendees who want to practice the methods but don't have a conference-related coherence to work with can use something from the past, or work with "raw material" provided by the leaders.)
This session will be an exciting wrap-up for all the people who participate in the morning dream-sharing groups or experiential workshops and find themselves, at the end of the conference, with unusual stories to tell.