The process called Dreaming on The Sentient Body

Dreaming

"Dreaming is a route to power for a warrior."

“Dream now and dream constantly. This is a matter of awareness in feeling, moving, seeing, hearing and relating."
Arnold Mindell~The Shaman's Body

Sentience is a transpersonal awareness; it is our physical experience of undifferentiated consciousness that connects with the underlying sentient reality from which our universe arises. When we engage sentient awareness to explore deep physical experiences and their relationship to the underlying essence reality, we can enter a process called “Dreaming”.

Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness. Our directed, controlling mind steps aside and we move into a deeper state that allows the unconscious or “dreaming” flirts, flickering signals and sensations to flow into awareness. Our conscious mind becomes a witness and participant rather than a prison guard to these altered states. When we engage our awareness with unconscious processes we can enter the state of dreaming, and from there unfold a creative dialogue of discovery, a dialogue that emerges from the interaction of conscious and unconscious experiences.

When sentient awareness engages with the sentient physical body it can access this dreaming process. Through subtle internal experiences, our bodies follow the personal and collective unconscious dreaming this world of matter and psyche into existence. Our sentient bodies are like trackers in the wilderness. By following sensation, subtle cues and inner hunches, we are able to explore the essence level or sentient underpinnings of reality before this energy enters into our consensus reality world of parts and polarities.

We catch those experiences that are flickers at the edge of awareness and focus on them. We look for those that are the furthest away from our ideas of ourselves, the most irrational and unlikely contain the greatest power to transform our worlds. We know that everything we experience is part of ourselves, even the most difficult to comprehend expands our definition of wholeness, for ourselves and the Earth. We engage in Earth Dreaming.

Sentience, through its connection to the dreaming process, can link us to the unknown or nagual according to Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan, and the personal and collective unconscious according to Carl Jung. Dreaming or dreambodywork is Mindell's term for a multisensory process, similar to active imagination, in which we explore a dialogue between the altered state mind and the dreaming. It is our tracking mechanism for the underlying and unmanifest essence world.

“Learning to dream is not haphazard but active and deliberate. You consciously intervene with spontaneous experiences, combining altered states of consciousness with wakeful interventions and, above all, noticing which are primary and close to consciousness and which are secondary and far away. The warrior senses something unknown to her and consciously decides to use her second attention to explore it. She feels her way into processes, selecting events and experiences according to the energy in them. The events that are strangest and furthest from awareness, the most unearthly secondary processes, are the ones with the most power. “
Arnold Mindell~ The Shaman’s Body