Embrace the Magic of Harvest Dreams

Foreign.

I'm really glad that you're all here.

Thanks for making time.

It's a, busy.

It's a busy week.

It's a busy time of year.

This is the talk on Harvest Dreams about how we can alchemize this time of year, this busy, insane time of year for dreaming big.

Because it often feels like, our nature is running against culture, when it comes to the holidays, the winter holidays, and yet there's also some.

Some gems in here too, that seem to actually point us in the other direction in which we actually might be able to use that for spiritual discernment, for, connection with community and family, and.

And living deeper into this season.

Right.

These are all things that I think that, that most folks want, and especially what.

What dreamers want.

And so harvest feasts, I mean, we're right before American Thanksgiving.

Canadian Thanksgivings come and gone.

And if you don't celebrate those, of course, like the whole holiday season leading up to the end of the year, this is the time of gatherings with family, with friends.

Often we don't see these folks maybe once a year.

these are a time for big dreams.

These are a time for widening the, the circle for.

For our life and the significance of our life.

And, what I'll do is I'll move into why this is.

So why these.

Why these gatherings we have actually promote dreaming big.

I'll start with the kind of more quantitative stuff.

And then we'll move gradually, like, a frog in boiling water, into the ethereal and the mysterious.

And we won't even know it's happening.

But.

But of course, when we talk about dreams, that always happens.

and so I'll just start with just the question, you know, what am I talking about?

What are big dreams?

And I'm considering dreams to be impactful dreams, memorable dreams that give us insight, that give us grounding, that connect us to our community, our family, our ancestry, our ecosystem.

So moving out these like concentric rings of being, to those that we share the planet with and the cosmos with.

And so big dreams are often come spontaneously, but as we'll see, they have an element where they can be called as well, as long as we're in synchrony with what wants to come through.

And so in a sense, it's about calibration.

And I ran an event back in the fall called dream calibration.

And this is sort of like, you know, the winter season calibration for big dreams.

And so it's really the same topic.

How do our insights, our wishes, our intentions match with what's trying to come through, what's trying to get our attention?

Right.

what do we need information on?

What do we need perspective on?

right.

This is what dreams are great at.

This is what they really do.

They bring through the things that are right on the edge, that want to come through.

And so I'll start with just the basics.

You know, I do this talk every year around Thanksgiving.

It's always good to remember this stuff, that when we go to a harvest festival, like Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or, you know, any of these things, what we're doing is carb-loading number one.

and a lot of it has to do with tryptophan.

You've probably heard this before, that tryptophan is something that actively promotes sleep.

And it does more than that, it promotes bizarre dreams as well.

And so tryptophan is an essential amino acid.

it's in a lot of stuff.

People say it's in the turkey and tryptophan's in the turkey, but honestly, it's in the same levels of, you know, activity as it is in the biscuits, in the cheese and the deviled eggs in your aunt's mashed, potatoes, right?

It's in chicken and ham and fish and beef.

It's.

That stuff's all just chock full of tryptophan.

It's in desserts because it's in, it's, it's a carb related thing.

It's in chocolate cake, it's in pumpkin pie, it's in the banana fritters, right?

So, what happens when we gorge, when we eat fully and richly, is carb loading.

And what happens is, is that the carbs are spiking our insulin levels, right?

And so when the carbohydrates spike our insulin levels, it's stimulating a huge uptake in those large amino acids in the bloodstream, except for tryptophan.

So suddenly you have a high level relatively, of tryptophan in the blood and it crosses the brain blood barrier and it enters the central nervous system.

And what happens here is the tryptophan gets synthesized, it gets transformed into serotonin, and then it goes to another alchemical, transformation the, the pineal gland into melatonin.

And this is the stuff that really brings on those feelings of sleepiness, right?

And so when we carb load, when we eat a lot of this stuff all at once, we are inviting naps, we are inviting rest we are inviting sleep.

And not only that, as I say, it's not just about sleep, because tryptophan and as it's synthesized in the melatonin, it's also instigating bizarre dreams.

And we've seen this clinically with a number of studies.

And one of the ones I love to bring up is the study that Tracy Kahan did about 15 years ago with her students, at Sonoma University, out in California.

She found that basically she compared a double blind placebo study with students taking melatonin and those who were not.

And she found that those who took the melatonin, their dreams were analyzed to contain more bizarreness, things like transformation of objects and overall transformations.

And so we're talking about like dream objects, like, you know, getting weird and things morphing and changing.

And so there's something interesting there because when we have a bizarre dream, when we have a dream that catches our attention, where things literally transform, these are opportunities for greater lucidity or becoming aware that we're dreaming, as well as just these potent symbolic forms that might not have come through either.

Right.

The other thing that tryptophan and melatonin does is that it increases your REM latency.

And so what we find is that it takes a little longer to get to sleep.

When you do have REM sleep, those REM periods are stronger, they're longer, and they tend to have.

We talked about bizarreness, but also more emotional, impact and so, so nightmares as well.

So bad dreams can come through this as well.

And this is something that we've seen through other, other research ways as well.

I'm remembering Ernest Hartman who passed away a number of years ago.

Really fabulous psychotherapist and, and, and dream researcher.

He called it the pepperoni pizza effect.

Right.

And so, which is full of like cheese and oil and of course all, all the, the bread as well.

But pepperoni pizza seems to bring on bizarre dreams.

It's, it's just one of these things that we see.

So, so how do we honor this?

And this is really what this talk is about is like, okay, so we're setting ourselves up for something.

How do we honor the fact that we're carb loading and loading ourselves full of tryptophan rich foods throughout, whether it's Thanksgiving or in, you know, these, these harvest feasts to come this season, we can honor it by letting ourselves take a nap when the body signals that we're sleeping.

Right.

Hopefully you have a little bit more time on your hand if your body is signaling to lay down, lay yourself down.

Right?

Let your indigestion, be your muse as well, you know, and this is part of it, is that if we're carb loading, especially if there's lots of oils, there might be more times that we wake up in the middle of the night.

There could be some time in the bathroom not so pleasant.

It's part of the experience, apparently, that we don't talk about.

But these are times in the middle of the night that we can reflect on what was I dreaming and what am I going to dream next?

Because anytime we have a sleep disruptive event, we have an opportunity to reflect on what just happened.

And what do we want to happen next?

Okay.

And the other piece of this puzzle that comes through is that there's often a lot of heightened alcohol consumption during the holidays.

And alcohol affects our dreams and our sleep our a lot, especially in excess.

I don't recommend alcohol as a dream inducer.

However, if you're drinking alcohol and you don't often do, you may notice that you have more bizarre dreams.

alcohol does a lot of stuff.

It makes it easier to fall asleep, but our sleep is more fragmented afterwards.

And so alcohol is doing a lot of stuff.

It's majorly messing with our neurotransmitters.

We got huge dopamine bursts happening, but then there's a crash.

And what happens also is that REM sleep, which is dreaming sleep, is often pressed when we are in recovery from alcohol.

But if we sleep in, there will be a REM rebound.

And so basically, as the body moves towards homeostasis, suddenly that REM sleep need comes forward and says it's time for some rem.

And guess what?

That REM sleep, say you're sleeping in, is going to be powerful.

It's going to be bizarre and possibly lucid with more of that metacognition.

As we say, you know, these like, oh, am, I dreaming right now?

This is so weird.

It must be a dream.

Okay, so again, I don't encourage alcohol taking for the purpose of having powerful dreams.

But know this, that this happens and that it might happen to you as well.

And so how do we honor this?

Right?

How do we honor this if you sleep in on Friday?

Get ready, get ready for some day residue, dreams for the first part of the night.

Get ready for a little indigestion, get ready for a little insomnia, get ready for some nice strong sleep in the second half of the night, Possibly topped off with a really bizarre dream in the morning that could be impactful.

It could actually address some of the other things that are going on, in your sessions, in your sessions with your family and friends.

And this is how, this is one of my cool, the coolest aspects I think of, of the holiday gatherings is we have one of the only opportunities that we have in our culture as adults to go to a slumber party, right?

And so if you are traveling, if you're traveling it outside your home for Thanksgiving or for, for the holidays, you're sleeping somewhere else.

And what happens is pretty predictable.

When we sleep away from home, our sleep will be disturbed.

We will have more dream recall.

And we know this, we know this from the lab.

We know this from the sleep lab.

In fact, you know, in fact, what the sleep scientists say when they are taking in data.

Say someone comes in because they've got sleep apnea or insomnia and they're doing brainwave measurements.

They'll say they'll take data for two to three nights because the first night of data is trash.

They throw it out completely.

Because the first night nobody sleeps well in a lab because you're sleeping someplace new.

They call it the first night effect.

So this is happening to when we are sleeping over at somebody's, somebody's house that's not our house.

We're going to have more awakenings, but there's deeper levels that going to come more clear.

especially when we consider sort of the major trigger that next comes through these family gatherings, which is family systems.

Right.

Thanksgiving and these other multi generational family meals stir up, they stir it all up.

They stir up the muck, they stir up the unconscious.

They stir up, sometimes the jarring levels of cognitive dissonance where we suddenly find ourselves being treated like a child again, like our personal mythology is triggered, right.

The way that we self define normally is not the same as we are when we're at Nana's house.

Right.

Also, we know that we're going to possibly have ancestral dreams too that are triggered by, by, by this, you know, new kind of, immersion.

Again, it's all going to come back up, right?

And you might actually have the dream, like an ancestral dream or a family systems dream before the gathering in anticipation.

And so this is interesting because you could really watch for this.

You could watch for, it's, it's like clockwork for some people to be like, oh, I had the, I had the dream beforehand.

This is an opportunity, this is an opportunity to talk about something at the table besides politics.

Right?

So how do we honor this?

It's an invitation to be aware that no matter how much you're going to play out in your head, how mature, you're going to be at the table this Thanksgiving, you're probably going to revert to your old self, and that's okay.

Like, it's just.

It is, it is what it is, right?

But if you go into this with your eyes at least halfway open, you're going to find that there's some opportunities and we're going to do a.

You have an invitation to do, a little activity at the end of today's session where we can actually explore this a little bit.

On your own.

There's one other aspect, and like I said, we're getting kind of deeper here.

Feasting itself.

Feasting stirs up big dreams because it is ancient.

Feasting is an ancient hominid ritual of celebration, right?

And all rituals that, when we attend to them consciously, can trigger powerful dreams, that they integrate our experiences and they pull us deeper.

So when we celebrate abundance, what are we doing when we're sharing a table, you know, a big table with friends and family?

what are we doing?

We're going back to the time where we're eating at harvest that which cannot be stored for winter.

Like, it's gotta go, right?

Like, it's.

It's got to go.

So it's like I can hear my mother in my head saying, I'm pushing eggs anyway.

This is what she would say when she's got too many eggs and she's gotta cook them before they go, right?

This is because winter is coming, right?

There's this, there's this existential evolutionary piece in here that's so deep.

And so we feast, we celebrate.

And this, this.

This decadence is functional.

It's.

It's primal, it's ancient.

And it, it's creating and I would say, you know, What's the word?

solidifying really strong bonds with our family before times of adversity.

Like, we're.

We're saying, like, who.

Look who's here, right?

So how do we honor this?

I encourage you, if you go into Thanksgiving dinner, if you're going to, another feast like this, this holiday, to notice the display before you sit down to eat, a lot of attention and care goes to the display.

Maybe you're the one in charge of this and you know what I'm talking about.

And, and just notice it, take it in, right?

Pray over it.

Even if, and especially if your family prayers, you're, you know, leave you cold or disconnected, you know, make time for your own, ritual life.

And maybe that just means, like, volunteering to do something like light the candles at the table.

Right?

There's something about this that's very powerful, and it's very ancient.

And when we attend to it with our eyes open, we're in the dream zone, right?

So what are some other ways.

What are some other ways that these.

That these holidays give us these opportunities?

I would say it's about, in general, just literally dream sharing.

And so, again, we talked about this a little bit, how instead of talking about politics or sports, we can talk about dreams.

And so if you're spending a night under the same family, under, the same roof, right.

Of your whole family the next morning, this is often when people get snarky.

Maybe you're on good behavior the night before, but then it comes out the next day.

maybe you're a little hungover.

You've got ibuprofen.

You got your coffee.

This is where people want to connect with each other, but you can connect over the dreams.

You can connect over.

What did y' all dream last night?

Did anyone have any weird dreams?

It's such a good conversation lead.

It's such a wonderful antidote to talking about something divisive.

We want to do that.

We want to connect, we want to share.

And we can go deep, we can go vertical rather than into.

Into the horizontal.

Right.

And on, into this.

More layers of surface.

When we dream, share in a safe way, it leads to other things, right?

It leads to family stories, it leads into lore, into funny moments as well as impactful ones.

And you can just notice this.

Notice what happens when we share.

It actually creates connections.

It creates moments.

yeah, yeah.

Of being with each other.

So the last thing I'll say in general, about what we can attend to with the harvest dreams and the opportunities they bring to our dream life has to do about decolonization.

Because when we are sharing dreams, we're remembering the old ways, we're remembering ancient practices, much of which have been lost to our own cultural traditions due to everyone's own colonizations.

And this is very poignant to mention right now at, Thanksgiving.

Right.

It's got a historical context that is bloody and, you know, for instance, just for American Thanksgiving, for many Native Americans, it's a day of mourning, right.

About what was lost.

So.

So that doesn't mean that we don't celebrate with our friends and family, but we celebrate it, and we tell the story.

We tell the true story, especially to our children.

Dreaming plays into this dreaming is a way to open up to our own authentic self and community and not at anyone else's expense.

So, I mean, what, what does that look like?

And how do you honor that?

Again, I would say, and just be open to this idea that we all have ancient ways that can be remembered and that dreams can literally lead the way.

If you have a wish or a desire to move deeper into ancestral ways of knowing, if you ask the question, a dream can respond with a clue, a way in.

And so you can be open to these messages, open to these dreams.

It's really, it's kind of the first step.

And then with a spirit of curiosity and inquiry, you can move deeper and uncover, research and connect, of course, with your family members about this too.

And again, there goes the lore again.

You'll start hearing about family members that you've never heard about who were like, oh, she used to always have psychic dreams.

She was a incredible dreamer.

Or this person was always having medicine dreams about somebody and knew what medicine to give somebody.

Right.

So this is the kind of thing that happens when we open up to ancestral dreaming.

yeah.

So that's, that's the download.

I wanted to keep this simple and quick for you because I know that it's.

It's a busy time.

I'm going to invite, you to do an activity with me that's.

It's a private activity for a free write that will help us kind of gel some of these themes that we discussed today.

So this process that we'll go through for the next five minutes is for you, and it's an invitation for a free ride.

It's.

I did this just last week with some of the members of my, membership portal.

We did something similar.

So if you were present for that, you can kind of deepen your work with it.

But the idea is to bring an intention, a conscious intention into the holidays, knowing full well that we're going to stir the muck up.

Right.

And that this is a time for dreaming precisely because it's a time, that we're moving into some of these fraught areas, you know, from family systems and, everything having to do with the holidays simply, for instance, just that the holidays are supposed to be cheerful and that we're supposed to always be together.

And you know, like, besides, every once in a while there'll be like a blue Christmas service somewhere.

There's very little talk publicly about the isolation that so many people feel during the holiday holidays.

So it's a, it's A very difficult time for a lot of people, and we never know what's going on.

So here's how we can support ourselves.

I encourage you to, over the next few minutes, to, to do a little free writing and so you can just journal, what comes to mind as we go through these questions that I want to guide you through.

And the big question is, is what is the story that you're telling yourselves about the holidays this year?

What are you looking forward to and what are you dreading?

So that's the first set of questions.

What is the story that you're telling yourself about the holidays?

What are you looking forward to and what are you dreading?

What are you anticipating.

You'll, have some time to write that out further?

Because these two things will be connected.

We'll take two minutes and we'll come back.

So, so part two of this exploration is how can you support yourself over the next month?

What resources can you call upon?

when you feel lesser than your truly connected nature, How can you, another way to put it be, how can you, make the most out of the loss of control that might come from the holidays?

Whether you're traveling or staying with other people's homes or simply being in contact with folks that bring up lots of conflict, how can you support yourself?

How can you resource?

Who can you call upon?

How can you, nurture yourself?

Yeah.

Okay.

Welcome back.

my friends, those three minutes always go by really quickly.

When I do this work, I realize that I'm just, just beginning.

I, I, if I always come up with a couple of things real quick, and then I hit a dead zone.

And then I realized towards the end that there's a whole deeper level that I'm missing.

So, with that, I just want to say thank you.

I really hope that you have a restful holiday period.

Make you dream big.

May you be safe and protected, and, to surrender to the unknown, and see what comes.

That's what it's all about, that curiosity.