A classic, full of great examples of how to work with and understand your dreams.

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Product Description

With more than 250,000 copies sold, this classic exploration of dreams and how to use them has been updated to reflect recent research on dreams and dreaming.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64438 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

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Customer Reviews

A seminal book in the rebirth of a dreaming culture
Patricia Garfield's classic work is one of the landmark books of the century we are now leaving. She takes dreaming out of the hands of tenured "experts" and encourages all to become active explorers of our personal dream experiences, and of dream reality, learning from cultures - especially those of the ancient world and of indigenous peoples - that value dreaming as a source of direct revelation on the critical issues of life and death. Her account of Senoi dream practices (though sniped at by some academic nitpickers as idealized rather than anthropological) provides excellent guidance on braving up to nightmare terrors and forging alliances with dream allies who may at first appear as adversaries.

I vividly remember discovering "Creative Dreaming" soon after it first appeared in the mid-1970s. I felt as if this queenly, elegant woman had picked up a sledgehammer and broken away some of the chains that had fettered our society's appreciation of what is actually going on in dreaming, and why we need to recover the ancient arts of dream incubation and dream healing. Patricia's book encouraged me to follow my own path as a dream teacher with greater courage and openness, and was a vital early influence in the research and practice that eventually led me to write CONSCIOUS DREAMING and the books that have followed. Before I ever met her in ordinary reality, she appeared several times in my dreams both as a guide and as a kind of anima figure. Thank you, Patricia, for all you have contributed to the rebirth of a dreaming culture - a dream I profoundly hope we will see fulfilled in the 21st century.

Learning to fly...
I read this book for the first time in high school while I was doing research for a term paper. As a by product of that research, I learned how to manipulate my dreams, and best of all, how to fly in them. This has been one of my favorite things to do for the last 30 years. Yes, something I do while asleep. I also learned how to stand up to my fears within the dream, and consequently, in my waking life. Another benefit is that I have dreamed about work, real detailed dreams where I'm sort of reviewing things I have read in manuals and reached conclusions within the dreams that solved problems I was having at work in my waking life. I've gone into work the next day and attempted the procedures (I support computers) that I thought would resolve the problem, and they have! And not just once.

This book changed my life.

Not a How to at all
I am glad that this book has changed title from the origional How to plan.... because quite frankly it tells you nothing. If this were a how to article in a magazine you would laugh it off. The author rambles on about different cultures and different dreamers in the past and present and talks about her own dreams but never gets to the point, which is: how to plan and control your dreams.

Example: If this were a how to on how to bake bread, it would tell you the history of bread, what cultures baked what type of bread, even talk about the construction of ancient mud ovens but would not ever get around to telling you what ingredients you need, how to put them together and all that for baking your own bread.

The book reads much like a dream, it might make sense while you are having it, but when read in reality you have to wonder what the author was up to.

There are plenty of references in the back, at least in the edition I read, but who wants to try to find ancient manuscripts or articles from science journals to understand why the author thought the information was important enough to put in there?

If you are really interested in a step by step how to then your better bet would be Stephen LaBerge's book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, or his first book Lucid Dreaming. There is actual scientific data on dreams and the state of dreaming, and methods for inducing dreams from WILD Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming where you go straight into dreams fully concious, to MILD where you practice the intention to recognize the next time you are dreaming. A much better and less holistic book that doesn't ramble.

I'd like to state that I respect the author, but her choice of title for this book is misleading. It is interesting for what it is, which is a collection of anectodes about different dreams and dreamers, but it is not what I would consider how-to.