DREAMS in the MEDIA

The indigenous people of the world understand the power of the dream. 

For the aborigines in Australia and the Senoi in Malaysia, dreamtime is all of creation.
For the Iroquois Confederacy of six diverse Native American tribes and the Hebrew, dreaming is divine.
For the Egyptians and later the Greeks, dream incubation led to healing.

Dreaming is the essence of humanity's story – both trapping what has been and capturing what can be. 

"Through our stories we come to understand the purpose of life on this planet. 
    The Dhammapada, the first 'twin verses' spoken by the Buddha, says,

1 All that we are is the result of what we have thought;
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him,
as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

2  All that we are is the result of what we have thought;
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him,
like a shadow that never leaves him.

To communicate thoughts, man first created pictures..... Pictures are the oldest form of communication.  Egyptian hierglyphics of 5000 years ago, Sumerian cuneiform dating back to 34th century BC, and Olmec writing from 1000 BC, give us images of daily life around the world in earlier times.  Slowly, the evidence is making it clear that far from being primitive and uncivilized, pictures are the most direct mind-to-mind form of communication available.  In today's world, pictures are assuming their rightful place as the global standard for the human race.
    A picture is worth a thousand words.
    For the picture, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Mind of humanity itself.  Pictures are the oldest language known to man, the Universal Language of Mind."¹
 
Storytelling
In today's world of the 21st century, our stories are broadcast through images we create and broadcast in theaters around the world or over the internet into space. 
    In recent decades, dreaming has entered our media storytelling.  Amy Hardie, whose film Edge of Dreaming captures the realities of the dreamworld, is director of the Scottish Documentary Institute at the Edinburgh College of Art.  Amy is a dreamer in the true sense of the word. With clairvoyant vision, she sees the scope of storytelling from its origins in cave paintings and tribal circles to the breath-taking transitions cinema now allows.
    "Powerful images and sound compress time through editing," she told dreamschool's Barbara Condron.  "Sequences that could not be shown during the last 60,000 years (except in our dreams) have, for the last 100 years, been increasingly ubiquitous on our television, computer and cinema screens. However, in one aspect cinematic story telling has lost power (because) cinema is not live.  There is no storyteller left in the room."²
    Like a dream left unattended, unremembered, cinema makes the storyteller unaccessible.  He or she is not present for the audience's experience.  Amy Hardie proposes a development of the cinema experience that neutralizes the passivity encouraged through mechanization into an interaction that is active and articulated in community.
    This is a concept we promote here at dreamschool.org.  We encourage you to partake of the dream cinema - whether in your own night time whisperings, your daytime imaginings, or through the sharing of others' dreams - be they here at dreamschool or in the media at large.  Exploring dreams brings Self awareness and the potential for a spiritual renaissance.  Sharing dreams brings opportunities to deepen understanding of Self and others.  Want ways to speak about dreams?  Here are views from School of Metaphysics graduates and instructors.

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¹– from DREAMTIME:  Parables of Universal Law while Down Under, SOM Publishing
² – from Everyone Needs to See this Film, or How Sixteen Schools in the Midwest U.S. came to Host a Scottish Film on Dreams by Barbara Condron http://www.som.org/NewPages/Newsite07/SOMBar/DreamArticles/EoDreaming/Eod_history.html