Living Our Dreams.
When I was little, I thought that I had to get up in the morning and have breakfast and go to school and play lots, so that when I went to sleep I'd dream properly. I thought that dreaming was the most important thing in the world. Growing up here, I have to accept that I was one weird kid but if I had grown up among the Senoi, I probably wouldn't have been an oddball at all.
The Senoi, according to an American psychologist, Kilton Steward, who studied them in the 1930s, worked actively with their dreams on a daily basis and had an exceptionally low incidence of mental illness and crime.
The Senoi taught their children how to control what happened in their dreams. So, for example, if a child reported a nightmare in which they were chased, they would be encouraged next time to face their enemy and call on dream allies - helpful animals, people or spirit beings to support them in the fight. Once the enemy was defeated, they should ask for a gift and the dream gift was held to have significance for the life path of the dreamer and in some cases for the group as well. The Senoi tribe saw violence as appropriate behaviour in dreams but inappropriate in waking reality - perhaps as Kilton Steward speculated they were so peaceful because all their aggressive urges were acted out in dreams.
The community gathered daily to share their dreams and develop song, dance and other creative projects based on their dreaming. When they faced a challenge individually or collectively they would 'sleep on it' and then discuss their dreams and use these as the basis for decision making.
The first time I heard of the Senoi, I was told that their dream world was shared. So that instead of each person entering their own personal esoteric dream space as we do, they all went to the same place when they were dreaming. This idea of a collective dream world fascinated me and I still wonder if we shared our dreams with each other if we would find that our dream landscapes would converge. After all when someone goes to a Freudian analyst they have Freudian dreams and when they go to a Jungian analyst they have Jungian dreams, perhaps if we all learnt to dream as the Senoi did we would find we shared our dream worlds. I have met people who said that they have had the same dream at the same time as someone they were close to, most often as children.
It was several years later that I participated in a wonderful year long dream work course were we covered a host of different approaches to working with dreams but none of these were as vibrant and alive and exciting as the Senoi approach to dreams. The difference between the various methods of interpreting dreams and dreamwork is the difference between looking at a picture and participating in an ever changing movie - a language of symbol and senses that is always evolving. Interpretation is flat - dream of a boat and according to Freud it is a woman's vagina, according to Jung it is an archetype relating to travelling the unconscious (the sea) and according to a dream dictionary it means you want to travel! But the truth is the boat can mean a host of different things to different people and the meaning can change over time. The purpose of Senoi dreamwork is not so much to interpret our dreams but rather to use this fertile source of creativity to enrich our lives.
As a culture we are greatly impoverished because rather than following our own dreams, our true path, we have bought into a collective mythology of what is beautiful, desirable, wealthy, successful. Senoi dream work is one way back to our own truth, to discovering the incredible depth of creativity and joy that is available to each of us.
I was so inspired by the Senoi dreamwork techniques, it came as quite a shock for me when further research revealed that when anthropologists returned to study the Senoi tribe in the 1960s they found little evidence for the tribal customs Kilton Steward described! No-one knows if the Senoi ever really lived as Kilton Steward claimed. It is possible that through contact with outside cultures, the lifestyle was eroded beyond recognition or it may be the peace loving people he wrote about existed only in his imagination.
I don't think it matters any more. The myth of the Senoi has inspired many people the world over much as it has inspired me. In the dream workshops I run, people come together, much as the Senoi were said to have done and share their dreams through story-telling, song-making, art and drama. Rather than seeing dreams as material for interpretation, we enter the dream world in awe together and celebrate the way in which dreams can enrich our lives.