Deep Dive into Dreams with Paul Sheldon
In this episode, we talk to Paul Sheldon, a Dreambassador. Paul has dedicated his life to studying conscience, dreaming, and everything in between. Paul has been involved with advocacy surrounding both prisons and the environment, and you can check out some of his work at greenprisons.org or Dreamosophy.com!
More on Paul Sheldon
Website: Dreamosophy.com
Website: greenprisons.org
Instagram: instagram.com/dreamosophy
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dreamosophy
Twitter: twitter.com/Dreamosophy
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Quotes:
“I remember wondering, what is this about dreaming and waking? What's the connection there? And that began a lifelong fascination with consciousness and awareness.” -Paul Sheldon
“We're not human beings who are dreaming. We are the dream of being human.” -Paul Sheldon
“I don't talk much about reality because every person has to describe reality as it occurs for them. I'm more interested in truth.” -Paul Sheldon
Show Notes:
Paul Sheldon: I often joke that I induced my parents to move from Vermont to California while I was in the womb so that I could be born in California.
Paul Sheldon: I got to live through the 1950s and 60s and 70s in Southern California, which was a very exciting time.
Paul Sheldon: I had a wonderful dream in 1963, in which I saw President Kennedy floating in a canoe, lying down next to a dock that I was on, and he had flaming red hair. And I woke up wondering, “What's with the flaming red hair?” And that day, he was assassinated.
Paul Sheldon: I remember wondering, what is this about dreaming and waking? What's the connection there? And that began a lifelong fascination with consciousness and awareness.
Paul Sheldon: I wrote a proposal on how to study human awareness. I didn't want to study the contents of awareness. I wanted to study human awareness as such.
Paul Sheldon: There's a divine presence in whom we live and move and have our being, which is fundamentally conscious.
Paul Sheldon: If we use a particular type of sensor, we will sense what that sensor can sense. If we use a different type of sensor, we might get a different result.
Paul Sheldon: We don't really know. So I'll give you three possible theories about that.
Paul Sheldon: You know, we're not human beings who are dreaming. We are the dream of being human.
Paul Sheldon: Traditional tribal peoples will say the dream is where we come from when we're born and where we go to when we die. And all of this is just a dream of a cosmic being that's dreaming this reality. And we're a part of that.
Paul Sheldon: People sat around campfires and they talked about dreaming.
Paul Sheldon: My first LSD experience, I was in the mountains in Southern California and I laid down in a little mountain stream and I dissolved into the sand and became just pure consciousness.
Paul Sheldon: If you experience it as reality, it's real for you. But then all the research on optical illusions and fantasy and schizophrenia also establish that your reality is not my reality.
Paul Sheldon: I don't talk much about reality because every person has to describe reality as it occurs for them. I'm more interested in truth.
Paul Sheldon: We don't know how we remember dreams.
Paul Sheldon: The experiential reality of infants and young toddlers is not about a separate self. It's about mommy. And is mommy okay? And if Mommy is okay, I'm okay.
Paul Sheldon: Part of why we don't remember dreams is that they're much more fluid and flexible than what we've been taught to believe is an objective, waking reality.
Paul Sheldon: I have a unique approach to dreaming, which I call “dreamosophy,” which literally means the wisdom of dreaming.
Paul Sheldon: There are very many different cultural traditions about how to deal with these phantasmagorical dreams.
Paul Sheldon: Dreams help us process trauma and distress and anxiety.
Paul Sheldon: When we work in prisons, women often come to us and say, “Can you help me recover from trauma?”
Paul Sheldon: 85% of women who are incarcerated have been trafficked for drugs, sex or both. And most men who are incarcerated are coming out of lives of trauma, of childhoods filled with trauma.
Paul Sheldon: Some friends and I started a website called greenprisons.org to show correctional institutions how to be more sustainability oriented and how to be environmentally responsible in ways that protect public safety and protect the security of the institution, but also save money and create a new identity for people who are incarcerated.
Paul Sheldon: Who knew that it was going to be hard to get into prison?
Paul Sheldon: Life is a precious gift.