Dreaming the Dream Body

Reconstructed as a doable practice from Andrews’s Dreamtime / dream-body teaching:

1. Set the field (a few minutes, lying down). Let the body settle and the breath slow. Andrews frames the entry to Dreamtime as a move into stillness and receptivity, not effort — you are opening a door, not forcing one.
2. Build the dream body. In imagination, construct a second self that is you, but whole and unhurried — see it, feel its weight, let it stand or sit in a setting you choose (a landscape, a lodge, a place of safety). Make it vivid through the senses, not just “thought about.” Over many nights this imagined self becomes stable and quick to call up.
3. Plant one intention or question. Hand the dream body a single clear question — “What am I not seeing about ___?”, “What does this fear want?”, “Show me the next step.” Andrews stresses that intent must be trained: a vague wish gathers nothing, a gathered intent gathers much. State it once, simply, then release the demand for an answer.
4. Let go and sleep. Stop steering. Drop the imagery and allow ordinary sleep to take over. The work now happens below waking control.
5. Harvest on waking — before moving. The instant you wake, stay still and scan for any dream, image, feeling, or phrase. Write it down immediately, in present tense, however fragmentary. Recall fades within seconds of getting up.
6. Read it as symbol, not prophecy. Later, sit with what you recorded and ask what it mirrors in you — what it points to, not what it predicts. Andrews’s framing is that the Dreamtime returns symbols for the self to interpret, “born of personal experience,” with meaning found by applying them to your own life.
7. Return and repeat. Go back to the same dream body and setting on following nights. The power is in the return: the inner self grows stable, recall sharpens, and a working dialogue with your own depths builds over weeks. (Sourcing note: Andrews’s books present these as narrated teaching-stories rather than numbered drills; the steps above are a faithful reconstruction of the dream-body / Dreamtime practice, not a quotation of a set exercise.)

Lynn V. Andrews (c.1940–2022) introduced the Dreamtime and dream-body teaching across the Medicine Woman series, beginning with Medicine Woman (1981) and developed through Flight of the Seventh Moon (1984), attributing it to her teachers Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs.

A necessary note on the evidence on lineage. Andrews’s accounts are widely disputed. Critics — including Native American scholars and writers on “plastic shamanism” — argue her narratives are best read as fiction and that the indigenous Cree/“Sisterhood of the Shields” lineage she claims is unverified and, to many, an appropriation that misrepresents real Native traditions.

This entry therefore makes no claim of authentic indigenous transmission. It presents only the transmissible psychological practice — pre-sleep imagery, intention, dream journaling — and disclaims the surrounding metaphysics and lineage claims.

Deliberate dreaming for self-knowledge is one of the most cross-cultural practices there is; Andrews’s version is distinctive in centering a built, returnable “dream body” self and a sacred-feminine framing: - Dream incubation (temple sleep, Asklepios) — the ancient practice of sleeping on a question to receive a guiding dream.

• The Sacred Garden (Hank Wesselman) — a stable inner sanctuary, but reached by waking drumming-journey rather than pre-sleep dreaming.
• Dialoguing with the dream (Robert Waggoner) — working inside a lucid dream rather than incubating one.
• MILD lucid-dreaming induction — the evidence-based pre-sleep intention method for becoming lucid.
• Active imagination (Jung) — engaging inner figures in waking reverie.

Treating the imagery as literal travel or prophecy. Read it as a mirror of your own state, not a report from elsewhere or a forecast.

• Planting five questions. One clear intention per night gathers more than a scattered list. Andrews’s point about trained intent is the operative one.
• Getting up before recording. Recall evaporates in seconds; write first, move second. Keep paper or phone within reach.
• Forcing or steering. The entry is receptive — straining to “make” a dream-body trip happen defeats it. Build, plant, release.
• Doing it once and quitting. The stable inner self and the recall both build over weeks of return, not in a single night.