On Dreamshaping: Write In Front of Us – The Dreamshaping Journal

Mark McNease

I have never kept a journal until recently. I’d read for years that any ‘serious’ writer keeps a journal, and I rightly dismissed it. Journaling is a personal choice, and until the last few months it was not one I thought would serve a purpose for me. The novels, short stories, and plays I’d written over the last 50 years (yes, it’s been that long), did not come from ideas in a journal. I knew plenty of people who kept journals or diaries and swore by them, but It was never something I saw myself doing or did.

Then came Dreamshaping and my hunch that writing most days could help me peel away the layers and obstructions that have impeded the creation of my life. I don’t write in it every day and would not fault anyone for that: we write when we have something to say, or we need to explore the dream we live and the part we play as its architect. I also don’t find any benefit in repetition, which has been the biggest trap of it for me – repeating the same things over and over, grievances and worries and doubts, as if the monkey mind has been given a keyboard and allowed to ramble. It happens, but it’s the opposite of what a journal is about for me.

The Dreamshaping journal is my map, my history, my exploration into myself and the world around me. It’s one thing to say that I am the shaper of my dream, and another to understand how I shape it. What choices do I make each day, and why do I make them? What are my poisons? What are my exits signs? And how do I get off a road that just keeps bringing me back to where I started?

I’ve spent plenty of hours in a therapist’s office, and one long stretch of it helped me understand the bruised and battered child I had abandoned years ago, the little boy I had been whose vulnerability had been so disappointing to others and ultimately to me. But when I began this Dreamshaping project, I expected to be my own therapist. The journal is the comfortable chair I sit it. The words are what I tell to the listener I must be to undertake this. I am both client and therapist now, and the Dreamshaping journal is both journal and journey, venturing into the inner workings of my life dream, and out into the full, robust, joyful living of that dream. The answers we need are write in front of us.