Just as dream-logic isn’t the same as waking logic, dream-space doesn’t tend to work the same way as waking space.

In waking space, you walk down a hallway, reach a door, open the door, and enter a new room. It’s all quite straightforward. You know where you’re going and how to get there.

In dream-space (including in our practice of dream return), things are a bit more fluid. You walk down a hallway, see a door at the end of it, and next thing you know, you’re on the other side of the door, mid-conversation with someone in the room. As that conversation flows on, you find that the room around you has shifted; it’s now an outdoor clearing in a tropical jungle. All of this seems like the most natural thing in the world.

And that’s the trick, when it comes to dream return: you need to find that mental space where this all seems like the most natural thing in the world.

If you’re constantly trying to pin the experience in place, to forcefully imagine each step down the hallway towards the door, very little is going to happen. Or at least very little that’s useful for rebalancing your ecosystem of unconscious energies.

In large part, the key skill for navigating dream-space is to stop trying to navigate dream-space.

Which yes, I know can be a frustrating thing to hear.

More concretely, what I mean by “stop trying” is that there’s a way of cultivating your intuitive reflexes for allowing the dream-space to unfold. Without this reflex, if you’re walking down a hallway, then suddenly find yourself mid-conversation in a jungle, you might be surprised and try to rewind or shake off the change — to go back to the hallway and try to force yourself to the door at the end of it. In other words, you’ll want the dream-space to make sense, and you’ll be surprised when it doesn’t, and you’ll try to control it to make it make sense.

When you cultivate the intuitive reflex, you’ll find yourself increasingly in a mindset where it makes perfect sense to be walking down a hallway one moment, and suddenly immediately be mid-conversation in a jungle. You’ll notice that the imaginal texture of “being halfway down a hallway” and “being in the middle of the conversation” are actually seamlessly connected, and you won’t need to spare a second thought about letting the image continue to unfold.