Shamanism is the oldest form of communicating and healing. It probably resides in all of us.

I try to see what the dream might be referring to - because the information in the world is being interpreted by my brain which only has the concepts derived from our five senses. So I think of the sequences in my dream as my brain doing its very best to process information in a way it knows I can deal with.

I think that when you go on a shamanic journey, you're allowing yourself to have much more access to your unconscious or your sense of connection within the universe, whatever you want to call that. You've accessed places in your brain that you don't normally. You're still there - it's your brain. But you have access in a way that you normally don't. For me, doing that felt like being in a new environment.

One thing I love is to stop doing. When I just STOP and start looking, I enter a state that is much more dreamy, and find I look at things quite differently. It seems like a change in scale - both very close up, and simultaneously very distant.

Stories that are real, that create you, rather than be created by you, are powerful.

I agree that dreams seem to be involved in laying down memories but I realise that dreaming gives us access to a part of our brain we do not normally have access to.

I am sure that there is a lot more going on in the objective real world than we can monitor with our five senses. I think dreams allow us to engage with the real world and monitor the way it is acting on us.