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Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping into Our Human Potential by Christina Donnell, Ph.D. Winds of Change Books
book review by Jeanette J. Jennis
"Merging with the Dreaming, however, confounds the mind. Instead of being lost in thinking, you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking ceases to be a self-serving, autonomous activity that runs your life."
Most children strongly resist going to bed at night, but Christina looked forward to it with happy anticipation because her dream life was full of unique and thrilling experiences. Imagine dreaming vividly about people joyfully singing African American spirituals. The author, a seven-year-old white girl with no knowledge of this type of music or lyrics, awakened from sleep and wrote a book about it.
Over the years, Christina Donnell's background in psychology, Zen meditation, and years spent training with a Q'ero master shaman has advanced her dreaming experiences. She provides a detailed explanation of the three types of dreaming: ordinary dreaming, which may be of help with problems or decisions in our waking life, lucid dreaming, which allows us to actively participate in our dream states, and ultimately transcendent dreaming, where we can move beyond the limited boundaries of time and space.
Each chapter describes a fascinating dream, followed by the author's reflections on the impact it made and the empowerment she achieved. Through the dreaming, Christina had breakthroughs in clairvoyance, prophecy, bi-location, and reconfiguring energy to merge into both human and non-human forms. Though her fantastic journey of dream exploration may seem unattainable to some, she believes in everyone's ability to reach universal consciousness as an evolutionary step.
The study of dreaming reaches back even further than Carl Jung to the ancient cultures that followed and interpreted our nocturnal states, but still there is much to uncover and perhaps harness about a place where we spend roughly one-third of our lives. Donnell's approach is about understanding and potential. Grounded in real life experiences, her insightful and sensitive account about altered states of consciousness will at the very least change the way you consider dreaming.