Below you will find short descriptions of the following videos as well as links to them:
What are “Emerging Potentials?
How Does IDL Interviewing Work?
Suggestions for Introducing Others to IDL Interviewing
How to Hold Your Own Integral Deep Listening Salons
Getting Started with IDL On Line Interviewing
Choosing Life Issues
Choosing a Dream and Writing Your Associations to It
Providing a Date, Name, and Deciding Who to Interview
Taking the Perspective of an Interviewed Character
Personifications and Possible Transformations
Addressing Life Changes
Application of Character Recommendations and Character Dream Interpretation
Integrating What You Have Heard: Adding Your Interpretation and Those of Others
The IDL On Line Life Issue Interviewing Protocol
1: Similarities and Differences from the Dream Interviewing Protocol
2: Generation of the Personification of a Chosen Life Issue for Interviewing
Reading Back the Interview
Extraterrestrials Invade!
The Soldier Nightmare
What to do if your Subject has a “Melt Down” in the Middle of an Interview
IDL as an Emerging Potential Interviewing Methodology
What are “Emerging Potentials?”
“Emerging potentials” are any character or element from a dream, life issue, mystical or near death experience, work of fiction, mythological, historical, or current historical event that you care to interview.
It’s easier to explain what emerging potentials are if we first clarify what they aren’t.
Emerging potentials are not roles, self-aspects, personifications, elements of your personal, collective, or universal unconscious, “shadow,” gods, shamanic totem figures, Greek muses, or projections, although they contain attributes associated with all of these things.
The problems with these definitions is that they are reductionistic, meaning that they do the same thing with emerging potentials that the Blind men did with that Elephant: they take one true but partial understanding and assume it is an accurate description of the totality. They reduce emerging potentials to something less than the totality of what they are.
How Does IDL Interviewing Work?
IDL interviewing works because, when we drop our own identity and world view and allow ourselves to answer questions from the perspective, point of view, or world view of this or that image, we create openings for life to reconfigure itself in ways that increase integration. But why would life do that, instead of doing what psychology teaches will happen if we give up control: decompensation, discontrol, personality breakdown, going crazy, and basically deconstruction into a burbling mass of protoplasm? I don’t think there is anything magical, mystical, or metaphysical about that process, although from our waking perspective it can easily seem that way. If we look at evolution and the adaptive, developmental, and healing processes of organisms, what we find consistently is a selection for higher orders of integration. Even on a purely material level, for instance in the movement of wind currents into tornadoes and hurricanes, water currents into whirlpools, or inorganic matter acquiring structures and processes that are foundational to the emergence of life, we see this process, called autopoiesis within individuals and negentropy within systems. IDL merely mimics this entirely naturalistic process. Is it therefore surprising that it yields similar results? – Higher orders of integration and the reframing of life issues as well as our understanding of our dreams and mystical experiences in ways that support healing, balancing, and transformation?
Benefits of Interviewing Yourself
Benefits of Interviewing Others
Suggestions for Introducing Others to IDL Interviewing
IDL Interviewing of dream characters and the personifications of life issues is fun, powerful, and intimate. As a result, interviewing others can be extremely valuable, meaningful, and rewarding, but at the same time, problematic. This is because fun, power, and intimacy don’t always go together. Fun can often mean an escape from intimacy. Power can be manipulative and also an escape from honesty and intimacy. Intimacy can be threatening. Both intimacy and power can undermine our sense of personal control over our lives. What looks fun at the beginning can turn into something that is dead serious. Here are several recommendations for how to approach introducing IDL interviewing to others.
How to Hold Your Own Integral Deep Listening Salons
Group dream interpretation often involves everyone projecting their own associations onto a dream until the dreamer says “Aha!” “That fits!” “That makes sense!” Integral Deep Listening (IDL) Salons are different. People answer as the characters in their dreams, nightmares, or as the personifications of life issues important to them. Instead of hearing our interpretations, or those of others, we first hear the interpretations of one or more perspective that is actually embedded in the dream or life issue, and is therefore in a position to have an invested point of view regarding why we had the dream, what it means, and why we are confronted with this or that life issue and what to do about it. In a group setting this process of hearing from a menagerie of imaginary images is fun, interesting, and exciting adventure in discovery, both of ourselves and in our deeper understanding and appreciation of each other.
Getting Started With IDL On Line Interviewing
IDL online interviewing is fun, easy, effective, and highly useful. IDL interviewing has proven effective at reducing fear, worry, anxiety, nightmares, phobias, symptoms of PTSD, and building stronger relationships. It’s fun to interview your dream characters and those of your children and friends, and you will share the fun and growth when they interview you as well.
It’s easy to do online interviewing because all you have to do is write the answers the interviewed characters give to the questions in the interviewing protocol.
1: Choosing Life Issues
In this series of videos you will learn how to use the IDL on line interviewing protocol to interview dream and nightmare characters of your choice! The on line protocol allows you to save your interview or, if you are interviewing someone else, send a copy to them! This process is a powerful and effective way to arrive at interpretations of your dreams that not only make sense but are useful, because they provide concrete recommendations you can use to both heal, balance, and transform your life and to test the method.
2: Choosing and Writing Down a Dream and Your Associations to It.
As an example of filling out the on-line interviewing protocol, I share a nightmare I had many years ago as well as my associations to it.
3: Providing a Date, Name, and Deciding Who to Interview
How to add a title and name in the on-line interviewing protocol and important information about how to choose a character to interview.
4: Taking the Perspective of an Interviewed Character
The critical piece of IDL interviewing is your ability to step aside and let your chosen character have its voice and spontaneously answer as it chooses. These initial questions are designed to help you authentically take its perspective. At the same time, you are learning more about how to fill out the on-line interviewing format.
5: Personifications and Possible Transformations
What aspects of yourself does your interviewed character say it most closely personifies? Does it want to transform? If so, how? Noting these responses in the protocol
6: Addressing Life Changes
Interviewed dream characters make recommendations that are meant be operationalized to test in your life. Do they support the resolution of life issues important to you?
7: Application of Recommendations and Character Dream Interpretation
Your interviewed dream character will most likely have recommendations to make regarding your life issues. What are they? How useful are they? What do you want to do with the ones that make sense to you and are practical? In addition, your character is given the opportunity to provide ITS interpretation of your dream, which may be very different from your own!
8: Integrating What You Have Heard: Adding Your Interpretation and Those of Others
When we interview others we often recognize issues and receive value for ourselves in our lives. The feedback of others, in terms of what they have heard and how they are integrating and applying the perspective of the interviewed dream character is generally a valuable resource. Dreamers are surprised how much their interview resonates with others, and others are often surprised at how the interview awakens within them goodness, truth, and harmony that is rich and fulfilling.
The IDL On Line Life Issue Interviewing Protocol
1: Similarities and Differences from the Dream Interviewing Protocol
Interviewing personifications of life issues that are important to you or your subject is basically the same as explained in the series of videos on interviewing dream characters. The main difference in the protocol is in how the characters are generated. This video explains the reasoning behind the creation of these interviewed perspectives.
https://youtu.be/xkNfygb6TdAB
2: Generation of the Personification of a Chosen Life Issue for Interviewing
This video explains how personifications of life issues are created by associating the chosen life issue with feelings, those feelings with a color or color filling one’s field of vision, and then spontaneously allowing those colors to congeal into a form, preferably an animal for subjects new to the process.
What to do if your Subject has a “Melt Down” in the Middle of an Interview
Reading Back the Interview
Aliens Invade!
When an IDL dream or life issue interview is read back as the subject’s own words, instead of those of the interviewed character, they hear statements that are authentic and true for them at a deeper level, which helps them to internalize and value what has been said. This reading back can therefore be a very impressive and meaningful experience. When you read back an interview you just read back the answers, but reframed. After the interview, the interviewed subject hears what was said by the interviewed character with different ears, because they are now taking a different perspective in relationship to the interview. A sense of validity, truth, and resonance is generally experienced by the subject. While reading back the interview extends the session by perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, I have never had it not be very meaningful and worthwhile for the subject. The entire IDL Video Curricula can be found at IntegralDeepListening.Com.
The Soldier Nightmare
When an IDL dream or life issue interview is read back as the subject’s own words, instead of those of the interviewed character, they hear statements that are authentic and true for them at a deeper level, which helps them to internalize and value what has been said. This reading back can therefore be a very impressive and meaningful experience. While reading back the interview extends the session by perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, I have never had it not be very meaningful and worthwhile for the subject.
When you read back an interview you just read back the answers, but reframed. After the interview, the interviewed subject hears what was said by the interviewed character with different ears, because they are now taking a different perspective in relationship to the interview. A sense of validity, truth, and resonance is generally experienced by the subject. The entire IDL video curricula can be found at IntegralDeepListening.Com.