How to Read the Symbols in Your Life

Coincidences, odd little details, things that "catch your eye" for no obvious reason — Field Project has a name for paying attention to these on purpose: Dreamwalking. The idea is simple to state and stranger to practice: treat your waking life the way you'd treat a dream, where everything you notice is assumed to be meaningful, symbolic, and worth reading rather than dismissing.

The World as Inkblot

The Companion opens the practice with a reframe of what "the obvious" actually is: "If you want to develop nonlocal awareness, begin approaching the world as re-presenting your consciousness. For example, if a billboard catches your eye, consider how its meaning may go beyond the obvious. Regard it symbolically, and see if this provides a new angle of vision or insight into whatever's going on in your life. Remember, the Field is holographic."

The same logic extends to sound, not just sight: "Another idea: when you're listening to songs, hear the lyrics as though either you're talking to the Field or the Field is talking to you. It may surprise you how directly the meaning of the words will speak to a specific situation you're facing." The instruction underneath both examples is the same one: "The key to living nonlocally is to realize that everything is metaphor, and that nothing that gets your attention is insignificant."

The Companion backs this with an observation from G.K. Chesterton: "fairy tales describe apples of gold and rivers of wine to remind us how amazed we were the first time we discovered that apples were red and rivers ran with water. The ability to see the world as metaphor, with new eyes, marks a return to innocence and receptivity that can never be" — in other words, ordinary facts were never as neutral as they looked; they were "pervaded with meanings that belong to the beliefs of the person experiencing them," bound by "the principle of correspondence," which is "always operating." Put plainly: "the physical world, in the most intimate and often remarkable way, is something like an inkblot of the sort used in the famous Rorschach inkblot test." Your psyche "reads into" the random shape something that "turns out to have little to do with the inkblot and much to do with you" — except, the Companion goes a step further, there's no separate "inkblot" being read at all: "facts are nothing more than an outpicturing of what's being 'read into' them in the first place." We don't just interpret events — in a real sense, "we create the fact in keeping with our commitment to a certain meaning, and create it to appear as though it has an existence independent of us."

The Leaning Power Pole

The clearest proof of how this works in practice comes from an actual student, not a hypothetical: "One student told me that, on her way to work, she had noticed a power pole leaning oddly at about a 70º angle. Believing and feeling that 'somebody has to do something about this — it could be dangerous,' she called the power company to report the wonky pole, was put on hold for a long time during which she took another call coming in courtesy of Call Waiting. When she got back on the other line, the power company had already come and gone. The next day, remarkably, the power pole had been set aright."

Instead of shrugging the coincidence off, she Dreamwalked it: "Sitting still with the inkblot of this charged experience, she realized there were power issues going on in her work life. The leaning pole that 'could be dangerous' and about which 'somebody had to do something' was reminding her that she could claim her power in ways she was not. The 'somebody,' of course, turned out to be she, while the 'Fieldy' timing of the phone call she never completed demonstrated to her that living powerfully has nothing to do with making anything happen, that power need not be 'off center' or a burden to be avoided, and that there is an efficiency at work that doesn't require her to do anything but show up in her truth, each moment."

Nothing about the pole itself changed her situation. What changed was that she stopped to ask what it might be standing in for — and the answer she found lined up precisely with something already unresolved in her working life.

Dreamwalking as a Practice Tool

The Companion names the practice directly in its section on "Maps of Consciousness": "One way to come into this 'knowing of what we do not yet know we know' is to use a Field practice tool called Dreamwalking, in which events are viewed as having symbolic or metaphoric significance, the way dreams do since, as we know, the events that take place in a dream represent aspects of the consciousness of the dreamer. This principle holds no less true in the 'waking dream,' but normally we may not be paying attention to what these symbols have to tell us."

It also places the practice inside a much older lineage: "In pre-Socratic Greece, seers could read the future in the flight of birds (the original meaning of the word inaugurate). The ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching; Tarot cards; Runes; tea leaves or cloud formations, the T.A.T. ('thematic apperception test') or Rorschach ink-blot images — all of these are maps of consciousness that we can use to become aware of otherwise ignored areas of our psyche, and 'know what we didn't know we knew.'" Dreamwalking, in this framing, isn't superstition bolted onto the philosophy — it's the same self-inquiry tool those older traditions were reaching for, applied to whatever is actually in front of you today.

The Companion is direct about the payoff: this process of self-inquiry "is a rich, powerful, and proven tool for coming out of immersion and into greater self-awareness" — the value isn't in predicting anything, it's in surfacing what's already operating on you, so you can work with it instead of remaining unconsciously immersed in it.

This is close cousin to the idea that your world functions as a mirror of your own beliefs — Dreamwalking is simply the practice of reading that mirror on purpose, one odd detail at a time, rather than waiting for it to become impossible to ignore. It also pairs naturally with reading the symbols in your own nightmares, since both treat the material your mind hands you as information rather than noise.

Try It This Week

Pick one thing that caught your attention today for no clear reason — a phrase, an object, a small coincidence — and instead of moving on, sit with it for a minute. Ask what it might be standing in for. You don't need certainty, just willingness to look.

Nothing that gets your attention is insignificant. The question is only ever what it's pointing at.

The full framework behind this practice lives on our Conscious Creating page, and more on the philosophy's origins is on our About page. If you'd like guided help reading what your own "inkblots" are pointing at, a one-on-one session is a direct way to work through it, and The Field Project Course covers Dreamwalking and the other Field practice tools in full.