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Jean and Rita Hildebrandt
Joy and Rita
Valley and Yvonne
Peace Bridge A Bun Dance Group
Rita and Yvonne
Jean and Wendy cutting a rug
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A-Bun-Dance and the World Dreams Peace Bridge....
The night I made the decision to write the book, I had the following dream:
I am working in the East Coast office of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. (In fact, there is only one IASD office, located in California). We are preparing for a conference. A woman comes into my office, someone I don’t know in waking life but knew well in the dream, and had not seen for some time. We embrace enthusiastically. Then we are joined by another woman, who hugs us both. Music begins to play, and the three of us begin to dance, a triad. We move out into the outer office, where other people form triads and begin to dance as well.
As a group, we move out into the hallway, a long hall in an office building. We pick up more people along the way. Approaching us, a man is pushing a heavy, industrial paper cutter. The dancers part to let him by, but he is coming directly toward my triad. We catch the man and his paper cutter up in the dance, and easily move the heavy piece of equipment down the hallway.
The group dances out the front door of the building, down the stairs, and into a city street. Soon all of the people in the city are dancing in triads, thousands of them, as far as the eye can see.
Now, it is not particularly unusual for me to dream of dancing. Members of the World Dreams Peace Bridge have been submitting dancing dreams for a long time. In fact recently there has been an increased number of these dreams due to a new member of the discussion group, Lana from Amman, Jordan. Lana is a graduate student who supports herself by dancing, particularly belly dancing. There had been a recent discussion in the group, which I found fascinating, about the many different words for love in the Arabic language, and how these words relate to sacred temple dances, which evolved into belly dancing.
I met Lana in one of those moments of synchronistic clarity when, pushed into the same corner at a crowded IASD conference volunteer reception, we exchanged polite information about our backgrounds. As soon as she said she was from Jordan, I asked, “You speak Arabic, right?”
“Yes.”
“Would you be interested in doing some translation work?” I was about to begin sending the instructions for the eight-week Crystal Birds Dream Program to Baghdad. Lana enthusiastically agreed to translate. She told me one of her own dreams is to get funding for a program she has named, “Dancing Around the World Barefoot for Peace.”
So I attributed my dancing dream to the ongoing Bridge conversation until the next day when, after I sent out the book invitations I received a phone call from my friend, Wendy Pannier. Wendy has been a Friend of the Bridge from the beginning, but too busy to participate in group discussion. “Oh, so that’s why I dreamed last night about women dancing,” she exclaimed when she heard about my dream. Later that day, in conversation with another friend, I learned that she too had dreamed the night before of the dancing women.
What was the significance of this shared dream? I can think of two immediate meanings or messages that are social rather than personal in their implication. One is a message that has been part of the World Dreams Peace Bridge since its inception, first appearing in Sandy Ginsberg’s dream of Beau Bridges wearing lipstick. “Beautiful bridges,” Sandy had said, but also “the need to feminize the masculine.” This message has been repeated in one dream after another. More than one Bridge member has dreamed of the golden circle of women even before joining the Bridge. There has been so much written about the dance of life that this symbol barely needs explanation, but the need for women to become the peacemakers, to become the leaders seems an important one.
The other message in the dream is one that Anna put quite succinctly in her post to the Peace Bridge after seeing an earlier version of the dancing dream. “I can’t help it,” she said. “Every time I see the word abundance now, I read a-BUN-dance! All these dancing women!” 
Excerpt from Group Dreaming - Dreams to the Tenth Power
by Jean Campbell
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