Dreams

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Dreams are mysteries.

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We know that everyone dreams: five to seven dreams per night, in fact. But beyond that we are in the dark ;-) 

 

Dreams have been researched and studied extensively and yet still we have no definitive explanation for what they are, where they come from, and why.

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In traditional cultures there exist ancient understandings of what dreams are and where they come from. These understandings, like many traditional understandings, are bound in intricate relationship with Place and Origins - the many stories that make up a cultural world. We couldn't possibly adopt those understandings without also committing to relationship with that ecology and its stories. But one thing is clear: all traditional cultures regard dreams as important.

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We know that very real information can come from dreams: about the past, the future, our ecology, our relationships, and ourselves, including our wounds, shadows, and deep potentials. Dreams seem to include a deeper territory of self - a territory in which we are not so separate from the world, nor from its strangeness and power.

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Dreams are experiences that are real, and significant. We know that neurologically a dream is no different from a waking experience. Just as life experiences inform, educate, impact and shape us, as do dream experiences, if we let them.

 

In addition, just like some of our most impactful experiences of waking life, dreams are experiences we do not choose.  If dreams come from some deeper intelligence (the unconscious, the land, or some Dreammaker), we would do well to pay attention, and allow them to guide us.

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Dreamwork

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I have been mentored in an Indigenous dream tradition of the Western Amazon, and have experienced the vital interplay between Land, Dream, and People that upholds the Achuar and Shuar cultures of the Western Amazon. I have also studied dreamwork facilitation with the Animas Valley Institute, based on the work of Carl Jung, through contemporary practitioners like Jill Mellick and Robert Bosnak.

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Dreams have become the guiding experiences of my life, and my most accessible territory for inner work. Each night we are offered intense and intricate experiences from which to apply reflections and intentions to our waking lives.

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Once we build a relationship with dreams and dreaming, we find an inexhaustible resource for deepening our inner life as well as our connection to Mystery and to the strange blessing of being alive.

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Facilitated dreamwork is not dream interpretation. It involves revisiting dreams so that you can fully experience them, so that their deep emotions and underworld energies can work on you. This is difficult to do alone because we are full of resistances to what might transform us. As a facilitator I help you to stay in the dream and explore what you might overlook, avoid, or judge.

 

If you have trouble with dream recall I can quickly coach you into remembering more dreams. If you feel like you don't have enough material we can do great dreamwork with dream fragments, childhood dreams, or any dreams from the past that have stuck with you. Your nightly dreaming will deepen quickly and we'll soon have some fresh material. 

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A great way to connect to your dreaming, and to prepare for dreamwork sessions, is to keep a dream journal.

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Dreams and Soul

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Dreamwork forms a part of my Soul Initiation guiding, but it's also an effective approach if you are simply curious about deepening your inner life, or exploring your healing journey from other perspectives - your own, more hidden perspectives.

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Dreams always provide other perspectives because those others in our dreams (characters, places, objects, colours, feelings) are not wholly other, but are connected to us in some unseen way. Dream material is never random. And the true experience of the dream is never what the ego claims in its desperate certainty upon waking.

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Dreams seek to reshape and transform us. Dreamwork is the practice of submitting to this process. The result can be radical change in our lives - because to dive deeper into a dream is to dive deeper into yourself, and the world.