Dreamwork

Dreams are mysteries.

We know that everyone dreams - 5-7 dreams per night, or one per 90-minute sleep cycle - 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.

In traditional cultures there exist ancient understandings of what dreams are and where they come from. These understandings, as many traditional understandings, are bound in intricate relationship with Place and Origin - 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: that all traditional cultures regard dreams as important.

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 its power.

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? some Dreammaker?), we would do well to pay attention, and allow them to guide us.

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. 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.

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.

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 the strange blessing of being alive.

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

Dreams always provide another perspective because those others in our dreams (characters, places, objects, colours, feelings etc) 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. To dive deeper into a dream is to dive deeper into yourself and the world