Do you remember your dreams?

Do you remember your dreams?

Many moons ago when I was studying art therapy, one of my favourite modules was on dreamwork. We spent weeks immersed in dream images and symbols, having conversations with them, drawing them, workshopping them in groups, teasing out deeply personal meaning from them, learning to be comfortable with their oftentimes ambiguous and shadowy natures.

Dreaming isn’t like being awake - different rules apply.

The kind of dreamwork we were revelling in was the opposite of dictionaries of dream symbols that pin meanings to pages with neat and tidy definitions. This exploration was something deeper, something wilder and stranger, something much more unpredictable.

It took into account the dreamer, which is something dream dictionaries can’t do. The colour red in my dream might mean something different to the colour red in your dream. And if our meanings are similar, there is probably some nuance that a dream dictionary definition wouldn’t catch. A richness that gets missed by not engaging directly with the dream.

It was frustrating, at times, to not always be able to say ‘this means that’, to not be able to look up a page in a neatly alphabetised book and skim it - dreams ask you to work for their secrets. They want you to be involved, they want you to see them, feel them. They want your presence and your attention.

And when we gave them our presence and our attention, marinating in our subconscious for weeks, the result was something that has stayed with me for almost a decade.

In my waking life, synchronicities popped up all over the place. Coincidence was everywhere (was it coincidence…?). I decided on a whim to fly to New Zealand for the weekend to build a nest out of driftwood on a beach, and the exact times and dates I wanted to fly were on sale. Everything I touched was rich with meaning. Life felt wilder, stranger, more magical, more… dreamlike.

I wanted to live like that forever.

And then, the next module rolled around and we put dreamwork to the side to focus on the power of masks and for the eight years since that time, I’ve been intending to return to the deep and wild and beautiful way of living that I found through dreaming. I’ve dipped toes in, here and there, and it’s always felt like coming home.

But now - now it’s time to start dreaming more deeply, and to do it in community. So, I’m dreaming up a dreamwork group. To begin, it will be a small pilot program of four online group sessions, where we will gather and immerse ourselves in the mystery of our dream images through writing, art, movement and other practices, and see what that might do to our waking lives.

It will be around $150 for all four sessions.

If you’re interested, please send me a message and let me know and I’ll get in touch when I have more details - it would be a delight to dream with you.