Dream-Work: Exploring the Untapped wisdom of the night

Dreaming is this mysterious night-time process, that begs our attention if we are interested in healing, transformation or awakening arts. 

Our dreams are our most intimate mental impressions.

They come through wordless, loaded with delicious imagery, symbols, feelings and movement. 

Dreams have a way of amplifying our neuroses, and I say this with the utmost respect and intrigue.

Who are these dreams meant for? Who is dreaming these night-time dreams?

I find it refreshing to work on dreams together. Dreams bypass the niceties or social graces, the ways we want to appear in our daylit glory. In spiritual work the dream is sacred, in that it reveals what is hidden, what is emergent, what we regard as shadow or too glorious to embody. 

We dream at our edge. To ignore the dreaming, is to hide away from this creative source of insight and reflection, to deny our darkness and to perhaps lose our ability to truly heal, transform and awaken.

Let’s look at that act of waking up from a nightmare--there is often a sense of ease, oh--that was just a dream.

But what is this-- just a dream?

Our nightmares reveal, sometimes in exaggerated forms, the fears, doubts, angers and griefs we may not be willing to see. And often give us a key to how to integrate these elements of the shadow into our sense of wholeness. If we ignore them, they continue or get louder, more frightening. If we face them, or treat them with love and respect, or even curiosity, they transform.

A friend shared with me a dream about this dark, hooded figure who would come into their room and stand over the bed. It was a frequent recurring dream. Once, she asked the figure--what do you want? The next time the figure came, it was friendlier, this friend started seeing it as Mary, the mother of god, she felt comforted by it as it sat on the edge of the bed. She realized this was a protector who was always watching over her. And…then the dream stopped reoccurring. 

Sometimes the change in behavior; the orientation of inclusion, of curiosity, love and respect happens in the dreamworld, sometimes it happens in the daylit world. These two worlds we begin to realize are intimately connected, perhaps even--made of the same stuff.

We train in love, attention, respect and curiosity. These are the ingredients of a heartful life, in my tradition we would say, the elements of Zen practice.

There are many approaches to dream work. As a Zen Teacher and Spiritual Counselor, I am interested in connecting with the dreaming, in real time. Bringing the dreaming to life, we begin to dream into the dream’s wisdom—to dream into our edge (which is usually something we are afraid to do in our daily lives). In Process Work, they call this, “dreaming the dream on.”

What happens when we dream the dream on? When we encounter our edges?

Flow, creativity, healing, integration, ahas!, releases—a more embodied life, a fearless life.

Doing dreamwork together we work to gently move into the edge, to integrate a shadow part of ourself, to discover hidden talents and power, to bear witness to what is happening below the surface, to discover guides and allies on our paths to healing. 

Dream work can transform our relationships too, as they provide insight into our conflicts and the fixed beliefs inside of us that we haven’t been able to see and attend to. Dreams can give us insights into what qualities in us we need to bring into a relationship or part of our lives. 

Dreams are bridges into the unconscious. Doorways to the darkness, the mystery, the collective unconscious. As we tend to the dreaming, we can appreciate the spontaneity and creativity that is always moving through us. 

Dreamwork, like dreams, is creative work. When we work on a dream together, we may also find that the dream is inviting art making, ceremony and/or ritual. For as we dream the dream into our lives the dream, or some part of the dream—wants to manifest, to be seen and lived into.

As a counselor, I work with you to help you discover and listen to the wisdom of the dreaming. There is so much to discover, as we open our eyes to this mysterious process of the night. Happy dreaming!