To Dream or Not to Dream: A Road Map Toward Understanding

What do you do? Do you interpret dreams? Do you analyze dreams? Are you a psychologist?

These are some of the most difficult questions to answer as what I “do” I will never quite know. What I practice is a kind of not-knowing or blindfulness. I’ve had to undo so much of what I thought I knew in order to work with dreams. Working with dreams this way is like learning to speak a new language and it has taken me years to develop abilities that enable me to hear into dreams. Dreamwork is audible, not visual. Images are felt, not seen. And dreaming is happening all the time. What I mean by that is dreaming is not something that merely occurs while one is sleeping. Dreaming is happening throughout our waking lives as well. So, if someone isn’t recalling their dreams, it’s important to get curious about what is happening in their waking world. What dreams are trying to be lived through them? What is trying to be in the world through that particular dreamer, specifically? Dream language is different for each individual dreamer. That is to say, one person’s water dream can be radically different than another dreamer's water dream even though the content is similar.  What I am most interested in tracking is the dream’s activity, or what the dream is doing. Let’s say you have a very active night of dreaming that would otherwise exhaust you but you wake up feeling refreshed. That’s what’s trying to be noticed—that’s the dream’s activity or what the dream is doing. And that’s most of what I do. I’m like a kind of dream activity tracker and mid-wife, noticing, listening with, and helping birth the dreams that want to be in the world.

#dreaming #dreams #blindfulness #trust