Dream Work

[Photo Credit: Zoltan Tasi for Unsplash]

It's first light. Crows call out to one another from the treetops overhead. The camp begins to stir, sleepy bodies emerging from tents that are sagging with dew. Someone is boiling water in the open air kitchen shelter. Someone else sets the firewood and lights a fire. Slowly, the group begins to assemble, speaking softly, stretching limbs, filling mugs. Campers begin sitting down together in small clutches ... to share their dreams. The guides are present for this purpose, taking notes, asking questions, and leading the dreamers in an exploration of their dreamscapes, going back in, and going deeper.

One of the features of soul work is remembering, listening to, and honouring our dreams. In every program run by the Animas Valley Institute, dream work begins the waking day, while the dream realms linger, still close at hand. No one presumes to "interpret" a dream--the very thought is preposterous. Instead, we listen deeply to a dream's unfolding and to our participation within it. We are invited to stay with the dream throughout the waking day, allowing it to shape our moods and lead our reflections. We're asking the dream to interpret us, not the other way round.

This is so different from the approach that says that dreams can be dissected for cryptic meaning and parsed for personal guidance, that a good dream dictionary is all you really need. Dreams are not rational, so they resist rationalization. They don't care to make sense to our thinking minds. They flee from interpretation and dissolve like a mist with analysis. Yet, dreams make a powerful, daily claim on our lives, disturbing us, delighting us, frightening us, inspiring us. It behooves us, at the very least, to pay attention.

Sigmund Freud, in his landmark study, The Interpretation of Dreams, saw the scattered images of the dreamworld as the mind trying to make sense of the detritus of the day. Going deeper, he could discern patterns of wish fulfilment, the unconscious mind trying to satisfy the unmet desires of the ego. But that wasn't nearly deep enough, according to Carl Jung, who saw in our nighttime visions the activation of ancient archetypes, connecting us to the psychic energies of the collective unconscious. For him, dreams were not egoic attempts to get what we want, but soulful invitations to serve a larger purpose.

Working with dreams requires a deft hand. Mary Marsden, a soul guide with the Animas Valley Institute, shows a deep respect for the dreamer, never presuming to lead them to questions of meaning or to practical applications to their waking life. That's not her job, she might say. Nor is it the concern of the dream itself, which she regards with a kind of reverence. It has its own intentions. The focus is on the experience offered the dreamer by the dream, nothing more. But also, nothing less.

Mary might suggest to someone recounting their dream, not to report it in the past tense, as if it were something over and done with, but to re-live it in the present, as an ongoing reality. And not to rush past the details, rather, to linger there: What colour is it? Is it old or new? How does it make you feel? Where in your body do you feel it? And lots of reflective pauses, to allow the dreamer to re-enter the world of the dream and be awakened once again to its rich and evocative imagery.

But where do dreams come from, in the first place, and what do they want? Are they a reflection of the will of the Cosmos, drawing us closer to our life's purpose? Are they a manifestation of Soul, regarding our life from within, offering us an inner landscape from which to reorient ourselves? Are they vestiges of the archetypal wisdom of the ages, rooting us in the collective unconscious, and therefore in the depths of our own humanity? Who can say? Like speaking of God, it is perhaps best not to presume to know and to name the Source, or even its purpose. It is Mystery.

When I corresponded with Mary, inviting her to have a conversation with me about dream work for The Mystic Cave, I suggested that, if I was fortunate enough to have had a dream the night before, I could bring it for us to explore together. She welcomed the idea. Better to 'show' than to 'tell.' Then, during an almost sleepless night (I was fighting yet another bad cold, which you'll hear for yourself), in the hour or so during which I drifted off, Dream Maker was waiting for me ... with a wild and intense dream fragment that seemed to come out of nowhere.

That would do nicely, Mary responded, when we met online for our chat. The wild, the non-sensical, even the drab and the familiar, each dream is a portal, she said. As I was about to find out.

To listen to my conversation with Mary Marsden, click on the Play button below. To learn more about Mary's work, and about the Animas Valley Institute, follow the More Info button to the show notes.