THE POT OF GOLD: A DREAM JOURNAL EXERCISE

 Legend tells us that if you catch a leprechaun, he must take you to the ancient treasure that is guarded in a pot hidden at the end of the rainbow. 

Catching the meaning of a dream is like catching a leprechaun. You must be creative to capture it.

Use found images to explore the paradoxical tricks in your dream.

Search for mischievous, diversionary dream pranks as well as the treasure hidden at the end of your dream’s ethereal rainbow.

Let unexpected things happen. 

Is your dream a vanishing pot of deceptive, insincere nonsense or the golden treasure trove of insight and understanding?

 

It is by going down into the abyss

that we recover the treasures of life. 

Where you stumble,

there lies your treasure. 

Joseph Campbell

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD: A DREAM JOURNAL EXERCISE

JANUS

Janus is an ancient deity with two faces. His shrines are found at the crossroads. He is the Guardian of the Gate through which we must pass at the beginning of the year. He reminds us that as we meditate on new beginnings, we also must ponder over the endings.

Janus is the presiding deity who holds the knife that cuts both ways in the dream. This spirit’s blessing is necessary for embarking upon any fresh outlook or new venture in the new year.

YOUR MISSION SHOULD YOU ACCEPT IT….

Create a pair of journal pages in which you explore the past and the future of one of your dream images.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.      -Joseph Campbell

MASTER OF RIDDLES: A 10 MINUTE DREAM JOURNAL EXERCISE

It isn’t always necessary to analyze or interpret this strange upside down, inside out dream world. Simply notice that you are in a lopsided world that doesn’t obey logical rules. Become curious.

Make a list of questions without any need to find answers. Take ten minutes to simply puzzle, ponder, contemplate, reflect, meditate, marvel, ruminate, speculate and wonder about the peculiar events, people that populate your dreamscape.

• Get inside your dream and look around.
• Observe the dream images from as many perspectives as you can.
• Ask questions of your dream images.
• Allow your dream images to ask you questions.

To have a question is at the core of being an artist. -Deena Metzger

MASTER OF RIDDLES: WORKSHOP 8/24/10

Dreams come to us as riddles filled with enigmatic imagery, odd encounters, eccentric characters, obscure references and paradoxical imagery. They haunt us with reverberations of the unknown and the unfathomable.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

— Rainer Maria Rilke

WORKSHOP: THE POETICS OF PARADOX 8/17/10

Are we traveling this road to the end?

Yes.

But you said the road has no end.

That’s true

How can it be true?

From a certain point of view, the universe seems to be composed of paradoxes. But everything resolves. That is the function of contradiction.

I don’t understand.

When you see everything from every imaginable point of view, you might begin to understand.

Ben Okri, The Famished Road

RISK: A DREAM JOURNAL QUOTE

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tightly closed in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.

Anais Nin

IMAGINE: A DREAM JOURNAL QUOTE

Imagine living in a culture that doesn’t value dreams?

Lee Irwin

WORKSHOP: CONNECTIONS, MEMORIES, RECOLLECTIONS 6/29/10

Memory feeds imagination

-Amy Tan

THE INNER SPACE: A DREAM JOURNAL QUOTE

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Tao Te Ching