Like a seed, the dream is a container of potential filled with the code of creation. It carries the cipher of the past and a blueprint for the future. Like the sprouting of a seed, each dream offers us a chance to wake up from a long, deep sleep into a new reality. If we are patient gardeners, we can release tremendous growth and expansion from tending our dreams. -Victoria Rabinowe
Dream narratives are often similar in structure and pattern to fairy tales. Both feature fantastic stories that require a suspension of reality as we know it. Both are filled with archetypal adventures in symbolic stories where anything is possible!
Like the sprouting of a seed, each dream offers us a chance to wake up from a long deep sleep into a new reality. If we are patient gardeners, we can release tremendous growth and expansion from tending our dreams.
Like a seed, a dream must be nourished to fulfill its genetic promise. It needs caring, attention, moisture, warmth and light to set roots deep into the earth so that it may burst through its confinement from darkness into light.
Invite a dream image to sprout with associations that have been planted in your past. Then, bring your dream forward into a flower of new growth. What new ideas and abilities in your dream are waiting to be liberated? What is the creative force in this dream? Write without stopping. Let your words burst forth!
In dreams, the image of Mother can hold many meanings. She may reflect our relationship with our own Mother, or the archetype of the Universal Mother, the Holy Mother, the Mother Goddess, The Earth Mother, The Terrible Mother, The Devouring Mother, The Great Ambivalent Mother and our Inner Mother.
How many aspects of “mothering” can you identify in your dream?
Transform one or more dream images by finding the animating spirit that belongs to each.
Invigorate the soul and intelligence of each image by allowing it a voice.
Speak on behalf of dream images who have had no voice until now. Lament their lack of freedom and autonomy. Reveal unspoken feelings.
How can you rededicate and rekindle your inner light?
Is there a perpetual light within the dream that cannot be extinguished?
EXPLORATION
Don’t think, just look….(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
In a stream of consciousness style, write for ten minutes without stopping the movement of your pen.
Mirror the dream by reflecting upon the images with as many observations and details as possible.
Riff with whatever thoughts present themselves. Is there at least one image in the dream which has no split and offers a reflection of unity?
A dream is a microcosm of time, memory, and space.
Shift your point of view. Take on the identity of one of your dream images. Speak in first person with the voice of the image. Explain who you are. Talk about what you are doing in the dream Elaborate on what you see, sense and how you feel.
Your mission should you choose to accept it…
WRITE FOR 10 MINUTES
With a still, calm voice from the center of your dream, speak about the images from your most sacred center.
ACTIVE IMAGINATIONAll quotes on this page are excerpted and adapted from C. G. Jung’s Writings.
Joseph Campbell
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
The Japanese concept of “MA” can be translated as “empty space.”
Rather than trying to explain the absences in your dream, try to feel what it might be like in the negative spaces and silences of your dream.
Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept it…
Write for 10 Minutes about a feeling or experience of emptiness in one of your dreams.
The empty spaces which give form to poetry; The negative spaces which give substance to paintings; The pregnant pauses between dialogue in a play; The silences between notes in music are often found in the world of the arts. Similarly, we experience the dream that doesn’t have an end, the room without a door, the faceless intruder, the message we can’t hear. The ambiguity of this paradoxical state is precisely the territory that expands our consciousness in dreamwork.
Our nightly dreams are the repository of our deepest memories and feelings. They call to us from the innermost center of our being. They touch us in our tenderest places with the depth of our longing, our joys and our sorrows. They enchant us with euphoria, they arouse our passions, they frighten us, they inspire us and they fill us with wonder.
The Art of the Dream
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