“Dreams are not unconscious or subconscious, they are superconscious.”
-Susan Pack, in Healing Night by Rubin Naiman
WHAT IS DREAMWORK?
On average, most people have a default relationship with their nighttime dreams that is passive and transient.
But did you know that developing an intentional and active relationship with your dreams can help you with creativity, problem-solving, grief, trauma, personal and spiritual development, healing in myriad forms, facing your fears, nightmare resolution, and so much more?
This is the essence of what is meant by the term “dreamwork.” The “work” is to pay attention and remember your dreams, and to spend time with them.
My role as your Dreamwork Practitioner is to assist you in discovering how your dreams can be a wellspring of inspiration and information for your waking life. A Dreamwork Practitioner helps orient you in the vast landscape of the dreamtime, and supports you in exploring various therapeutic approaches and techniques to working with your dreams.
RESPECTING AND HONORING DREAMS
Dreams are a universal language, and touch every aspect of human history. Evolutionary anthropologists theorize dreams may have initially functioned as rehearsal and preparedness training. Aboriginal peoples are of a dreaming cosmology. Dream and sleep temples in ancient Egypt and Greece may have been the earliest forms of what we might call hospitals today. Religions from around the world include stories about dreams. Indigenous cultures have long used dreams for information, guidance, and communal decision-making. And throughout time, countless inventions, inspirations, artworks, and discoveries have come to us during sleep and in our dreams.
Why, then, do we not pay more attention to our dreams today?
Why do we say, “It was just a dream” and discount them as imaginary experiences, yet still mind the wise advice to “sleep on it”?
In Healing Night, Rubin Naiman describes the impacts of modern life on our sleep biology and circadian rhythms, resulting in an epidemic of loss of sleep and dreams. Luckily, there are many wonderful dreamwork practitioners, psychotherapists, and dream researchers diligently working behind the scenes to help usher in a much needed renaissance of dreaming.
Sounds Like A Dream is honored to work in the service of dreams.
What happens in a Dreamwork Session?
My role as your Dreamwork Guide/Practitioner is to assist you in discovering how your nighttime dreams can be a wellspring of inspiration and information for your waking life. A Dreamwork Guide/Practitioner helps orient you in the vast landscape of the dreamtime, and supports you in exploring various therapeutic approaches and techniques to working with your dreams for your overall health and well-being.
During a Dreamwork Session, we will:
Discuss any questions you have, such as how to remember your dreams, how your lifestyle or health conditions may be affecting your sleep and dream life, information about sleep stages and parasomnias like night terrors and sleep paralysis, how to work with recurring dreams, creative art ideas for working with your dreams, and lucid dreaming techniques for nightmare support, creative exploration, or personal/spiritual development.
(And this is only small list of possible topics! There is so much more!)Work directly with a specific dream that you’d like to better understand. We specialize in using the somatic Embodied Experiential Dreamwork method and various other techniques using creative/active imagination.