The Dreaming Way: Courting the Wisdom of Dreams

As Annie Dillard wrote, "Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”⁠

These two streams of attention—surface and depth—are always running simultaneously and, at any given moment, we can choose to focus on either or both.

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Whether courting a dream, doing active imagination and somatic play, or enacting a ritual and divination to dream an idea forward, magic is made by tending to our everyday relationship with it.

To strengthen the imagination, we must favour and engage what I call the aptitudes of the soul—receptivity, the body’s wisdom, intuition, relationality—qualities typically associated with women and “the feminine.”

There is a new world waiting to be realized through each of our lives,

There is a danger in believing the death phase of the cycle might be perpetual—that we may never feel alive again. Grieving and railing against our losses is necessary, but when we are ready, we must actively turn toward that questing field and actively imagine a new way forward.

Sometimes characters in your dreams are composites of more than one person. For example, you might wake from a dream and say, “She looked like my first girlfriend, but she was also my sister.” The dream may even morph between two-or-more figures to convey a fusion of their attributes, or to draw a correlation between the two. Try writing down each

Paradoxically, the things we most want to hide are also the things we long to reveal.

place of exchange between what you know and something that knows much more than you. It’s the resonance or reverberation between those two things that produces creativity. What comes out of this exchange is not something you are making up, nor is it something given to you. It is a participatory exchange, a collaboration that generates wisdom and me