Letters from Home: Soul-centred Dreamwork
“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
Carl Jung
Image 1: Dream image of two shining brass plaques
There is something powerfully honest and authentic about our dreams. Stripped of the conscious ego, our dreams can bring raw, unfiltered messages straight from the depths of our psyche, permeated with soul’s wisdom.
Dreams help us metabolise life, giving powerful energy to our healing and transformation. Dreams come from our wholeness, not our fragmentation, and give us insights about what we need to do to be whole, true and fulfilled, in ways that we are not quite seeing in our everyday life. Dreams help initiate our everyday ego into the deeper unfolding of the underworld story of who we are and why we are here, so that we may live soul’s dreaming within our waking life. Dreams are letters from home. If we do not receive the letter, if we ignore our dreams, the Dream Maker, with astonishing compassion, will bring dreams to us, again and again, until we receive the message.
Here I will describe my exploration of a significant dream of my own, to hopefully inspire your own dream tending. I give special thanks to soul guide Carolyn Griffeth whose online dream course explores an experiential and empowering approach to dream tending. This includes dream guide Toko-pa Turner’s 5 keys of dreamwork, outlined at the end of this article. I have also included here insights from two dream workers, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Bill Plotkin.
Soul-centred dreamwork invites us to immerse in, embody, enact and surrender to the experience that the dream is showing us. As Bill Plotkin outlines in his book Soulcraft, we regard every character and aspect of the dream as a part of the dreamer’s psyche. The deep meaning of the dream emerges from inner inquiry - not from external or generic symbol interpretation as this interrupts the intelligent, specific and nuanced inner wisdom contained within the dream. Through immersing in the dream we allow the dream to work on us, rather than us work on the dream, so that soul’s messages can emerge.
Remembering and recording your dreams
One of the first steps to exploring dreams - is to remember your dreams in the first place! If dream recall is challenging for you (it is for me!) it is helpful, as the last thing you do before you sleep, to state your desire or intention to remember your dreams. Have a journal and pen (or phone) to record your dream as soon as you wake up. Even if you only remember a scrap of a dream, record it. The more attention you pay your dreams, the stronger your dream remembering muscles will become.
Re-telling your dream
The next step is to re-tell the dream in the first person, present tense, as though the dream is happening here and now. You can tell this to one other person, who simply listens and asks questions that help you go deeper into your dreaming. Or you can re-tell the dream by writing it down in a journal. A common mistake is to assume that the dream is complete within itself, that the dream ends upon waking. However, when we consciously re-enter the dream, the dreaming continues with a rich flow of meaning, especially if we are able to suspend the logical mind and remain in the intuitive, imaginal, dream-like part of the mind. This is what Carl Jung called ‘active imagination’ - a process of following and trusting the images that arise from the depths of your psyche as you explore the dream in a waking, yet dream-like, state. When we allow the dreaming to continue in waking life, we can understand the deep messages of our dream life.
My Dream
It seems like a simple dream. I am in my beautiful overgrown garden on a sunny day. I am listening happily to three musicians: a violinist, cellist, and a viola player. I say to the violin player, an ex-boyfriend, “Since when did you learn to play the violin?!”. When the musicians finish playing, they put together some pieces of two brass plaques lying in the grass. They are rectangular shining brass plaques, with curvy symbols on them.They cannot find the missing pieces. I find them easily and slot them in. When I wake up I am deeply curious and intrigued by the two strange, shining plaques.
Image 2: Re-telling my dream through drawing
Key 1 Embodied Presence & Key 2 Curiosity & Key 3 Reflection/Mirroring
You can see each key described at the end of this article. I told and listened to my dream by journalling it and drawing a quick sketch of it, as above. This drawing was like a mirror, reflecting back to me more clearly the important elements of the dream. Drawing freely helps go underneath the tendency of the mind to rationally work out the dream.
I decide to enact what I was doing in the dream: listening. This is a powerful dream technique, to notice what you are doing in the dream (that is following one or more verbs of the dream) and re-enact that. I listened through my felt sense, to three specific pieces of music played on the violin, viola and the cello, respectively.
Image 3: Listening through my viola-heart and cello-woman-body
I felt the viola music in my heart and breasts. I felt the cello music in my pelvis, ovaries and womb. I followed curiosity, associations and inner meaning-making. I notice that I feel deeply connected to my woman-cello body who is creative, wise, intuitive, feminine. The cello strings reach from my womb to my throat. My body holds beautiful music and creativity. I am, however, without arms and without a head - there is no action or expression in the outer world. It is held within.
Key 4 Bridging / Relating
I then turn to a moving piece of violin music, T’filah, The Prayer, composed by Lera Auerbach in memory of the holocaust, played by young virtuoso violinist Michelle Stern. I see how the dream relates to what I am experiencing in waking life. The music stirs deep grief and tears about the unfolding genocide in Palestine, humanity’s relentless tendency to wage war and my own sense of incapacity and powerlessness. I have no arms, no voice. My throat aches. I feel mute and unable to express myself. There is deep anguish. My ex-boyfriend in the dream feels masculine, talented in a skilled and technical way, showing up in the world as a musician, expressive. I feel unable to enact the violinist, pointing to unclaimed creative parts of myself that I cannot express in the world (yet).
I will mention here a dream technique described by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her Beginners Guide to Dream Interpretation. She suggests looking for the nouns in the dream (person, creature, place, thing) and then draw out your personal associations, such as ideas, images, feelings and thoughts, that you associate with that noun. Then you retell the dream, replacing that noun with your association. So for example, in my dream, the cello becomes the feminine, creative, intuitive aspect of myself, that is not (yet) fully enacted in the world.
Key 5 Synthesis
A couple of weeks later, a friend sends me a song that lights me up: The Body of Love by Ben Lee. I decide to move beyond the three chords that I know on the guitar and painstakingly begin to learn (my first) riff in this song. It was only after a week of slow practice, that I remember that my ex-boyfriend in the dream was an excellent guitarist in waking life. In learning the guitar and singing this song, I was connecting with my inner artist, a more masculine aspect of myself, who has technical ability and skill, who practices and takes action through expression in the world. I start to understand the deeper thread of the dream. The secret longing of this dream is to claim my inner artist, inner musician, inner creative, inner expressive one. I am often a listener in the ways I interact with others (listening from my familiar cello-woman-body) and this dream is showing me that I secretly long to be creative and expressive and to share this with others.
Finally I come to the most intriguing part of the dream: the two plaques. When I shared this dream with the dream group, I embodied the plaques through my hands: there is sacred work for me to do in the world.
I again turn to drawing. As I drew the two plaques, I felt that the plaques wanted to be joined together and as I do this they turn into a book - just like that!
Image 4: Sacred creation
The book feels like it has structure, contained with rectangular edges, but filled with fluid, swirling, magical symbols and stories, a combination of masculine and feminine. I feel that the deepest secret longing of my dream is to create, possibly a book, that grows naturally from my life. This sacred creation feels a little dormant, lying on the grass. The most astonishing part of the dream is that I pick up the pieces and complete this project easily, effortlessly. You might expect I would feel joyful upon waking. Instead this aspect of the dream feels very emotionally confronting and evokes disbelief and resistance. I see my conditioned beliefs around my creative process is that it is slow, difficult, just about impossible and that I am not worthy or capable of fulfilling my creative self. To write a book feels impossible - yet my soul seems to be saying: it will happen and it will arise from your life. Some aspects of a dream affirm what we already know about ourselves - and, when we dig deep, a dream also usually shows us what we definitely do not know about ourselves!
One of my favourites parts of the dream course with Carolyn Griffeth was her invitation for each of us do an Integration Project. We asked our own dream: How do you seek to be honoured, expressed or anchored? What remains to be done to receive your medicine? This integration project could be to create art, write a poem or prose, a song or a dance, to do a ritual or ceremony, embody a dream character or any other activity that helps bring the dream into everyday life.
My integration project included drawing the above pictures and writing a poem (which I promise I will share another time!). I also made a commitment to spend a little time each day practising the guitar and writing poetry. I have written poetry for decades and most of it lives on my computer, unseen. So I have also made a commitment to share my poems with others. A few weeks after this dream, I even read my poetry at a poetry gig for the first time. Working with this dream has powered my creative self.
Dreams are encoded messages from the soul. The soul, through dreams, beckons us beyond comfort zones, into deeper becoming. As we name resistance and fears and be present with the dream, we allow our small self to be shaped by the deeper truth that our dreams show us.
I hope you tend to your own beautiful dreams as sacred messengers of your own soul, interlaced with messages designed specifically for you and often infused with the deep longing of the world. May our dreams help all of us to show up and co-create as part of the dreaming of the whole web of life.
x Anahata
Here is a brief overview of Toko-pa Turners 5 Keys of Dreamwork, which you can use to explore your own dreams:
Key 1 Embodied Presence
This is deep, embodied listening as you re-enter the dream as though it is happening now, paying attention to sensations, the felt sense of the body, emotions and intuition, to somatically inhabit the dream realm with deep presence and awareness.
What element of the dream most draws you in?
How did it feel in your body when…?
What emotion was there when…?
Key 2 Wonder and Curiosity
Putting aside assumptions, we draw on keen curiosity and wonder, to gently explore key elements of the dream by tracking and unpacking details, patterns, associations, connections.
What do you associate with…? [do this for different aspects of the dream, including for each noun]
What was it like for you when…happened?
How would you describe…?
Key 3 Reflection / Mirroring
A listener can reflect back the words, images, gestures of the dreamer, to help the dreamer enter more deeply into their dream experience. Or the dreamer can write or draw key experiences and the journalling or drawing can serve as a mirror.
Key 4 Relating / Bridging
We explore bridges between our dream and waking life experiences. Our questions can use the three Rs - remind, recognise, relate:
Does this character remind you of anyone in waking life?
Can you recognise this dynamic in your walking life?
Can you relate to feeling …?
Does this remind you of anything?
What is it like for you to be or enact …[any character, element, symbol from the dream]? What do you notice as this being?
Key 5 Synthesis
This is a weaving of all insights into a whole. It is important not to attempt to synthesise too soon. We first need a thorough exploration of the elements using the four keys above, until the deeper meaning, invitations, instructions, healing or soul guidance emerges.
Can you retell the dream with all that you have gleaned?
Is there a healing element in this dream?
Is there a soul message in this dream?
What would you title this dream?
What medicine or invitation does this dream bring?
What does this dream want you to say, do, be?
Where does the energy of the dream want to go?
What is the secret longing of this dream? (This is my favourite dream question!)
Integration
It might take days to months to explore and then integrate a dream. Integration is the art of weaving the messages, symbols, invitations and guidance into the fabric of your waking life.
What remains to be done to honour the longing of this dream?
How can this dream be expressed, anchored or integrated?
What action, project, creative expression, art making, ritual, ceremony or gesture needs to be enacted to integrate the message or medicine of this dream?
Anahata Giri
March 2024
♡ Anahata Giri is a soul guide and aims to help your deepest life to unfold. Dreamwork is one of the many soul practices she explores in the Soul Purpose Immersion and in the Wild Heart, Wild Soul Retreats.