A dreaming workbook and audio journey
Drops of Enchantment 3
‘And by the way let us recount our dreams. ... I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was ...’
– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
Humans seem always to have looked to their nighttime dreams for wisdom – to predict the future, heal illness or address a general malaise, and communicate with the sacred. In more modern times, there are many different theories about what dreams are, and what they might signify. I’ve always been attached to this perspective of Jung:
‘It is only in modern times that the dream, this fleeting and insignificant looking product of the psyche, has met with such profound contempt. Formerly it was esteemed as a harbinger of fate, a portent and comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we see it as the emissary of the unconscious, whose task it is to reveal the secrets that are hidden from the conscious mind, and this it does with astounding completeness.’
Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Dream interpretation was a central part of Jung’s therapeutic approach, and he once estimated that he’d analysed over 80,000 dreams. In his Seminar on Dreams, Jung stated that ‘dreams are messages sent up from the unconscious’, but I’ve always thought of them as more than that – in the sense that it seems to me, from the content of my own dreams, that they come from beyond anything I myself know. I remember once, at a turning point in my life, having two of what Jung called ‘Big Dreams’, one of which I described in If Women Rose Rooted:
I dreamed of a creature with the face of a fierce, ageing woman and the body of a large hound. I held out my hand to her and she smiled; her teeth were pointed and sharp. Then she bit me. I looked down at my open, bleeding hand, and found that each of my fingers had turned into a bat. I had no idea then what I was dreaming, but I knew that I needed to know. After much research I discovered that the Greek goddess Hecate was sometimes represented with the head of a woman and the body of a dog. Hecate, who holds the keys to the Underworld, who calls us to follow her there, whose Call is a call to transformation. And the bats? In almost all cultures, they are a symbol of rebirth.
At the time that I had that dream, I had no knowledge of those aspects of mythology. Where, then, did they come from? Afterwards, I had another Big Dream: I was running alongside a train, desperate to get on. But the conductor stood at an open door as it was pulling away from me and I was losing ground. He said, ‘This train has departed.’ I said to him, ‘But I have to get on. I’m carrying the foundation stone of my mother’s house.’ And I held out a heavy rock which had been weighing me down. The train stopped, and I got on. Later, I began my long work of writing about women; I’d carried with me the foundation stone of my mother’s house: a house of words and dreams that I was now building.
Image by Christian Schloe
Well, dreams have been preoccupying me ever since. I wrote quite a bit about my own philosophy of dreamwork, including many practical suggestions for working with dreams, in one of my online courses four years ago. And so I wanted today to offer you the workbook from that Module of Courting the World Soul, to help you work through these long, dark dreaming days of autumn and winter. It includes advice on creating your own Book of Dreams, improving your dream recall and recording, an exercise on dream analysis and amplification, using active imagination, tracking yourself in your dreams, incubating dreams, and so much more.