DREAMWORK
ONGOING MONTHLY DREAMWORK CIRCLE WEBINARS 2024 – 2025
Dreamwork and Symbolic Reality
Willingness to engage the genius in dreams invites a new genius in you.
Becoming a student of the Dream World is indispensable to the path of awakening. Richard teaches that while dreams work their magic even if you don’t understand them, rational understanding is not the point of dreamwork; it is about building and discovering another kind of understanding by the intuitive process with which you engage the dreamworld. For Richard, dreamwork is among the most subtle of conscious undertakings, requiring fundamental curiosity, humility, and active respect for the richness and depths of (your) psyche.
In dreamwork you engage with the stories psyche speaks through your dreams, enter their symbolic reality, develop a refined intuition of recurrent patterns of consciousness usually not obvious to your waking consciousness, and discover that dreams convey an essential intelligence which is complementary to but also in many ways superior to your waking intelligence. Working with your dreams is indispensable on your spiritual path.
The Dreamwork Circle webinars will run approximately once a month. Richard will teach by inviting participants to share their dreams, reflect on each dream with the dreamer, and guide the whole group in learning how to work together in a dream circle.
The Process For Our Webinar
At the beginning of each session, I will choose a dream, either from those emailed to me – more on that in a moment – or one that is presented on the spot. Then I will propose a process by which we approach that dream together. Relax, I don’t care if we will ever understand the dream in the sense of having the “correct” interpretation.
Great minds have been theorizing about the dream-world probably since the dawn of the human species and none of them have the same approach or would necessarily agree on the same interpretation of any dream. Our dreamwork is not about correct interpretation in an intellectual sense; the correct “interpretation” is whatever brings you greater understanding of the multidimensional richness of your being and can offer you better choices on the path of your life.
The process I propose for how we work together on a selected dream offers an experiential and integrative approach to dreamwork. It is a process of collective information sharing (conceptual, feeling, intuitive), self-reflection, and psychological mirroring.
Here it is in outline:
- I will invite a dream from those you email to me, or one that I select from something one of you volunteers to share.
- The person offering the dream will share the dream twice. The first time so each of us hears it. The second time so that we can dive into a more relaxed, less mental attention and listening.
- The person who has shared the dream will be invited to speak of what you think is important for you about your dream and a little of what you believe is the context from which the dream is emerging.
- Then I will invite others of you to offer your reflections on the dream you just heard. As well, I will reflect on not only on the shared dream, but on the varying “waking dreams” of the dream.
Here is where it gets interesting. Your interpretation of the dream (you just heard) is your waking dream of the dream. As many of you share what the dream means to you (including me), your thoughts reflect your consciousness, which may have more of less connection to the dream that the dreamer shared. In other words, what you share is your version of the dream, and in that sense, it is your dream. As the discussion progresses, you can get to “see” yourself – your unique psychology – in what the dream means to you, and as well as in how you resonate or not with the interpretations that others propose about the dream. One dream gives you the opportunity to recognize not only your own point of view, but the richness of the points of view of others. In this way the process invites personal and collective insight.
- To conclude, the person who shared the dream will offer how their sense of the dream was influenced by what was shared. And then I may summarize or add a few additional thoughts.
If this does not seem clear now, it will become clear as we progress. I invite you to attend with an expectation of what I call “high play”.
The main challenges I foresee is that this is the first time I have proposed this kind of work over the medium of Zoom. You will want to get past inhibition to speak in the Zoom format. You will need to “raise” your “virtual” hand, an element of Zoom protocol we will go over in the first session. I, in turn, will have to notice who has raised their hand and call on one or another of you.
Interpreting dreams is an ever-evolving path of wisdom. I will offer you several different ways to approach a dream that can be helpful. This teaching will be part of the content of our first session, and it will be repeated in somewhat different ways throughout all the sessions. Gradually, you will learn to look at dreams in many ways, the same way we need to be able to look at daily life in many ways.
I have been wondering how I might express my amazement at the experience I had during our last dream circle. You gave so much time to my seemingly small and commonplace dreams. I was left with awe at what opened up to your insights and that of my cohorts. I feel such a sweet tenderness toward you, to the Voice that spoke through my dreams, to my cohorts as they struggle with their own life challenges.
What You Need To Do
IN PREPARATION FOR THE WEBINAR SERIES:
1. Start writing down or recording your dreams if you don’t already. Notice the ones that intrigue you in some way. Is this a recurring dream, do you recognize a recurring pattern? Does it “make no sense” but feels nonetheless important. Choose one or two, and send an email to me. Make sure the SUBJECT line has your name and then the words: DREAMWORK WEBINAR
2. Think about the context in which your dream(s) have come: Things going on in daily life, recent upheavals, on-going challenges, etc. Since your dream(s) are emerging from the complex dynamics of your daily life (not in the context of a group retreat as I described above), it is important for us to know something of that context. AND you must be able to share your sense of context CONCISELY if you are called on.
One important Caveat: If the dream is very long and complex it may be difficult to work with in the group due to time constraints. But you can send it to me, nonetheless, I just may not think it appropriate for our process.
I very much look forward to sharing this adventure with you.
DREAMWORK SESSIONS FOR 2024 and 2025
COST: $300 for 5 sessions (see payment link below to enroll).
TIME: 13:30 – 15:30 ET
25 September
30 October
20 November
18 December
2025
15 January