Community Dreamwork: Centering Relationships
After our most recent dreamwork gathering on March 24th, I shared with Stephanie that the gatherings increasingly feel like it’s less about the dreams and more about the relationships.
Relationship to dreams. Nurturing my relationship with dreams is a newer framework for me because I lived most of my life perceiving them as an “it” or an experience that gives me something - meaning, pleasure, terror, amusement, catharsis, bewilderment…
Since delving into dreamwork gatherings, I’ve started to communicate back to my dreams. I ask questions, say, “Thank you,” and let them know how they made me feel. I even connect to dreams before falling asleep, either letting them know I’m looking forward to what they want to share with me or asking for guidance.
After all, the dreams are sharing, showing, and provoking something in me. The least I can do is respond. Eventually, I hope to develop conversational skills while I dream; some of us already do, through lucid dreaming.
Relationship to self. I continue to learn so much about who I am at the moment and how I want to continue to evolve. My dreams have shown me parts of my lives beyond this one, revealed suppressed or oppressed parts of my living experience, helped me to process emotions, and pointed me to what I am resisting or desiring. Other times, the dreams have left me with more questions, dis-ease, or a funk that can last all day. My dreams contribute to my waking state and the shaping of who I am.
Relationship to people. While we aren’t explicitly sharing about ourselves, the dreams reveal details of our lives, glimpses into how we process, and even highlight various energies or dynamics that are unique to the people who show up. Some of the most intimate conversations I’ve had with people have been through sharing dreams. These conversations are also the ones I can recall with greater detail when I think of some people I’ve met along the way. The dreams they’ve shared are my cherished thread of connection to them.
Relationship to the natural world. My growing attunement to the natural world is in part because of community dreamwork. In my dreams, elements and more-than-human beings from the natural world are distinct characters that convey messages in a way that I’m less privy to in my waking state. So now, I pay better attention to them, dreaming or awake.
Relationship to Spirit. The nonlinear and imaginal qualities of my dreams are evidence enough for me to recognize that there are realms and beings beyond what my five basic human senses can detect. Some of the extraordinary and sometimes inexplicable experiences that have come about due to our dreams nudge me to feel into the possibility that there must be something more to this day-to-day living.
However, being brought up in a Korean household that was so casual about our animus culture, I took my relationship to Spirit for granted. Practicing dreamwork in community has been one of the ways that I have had the opportunity to reengage my relationship with Spirit from a place of humility and wonder.
Relationship to imagination. I’ve most recently begun to consider how dreamwork has been rehabilitating and nurturing my imaginal capacity. It’s clear to me now that my dreams and my imagination are versions of the same kernel of energy - my sovereignty expressed as boundless potential for creating toward our co-liberation.
The social systems and the home-environment in which I have been brought up have done a thorough job of getting me to abandon my relationship with my imagination, and instead settle into comfort and compliance. Thankfully, community dreamwork has been one of the potent medicines for re-membering my imagination and exercising it to greater capacity.
Community dreamwork is about so much more than dreams. Our dreams are the living bridges by which we cultivate intentional relationships.
On the podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, episode 266, sisters, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, delve into the question of who benefits from us being dissociated and fractured in our relationships. To be severed in relationships with beings, faculties, abilities, and the unseen that make up our humanity leaves us more vulnerable to be in service to inhumane practices. Autumn shares that “the more dissociated we are, the more at odds we are with ourselves, the less we can act, the less easily we can act in alignment with what we believe.”
“We are really in an interesting bind right now where I think relationship is the only thing that’s going to pull us through,” adds adrienne.
Relationships are going to save us. And community dreamwork is one way meaningful relationships are cultivated.
