Dreamwork as imagination reclamation and rehabilitation
On exiled capacities and dreamwork as a practices that can support us in this moment
Dear dreamers,
How have your dreams been this week, amidst the latest wave of collective pain and upheaval that is the aftermath of the US election?
I’m so curious about what folks have been dreaming about, and how the waking reality of this moment might be seeping through our collective dreams, and how we are digesting and metabolizing this moment during our trips to the unseen world.
I didn’t dream a lot this week, or remember them, at least. Maybe I didn’t sleep so well, as I imagine was the case for many. As I write, I’m tired, very tired. As I know many of you are.
One thing I know for sure: we will need our imaginations more than ever to guide us towards life-giving ways of being and living together. We will need wisdom from every place we can find it. And I know we need the wisdom available through our dreams, and the imagination reclamation and rehabilitation our dreamworlds can provide.
In Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book Hospicing Modernity and in the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, they talk about “exiled capacities,” which are “cognitive, affective and relational capacities actively numbed by modernity-coloniality”1. They call for and “an invitation to sit at the limits of the imagination” and go on to describe:
This practice [of gesturing toward decolonial futures] places emphasis on the relationship between cognitive, affective and relational human capacities, as well as the role of the unconscious in blocking and/or enabling possibilities for different forms of co-existence to emerge in the eye of the perfect storm of the unprecedented global challenges that we will need to face together.
One of the challenges of trying to birth new worlds from within this one is trying to imagine beyond modernity when we can feel (and be) stuck within its imaginary. As adrienne maree brown states in the quote from Emergent Strategy, we are living inside systems that came from a few people’s imaginations. It is very hard to escape their cycle of replication and reproduction - but it is our right and responsibility. I take solace in knowing that if the current systems were once just ideas in some imaginations, then we can - and must - imagine otherwise. We must imagine our way beyond them.
While our dreams and imaginations might also be colonized, I believe they are not only that, and they give us access to pathways of imagination beyond modernity. Healing this relationship between seen and unseen realms through dreamwork is a vital practice for these times - a form of imagination rehabilitation and reclamation.
This is a time for doubling down on any practices that help us ground, stay regulated, bring joy, and nourish our imaginations. For me, dreamwork is one such practice.
In working with our dreams - in honoring them, witnessing them and learning from them - might we open up stuck pathways in our unconscious and enable new possibilities?
For your imaginal nourishment, I will close by sharing a video that we watched in my class last week on Becoming Imaginal by Alixa Garcia:
Wishing you sweet, potent, healing, transformative dreams,
Stephanie
P.S. We dream together on Zoom next on Tuesday, November 19. If you want to join us and are not already on our mailing list, comment below or reply to this email and we will add you!
Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecopsychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.
https://www.rizoma-freireano.org/articles-3030/calibrating-our-vital