Dreamwork + Felt Futures

A conversation with Denise Shanté Brown

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of, felt futures, as offered by my dear friend, denise shanté:

—futures that are sensorial and designed for and with our senses, yes—but also futures that recognize we are creative, intuitive beings meant to experience an intimate relationship with our bodies, our more-than-human worlds, and our dreams for care and liberation.¹

I was struck by the giddiness I experienced seeing “dreams” and “felt futures” together. For one, it’s pretty obvious I am a fan of dreams! Add to that this notion that the future I long for can be felt into RIGHT NOW is the elixir I need.

               Here is my very own copy of denise shanté’s book collection, 
               may we dream and design felt futures.

So, I invited denise shanté into a conversation with me to explore how the dreamworld and felt futures coincide or converge, if at all.

And we did it in my 270 sq ft treehouse while she was visiting from México last month!

This is us during an outing to get a picture of our auras (yes, this is why we're friends...among many other reasons!), in May 2021, during the gas shortage as a result of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline. We almost didn't make it back home. This day is one for the books...literally. This photo is featured in book 02: to tend to each other's abundant creativity. You can watch the Instagram Live of her reading the book to me *cue tears*.

---

M: Do you see the connection or potential of cultivating a relationship with our dreamworld with dreaming into our felt futures?

DS: One of the connections I'm remembering between dreams and felt futures is when I was experiencing a real life rupture in a relationship. I wasn't really in the space (or didn't have the capacity at the time) to tend to that rupture or go through the process of trying to fully mend what happened between us. I remember having a dream about this particular person and in the dreamworld I was able to drop into the possibility of forgiveness. I remember feeling a sense of compassion, feeling a sense of understanding between us. In this dream, I was actually hearing the heart of this person and their perspective while also sharing my authentic emotions without needing to suppress what was also true and very real for me, including the ways I had been hurt by their actions. I remember coming out of that dreamworld and into my waking life feeling lighter, with more levity.

After waking up, I was in awe and like, “Oh my gosh, I just forgave someone in my dream!” I'm getting teary-eyed as I'm talking and processing this because I remember that sensation of forgiveness moving through my body. It was amazing to me that something I didn't have the capacity to do in my waking life could be offered to me in the dreamworld. I came out on the other side with a sense of relief and a connection with the possibility of forgiveness. All of the tensions and ruptures weren’t completely gone but the dream did open up pathways for forgiveness in ways I couldn’t access before.

This shares a relationship with the concept of felt futures because the sensorial moments of forgiveness and compassion completely covered my being in the dreamworld and came with me on the other side of everyday life. Everything I had felt there was very much alive here, and this started to reshape the future of my relationships. Through this dream, I was able to see all of my relationships a bit differently and trust that even if some things feel impossible here in this earthbound place that we have chosen to continue moving through every day, our dreams—and the deep feelings they carry—can help facilitate the mending and healing we desire.

M: Do you believe that this relationship between the dreamworld and felt futures could be scaled up to something larger, one that includes collaborative healing, envisioning towards systemic transformation?

I'm curious if the transition from personal to interpersonal to systemic can happen with a deliberate practice of collaborative dreaming. I'm going to stick with the forgiveness example here…if a personal and interpersonal relationship with ruptures can experience forgiveness in the dreamworld—getting me closer to the practice of forgiveness in my life (and in the other relationships I care about)—I'm wondering if the next step to get to systemic transformation begins with a co-dreaming process in this dimension.

What I mean is having imaginative, creative conversations with people and asking: What does it look like for us to apply the lessons and the illuminations that we are pulling from our dreamworld and the futures we’re feeling into? How can we put these lessons and illuminations into practice within our collaborative work? I don't know exactly what it could look like but curiosity is showing that we could maybe begin with an invitation for us to expand our sense of possibility and consider what the outward movement of dreaming and feeling wants to create for us, for our futures. For me, it means starting with inquiries and intimacy with folks who have a willingness to share stories, share imaginations, share hearts.

M: I really resonate with what you're saying, and it actually aligns so well with the work that I'm doing with Community Dreamwork because that space is specifically about sharing about our dreams into a collective space and seeing what emerges from dialoguing with our dream and with one another. And we say, in Community Dreamwork, that the dream shared is no longer just mine, it becomes ours and it becomes this other entity that becomes part of the collective. I’m actually reminded of your letter to me where you talk about receptivity—it's this practice of receiving the gift of the dream and then building that out into the practice of reciprocity, where we receive from the dream and then we are reciprocating it by taking an inspired action in our waking life. And the practices you're speaking about is similar to turning over a dream together and seeing what else emerges.

DS: Yeah, what you’re sharing is making me think about how dreams and the futures we're feeling into might reveal themselves within our collective agreements or within the principles we decide to embody. Within the spaces we’re gathering, or within the visions we say we want to move towards, how do our dreams and futures echo in the things we’ve constructed to guide us?

M: Your wondering about what would it look like to fold this into collective agreements or into the principles feels really radical because it doesn't currently exist in this way, at least none that I’m aware of. The agreements or principles that generally exist in many spaces and organizations are contained in waking world productivity mindset versus what you're offering here is inviting in unseen realms and non-waking states and even without this expectation of having to produce something or extract something from it and simply being with it and allowing things to emerge as they want to; it's a much more organic process.

And what I heard you say earlier is it starts with these small conversations, like the one we’re having, then bringing it into more conversations, and eventually exploring and practicing the embodiment of these conversations that eventually makes its way into larger communities and organized spaces. In other words, starting from the smaller scales and gradually growing into bigger ones, and along the way we're developing the capacity to contain these conversations that are rare and infrequent.

How would we be as a human species if we were to practice this receptivity with our dreams and felt futures?

DS: What’s interesting is that felt futures emerged from the desire to expand beyond just the human and to enter the more-than-human, to be genuinely curious and open to what is otherworldly. So I think in order for our receptivity to happen as people we need to be able to move toward a curiosity about the worlds that exist and breathe around us and within us. This could be our relationship to spirit, our relationship to nature and the multisensory aspects of our living landscapes and environments, our relationship to our intuition. It’s also about becoming more curious about the spirits within each other as well. Through the years, I’ve been growing an openness to be in a deeper relationship with creative spirit from a very sensorial and sensuous place and I’m learning it requires a commitment to intimacy. I want to really know my creative expression and what guides me. I want to witness my friends, community, and people around me as the creative intuitive beings we are. I guess what I'm saying is that practicing the receptivity of our dreams and felt futures asks us to shift our perspective around how we relate to each other. In that shifting and relating, maybe we’ll open ourselves and our senses up enough to where we’ll be able to notice the presence of enduring love. We’ll be able to understand what solidarity feels like in our bones. We’ll be able to not just talk about theories but transform thoughts into everyday practices because we’re alive, feeling, and receiving.

M: Your description of the practice of receptivity asking us to shift our perspective and how we relate to each other and see one another as creative intuitive beings is exactly how I relate to the dreamworld, or the Dream Maker—as a principal creative intuitive being. In modernity, we’ve reduced our dreams to a frivolous thing that just happens; we oversimplify it to something that our brain does, and we move on. But, if we were to slow down and perceive the Dream Maker for its core essence of co-creation, I can see us being able to feel into our felt futures more deeply because we’re now acknowledging and collaborating with the more-than-human and the unseen realms, all of which are inextricably tied to Life.

---

denise shanté,

Thank you for being a part of this conversation and my life. Your abundant creativity inspires me to re-member mine.

And our friendship has been a felt future for me.

May we continue to dream and design felt futures together.

love you.

1. https://substack.com/home/post/p-160909951