Healing our relationship with time through dreamwork
“To break free from the plague of time, you must first go where it cannot. Which is to say, you must go to sleep.”
-Roger Reeves
Today’s post was inspired by this opening line from the beautiful and powerful essay When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps by Roger Reeves, which I recommend reading in its entirety.
Among the many ways that dreamwork is a decolonial, pluriversal practice, one that helps us heal from modernity and move towards other ways of being, is through our relationship to time.
Have you ever tried to tell or write down a dream and you can’t remember the order in which things happened? Or the way the story of the dream seems to fold back in on itself, looping? It can be hard to tell or write a dream because dreams are almost always nonlinear, timeless. Dreams teach us - and allow us to experience - that time can bend, and it’s a construct. A dream journey can feel like an eternity while we’re in it and when we wake up, it could be just minutes or hours that have passed. Dreamtime is its own form of time, and gets us out of linearity if just for a while, while we sleep.
Modernity tells us that time is linear and marches on. Being tethered to the clock is one way that linear thinking is perpetuated within modernity, one of the ways we learn to overvalue this way of seeing above all others. Yes, it’s useful to have a collective sense of time, for appointments, for the workday, etc. But it is not the only way of seeing, experiencing, or thinking. There are other ways.
Nature is not on the clock. Nature has her own rhythms, ways of keeping time - the ebbs and flows of tides, sunrise and sunset, the shift of seasons, the cycle of the moon. Tuning into these ways of keeping time is another way of disrupting and healing our relationship to time, especially deep time.
Deep time is the time of mountains and volcanoes, of moss, our ancient relative. Deep time is the time it has taken for the river in front of me to carve out this canyon. Modernity and capitalism operate on quarterly time: what will make the most profit for shareholders this quarter, regardless of how many species are sacrificed in the process. Deep time is remembering that on the clock of the Earth, we humans are a recent development, that the ancient beings are our ancestors and have so much to teach us about how to live in alignment with the Earth by getting into a different relationship with time.
Dreamwork can help us heal. It is a healing practice.
Dreamwork can help us heal our relationship to time by helping us remember that there are other ways of relating to it.
We are approaching the solstice (winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the south). The solstice is another way of tracking the passage of time and healing our relationship to it. In the northern hemisphere where I am writing from, it marks the shortest day of the year, the day with the least amount of daylight. After the solstice, the light slowly starts to return. For me, honoring this moment is a healing practice of ancestral recovery, of remembering a time when my European ancestors were connected to the land and these natural rhythms. I know in my bones that the solstice was significant to them, and my solstice practices1 are a way of remembering.
May our dreams be healing, and may healing our relationship with time help us heal our relationship with the Earth.
Sweet dreams,
Stephanie
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.
I have written about how I practice with the solstice on my other Substack, Enchantable:
https://enchantable.substack.com/p/making-december-magic-series
so beautiful...i wrote our next post in connection to the winter solstice without reading yours until after i posted it!