Rehabilitating Our Imaginal Capacity

How dreaming prompts real-life responses

I had the honor of co-facilitanting* the fourth in-person Asian Diaspora Jam last week. In our final circle of thirty siblings of the Asian Diaspora, Shilpa, a co-facilitant and mentor-sister-friend, shared that at the end of YES! Jams, people have made remarks that they are returning to the “real world,” implicating that the community we built together was unreal, out of reach…just a dream.

She challenged this notion and exclaimed that the community we co-created over four days is real! This Jam was seeded in 2017 when Shilpa, the Executive Director of YES! at the time, gathered Jam alum for our first Zoom to dreamweave the possibility of an Asian Diaspora Jam.

This March, our dream came true for the fourth time, as thirty of us gathered with the collective vision of healing and building towards a world of authentic belonging, one that has space for dissonance, contradictions, and our whole selves to exist freely and unapologetically. We got to experience manifesting our vision through our shared Asian Diasporic identity, offering and receiving stories, playing!, witnessing one another in our joy and grief, and choosing to work through various moments of inevitable “storming.”

Toko-pa Turner, author, mystic, and dreamworker, shared in a For the Wild podcast episode, Dreams of Belonging, that “…most of us have been taught that say, if we wake up from a dream that is difficult, or scary, or repulsive or upsetting in some way, our first reaction is to push it away––is to get as far away from it as possible. And that's kind of an expected reaction when looking at something when being confronted with something that is upsetting or difficult. But we have to really shift our mind frame to realize that when these difficult dreams come up to be seen, it is in and of itself, a validation of something that's ready to come to consciousness, something that's ready to be seen, to be acknowledged.”

I believe the thirty of us were brought together to Jam, including weathering the moments that felt difficult, or scary, or repulsive or upsetting because we were ready to see ourselves and one another in our multifaceted humanity and take up our right to dream for a better world.

[My ‘River of Life’ drawing from the 2024 Asian Diaspora Jam]

Post-Jam, several of us expressed that it “felt like a dream.” What I’m hearing underneath it is the disbelief or surprise that something like this could exist, the skepticism or nervousness this loving-community can sustain and grow, and that there are so few models of the community we long for in our day-to-day.

While dreams for a better world are necessary, “[and] even though it may look like a simple step, it's very complicated for us, because consensus culture devalues dreams, for the most part. And so there's a great deal of sort of unhindering, reading of those ideas around to the bifurcation between the worlds that really originated, or at least was deeply ensconced around the 17th century and René Descartes and rationalism and materialistic thinking like that. But this kind of unlearning or unhindered processes, kind of complicated because there's so much evidence to the contrary, that we get pulled by worldly demands that keep us in a kind of locked relationship with the physical world. And so this sort of stretching into the imaginal and practicing animism and even exploring our dream time, is a kind of privilege that is not available to a lot of people when trapped in that context of capitalism and all the Hydra heads of that paradigm.” Although Toko-pa is speaking about the literal dream state, her reflections apply to the waking-state dreams for a liberated world and how we get pulled by oppressive status quo demands that can keep us bound to their limitations or is a privilege that isn’t available to a lot of people trapped in colonial-conditionings.

She also describes how building a relationship with our dreams is one way we can rehabilitate our imaginal capacity that becomes oppressed and suppressed simply by existing in a system designed by colonialism: “The first step is this very basic idea that we have to give value to our dreaming experience…But I think everything that falls to the margins of that way of thinking is more or less neglected in our culture. And when something is so neglected, it becomes devalued or dismissed or just not acknowledged. And so the work of bringing things back into balance is about learning how to value those things at a very personal level, learning how to make time for our dreams, for instance, and to give a part of every day to paying attention to maybe even writing down and perhaps even doing a ritual around the dreams that we do receive, and/or creating responses or enacting changes in the way that we live our lives and the way we are in relationship as a response to the promptings that we get from our dreams.”

To me, this Jam was about learning how to make time for my dreams - writing down my intentions, engaging in a ceremonious experience with twenty-nine others, and creating life-generating responses in the way I choose to live my life and the way I show up in relationship with the group as a response to the promptings that I receive from my dreams for a liberated world.

As I continue to integrate this Jam experience, I’m moving through waves of nervousness and hope, feeling close to the Jam and then feeling far from it, falling into the trap of thinking, “This was too good to be true,” and then being buoyed by remembering, “This is real because I got/get to experience it!”

This pendulation I’m experiencing signals to me that, at the moment, my imagination is still relatively contained, contracted, and fractured due to inheritance of ancestral trauma, much of which was due to imperialism and colonialism, being parented in an immigrant household with unprocessed wounds and layered with the impact of anti-Asian racism in the United States, and the disembodying experience of public school education.** Nurturing a relationship with dreams and those who dare to live boldly as a response to their dreams’ promptings, I feel my imaginal capacity slowly returning to its boundless and wild capacity.

I’m committed to rehabilitating my imaginal capacity for envisioning a more expansive liberated world that has space for all of us to feel free and belonging by continuing to build a relationship with my dreams and with my dreamy Jamily and responding to the promptings that I receive from these dreamy-spaces.

*facilitanting = facilitator + participant, Jam facilitators participate in all sessions with participants and co-create the Jam through our joyful, messy, human participation

**These experiences do not necessarily impact everyone’s imaginal capacity in the same way. I am speaking for myself while also recognizing others can relate.