Starting a campus dream club
Weaving dreamwork into formal education spaces
Dear community of dreamers,
Today I wanted to share with you about our dream club on the University for Peace campus, where I am a professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies. For those of you who work in academic settings or educational spaces, I hope this post might give you some ideas for how to weave dreamwork into your learning communities. For those of you who work in other settings, it might give you some ideas for how you might begin to weave it into the spaces you are a part of!
In the beginning…
This is the second year of dream club, which was initiated as a professor-student collaboration. The first year, in talking with a student in the Indigenous Sciences and Peace Studies masters programme, we discovered a shared love of working with our dreams in community. This gave us the inspiration to start dream club. At first it was the two of us, and slowly it grew organically.
As UPEACE is a one-year masters programme, there is a new cohort of students each academic year, which can make continuity of anything challenging. I mentioned to the students that we had done a dream club last year, and if there was interest, we could do it again. There was, and we began again.
What is dream club?
Like our Prism of Wisdom dreamwork gatherings, dream club is a space for nurturing our relationship with our dreams and the unseen. In an academic setting, we spend a lot of time in our intellectual, rational, linear parts of our mind, and when this way of knowing is overvalued as the only way of knowing, this is a form of Eurocentrism that is characteristic of modernity. Dream club is thus an active disruption of the overvaluing of Europatriarchal knowledge1 and allows us to honor and tap into other forms of wisdom and ways of knowing and being. As such, in the hyper-intellectual space of academia, this alone feels healing.
We aim to meet for about 90 minutes after lunch. Sometimes it is more or less depending on who is there and what needs to be shared. We have a two-hour window between buses, and having it in this time frame allows us to not be rushed. It is helpful to have some spaciousness, as you want to be able to take your time with the dream sharing.
This is one of the most healing elements of dream club, too - the invitation to slow down together. Our UPEACE schedule revolves around 3 week intensive classes, and they are very intense, both in terms of schedule and content (we are always talking about peace and violence). Students (and professors when teaching) spend the mornings in class. Having dream club in the afternoon feels like a way to digest the morning (and lunch!), to shift gears from the busyness of class and put down the academic work and have a space to be together. It is also a space to bring our whole selves - mind, body, heart, emotions, spirit - which is also healing in academia which tends to overvalue the mind and intellect and ask us to leave other parts of ourselves outside the classroom2.
In our Prism of Wisdom handout, we have some guidelines for the space (the section titled “In this space, we…”). I would highly recommend having community agreements for the space, either these or your own. The guidelines Minna and I have created are based on our experience facilitating community dreamwork gatherings, and on what we have found to be helpful over time. While it is not listed on our handout, confidentiality should be honored, as in the process of sharing about dreams, it’s possible for deeply personal things to be shared.
One of gifts of dream club is also one of its biggest challenges - stepping out of linear, rational, thinking mind. The invitation of dream club is to really be together in a different way, but in an academic setting, the habit energy of wanting to rationalize or even debate can be very strong. I recommend emphasizing this as an invitation in the space. As a facilitator or guide, you may need to gently guide folks back if the conversation starts to veer in an overly intellectual direction. You can point people to our article on dreamwork for reading at home or even arrange a time outside of dream club to discuss it as support for intellectual engagement with this work in a way that embraces thinking-feeling3.
Do I need experience to start a dream club or dream gathering?
No! I would say you just need the curiosity and interest to cultivate, grow, and deepen your relationship with dreams in community. It helps if you are intentionally cultivating your own dreamwork practice, such as by trying to remember your dreams at night, honoring them by writing them down, or otherwise engaging with them (making art from the images that arise, for example). But you don’t need to be a pro, and you don’t need to always remember your dreams. You just need an aspiration, an intention, and an effort to cultivate this relationship with the unseen.
At the heart of our work at Prism of Wisdom is the belief that dreamwork is an ancestral way of knowing for all of us, and it is our birthright. Dreams belong to us all, and we belong to them. We don’t need a PhD in dreamwork or a certificate to start. In fact, please don’t wait! Sure, over time you may want to deepen your understanding with a teacher or further formal study, but don’t let certification or diplomas keep you from working with a path of wisdom that is available to you right now.
If you want to see how we facilitate a dream gathering, you can watch the recording of our workshop that took place at the Acosta Institute’s International Healing-Centered Education Conference. You can also join us for regular Prism of Wisdom Dreamwork Gatherings on Zoom (reply to this email and we will get you on the list - our next gathering is December 12th!).
How do I start?
Just start! The key to beginning is just wanting to. Put the invitation out there. Talk to colleagues and students about who is interested in working together with dreams. All you need is one other person!
Find a space. At UPEACE, we are very lucky to have access to a holistic center that is a bamboo hut at the edge of a nature preserve. Any space will do, but if you have choice, try to find the coziest or most natural setting you can. If the weather permits, having dream club outside is an amazing option.
Find a time. Amidst campus activities, it can be hard to find a consistent time that isn’t already full. We are meet Monday afternoons. Over coffee or breakfast can be a great time for a gathering too (our dreamwork was birthed around the breakfast table of a conference). Work within the boundaries of your schedule and try to find a consistent time to meet. Consistency is helpful, even if it is just once a month (every week is great, though!). But you can also play around with it. Minna and I play around with the times of our Zoom dreamwork gatherings!
Get the word out. On campus, the students shared the invitation to the whole student body WhatsApp group, and then we created a Dream Club group. Trust that the right people will come.
What does a dream club session look like?
Here is the general flow of our sessions.
Have a facilitator or co-facilitators. So far I have been facilitating, but I hope that over time, students will take leadership roles and begin facilitating the space with me and on their own. Last year, the co-founders always co-facilitated. It is great to have a facilitation partner, as Minna and I do!
We set up the chairs in a circle, and put an altar in the middle. The altar can be simple - at our last gathering we gathered a few flowers, leaves, and branches we found outside our space. The altar is a focal point that beautifies the space, and symbolizes the energy of it being a sacred space. It also serves as a point to gather attention. I often bring an altar cloth and some stones.
Get comfortable. Academic spaces are not always comfortable, but get as comfortable as you can. You might want to invite everyone to do a little movement, stretching or shaking to help release the day so far and do what their body needs to be able to sit together for a while.
We begin with a few minutes of grounding and centering. This can be very simple. The centering we usually use for Prism of Wisdom gatherings that Minna taught me (and I now often use in the graduate classes that I teach) is a simple three breath practice.
Take three deep breaths together.
The first breath is for yourself.
The second breath is for the collective in the circle (the dream club).
The third breath is for the wider webs we are a part of (the land, our dreams).We often do a brief check-in to see how folks are arriving. If this is the first time you are gathering, it can be great to ask why people chose to come to dream club, and share any interest or experience they have working with dreams. After meeting for some time, we have been doing simple one word check-ins to see how people are feeling as they arrive, just to get a sense of what people are bringing into the space.
We give a brief introduction to dreamwork. I usually introduce the practice very simply. The first time we had dream club on campus, I went through our full workshop presentation, and ran the club more like a workshop that day. Since then, I have the handout present for people to refer to, and just rif a few of the main points and invitations. As noted above, dropping intellectual thinking can be a challenge, so I try to emphasize that this space is an invitation to let that go, tap into other ways of knowing, and slow down. As noted above, it can be really nice, as part of the centering, to do some movement or shaking to physically let that energy go and make the transition.
The more often you meet, the less introducing you have to do - though I think some introduction is always helpful, even if the same group has been meeting for a long time. It is a good reminder about why you are there and what you are intentionally trying to practice together. The more often folks come, the more the group is holding the space together (rather than just one person as a facilitator).We open the space for sharing dreams. Particularly when starting out, I often model by sharing a recent dream. Once people get the hang of it, they will probably arrive with dreams and be excited and eager to share. Depending on your timing, not everyone may have the chance to share a dream. Minna and I always talk about giving time and space to each dream, moving slowly with them, and this might mean that only a few dreams are shared and that is OK. We all take part in the sharing through our listening, questions, and reflecting. Once a dream is shared, it becomes a collective dream!
As we are just a few weeks into this year’s iteration of dream club, I am excited to see how it evolves. I have encouraged students that this space can be anything we want it to be, and we can bring other things into the space that resonate with dreamwork (such as art, tarot or oracle cards, etc.). I will keep you posted along the way!
Wishing you sweet, magical, and rich dreams,
Stephanie
The phrase Europatriarchal knowledge comes from Minna Salami’s beautiful and brilliant work on Sensuous Knowledge: Black Feminism for Everyone.
Within our department, we try to bring a holistic approach and welcome students as whole people in all our classes and offerings.
For more on this, see our article.