The Kin of Ata, part 2
On different kinds of dreams
This post builds on Part 1 about the book The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant.
Dear dreamers,
I finished The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, and I actually don’t want to spoil too much of the plot for you. What I can say is: I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in dreamwork (or depth psychology or science fiction or…there are many reasons to read it!). It’s a rich companion and accompaniment and offers so much to think about with respect to our dream worlds. Today I wanted to share about one thread that I particularly enjoyed and have been thinking about since reading it: the different types of dreams we have.
In the book1, the narrator asks one of the elders, Salvatore, how to dream better. In response, he says, “There are many answers. There is not THE answer. I can give you some answers, but not all…There are many kinds of dreams. They exist perhaps on different levels.”
Then he goes on to describe:
Simple dreams: that tell of a bodily need (dreaming of drinking if you are thirsty)
Deeper dreams: that reveal things about ourselves, sometimes directly and sometimes veiled; higher messages tend to be less direct
Dreams in which we open ourselves up other people (this happens in the book plot line, where the narrator can be with another person who is in a different dimension)
One of the premises of the culture of Ata is to live in such a way as to get passed the bodily needs. They all try to find the right balance of sleep and food and work for their bodies; they avoid small talk and gossip. The culture has some monastic-like qualities that are built around optimizing physical conditions for the body so that people can more easily get to deeper levels of dreaming.
When you think about your own dreams, what types of dreams do you have?
What kinds of different categories would you add?
I definitely resonate with the experience that there are different kinds of dreams. Sometimes my dreams feel very literal, and I am dreaming about something that happened and there is very little in the way of metaphor or hidden meaning (although truth be told, I think there are always more meanings to be revealed, which is one reason why I love the magic of community dreamwork!). In these dreams, it feels like my mind is just processing life, almost in the way the stomach digests food. Maybe here I would call this dreams as digestion.
Sometimes I have a dream that feels loud, like I’m really, really in it in an intense way. I’m not sure how to describe it other than loud, but it has to do with more than sound. It’s the kind of dream that I can really feel the residue of when I wake up, like when I wake up I have been pulled out of it.
Another kind of dream I experience which I’ve written about before is being visited by the dead. And then there are dreams that feel like they have a very important message, a task, or something I feel like I need to do something with, such as my Rest is Peace dream that I wrote about and turned into a workshop. I think this is more aligned with the second deeper dreams as described in Ata.
If you read The Kin of Ata, or think of other types of dreams you have, let us know!
Sending you wishes for 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 at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.
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