What are you feeding your dreams?
What dreams are made of: on nourishing our dreams and imaginations
Dear dreamers,
We have been on a little hiatus while we made edits to our upcoming article for The Arrow Journal on community dreamwork as a pluriversal practice, an extension of our session at the Courage of Care symposium on Practicing for the Pluriverse. We look forward to sharing it with you when it comes out!
Since the start of the year, the questions that have been swirling in my dreamlife that I want to share with you today are:
What are dreams made of?
What are you feeding your dreams?
What are the seeds that are sprouting in your dreamlife?
I have been reading The Wild Robot series by Peter Brown with my 6-year old daughter (I cannot recommend both the books and the movie enough!). The stories are about a robot that washes up on the shore of an uninhabited-by-humans (but thriving with wildlife) island somewhere in the Pacific northwest and her ensuing life of learning the language of the animals, becoming the mother of a gosling, and becoming a part of the island community. It touches upon beautiful themes of parenthood, home, technology, AI, and relations between humans and more-than-humans (wildlife and robotic alike). The stories are filled with beautiful imagery, and the amount of research Peter Brown put into understanding ecological processes and reflecting them in the stories is evident and adds a powerful richness to the stories.
We have been reading the books since Christmas, and during this time I have had some wonderful dreams about animals - not from the movie or books, but just fantastical creatures in their own right. In one dream there were giant fluffy flamingoes (which were my mom’s favorite animal), and later soft fuzzy piglets. It has had me thinking about how I have been feeding my mind The Wild Robot, and what a rich landscape in my dreams it has inspired.
In Buddhist teachings, there is a framework of the four nutriments1 which are said to nourish all of life. They are: edible food, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness. Edible foods are fairly self-explanatory - that’s what we eat and consume in the realm of food and drinks. Sense impressions are things we consume through our senses other than eating - what we watch, read, listen to, wear, etc. Volition refers to our motivational energy, what is driving us to do what we do in this life. And consciousness refers to seeds of mental formations that exist within all of us that are generally categorized as wholesome, unwholesome, and neutral, and how we are feeding them (“watering the seeds” is the language often used by my teacher Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh).
While reading The Wild Robot books, I could really feel how the imagery of the books was feeding my dreams and adding beauty to my dreamscape. This has had me thinking a lot about these questions: What am I feeding my dreams? What are my dreams made of?
In my own life, I am not always feeding my dreams nourishment (nor is this always possible or avoidable). I do my share of doomscrolling. There is an inevitable amount of garbage that we consume each day just by virtue of existing in the modern world (it is reported that we see between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day, for example).
But an additional question for dreamwork, besides asking what the dream means, is asking is: where is the dream coming from? What sparked it? What seeded the dream? And was it something you consumed through your sense impressions?
In playing with your own dreamwork, my invitation to you is to try to notice what is seeding your dreams. Notice how the things you are consuming - food and drink, what you’re watching and listening to, etc. - is showing up or weaving its way through your dreams. How is what you are consuming and exposed to in your waking life showing up in your dreamlife?
And then: how can you actively nourish your dreams, your imagination?
This has been my realization while reading The Wild Robot books. My imagination feels so nourished in both the reading of the books and watching the movie. It is a beautiful story on many levels, and it has nourished my waking and dream lives. So how can I be more intentional about what I am consuming? How can I continue to nourish my imagination even more?
As we have written about before (see here and here), reclaiming, rehabilitating, and nourishing our imaginations is one of the urgent and pressing tasks of our time in the process of hospicing modernity and birthing more life-affirming worlds. The ways we nourish our imaginations and seed and feed are dreams are important parts of imagination reclamation.
How can you nourish your dreams and imagination today?
May your dreams be nourished with beauty!
Sweet dreams,
Stephanie
For an introduction to the four nutriments, I recommend this podcast episode: https://plumvillage.org/podcast/the-four-types-of-food-for-healthy-growth-episode-76