Dreams & Your Personal Journey I

Course Description

This course brings together the varied perspectives of 12 expert dream and depth psychology workers to guide you towards harnessing the power of dreams. They will share varied perspectives, techniques and make old wisdom accessible as they guide you in how your application of these expressions from the other world can aid your own development journey.

Do you need answers to matters related to your own personal relationships, vocation, health and overall well being?

Dreams were a foundational part of Carl Jung’s work. Discover how your dreams can be utilized to not only answer complex questions, but also how to truly harness the creative power of dreams in new and different ways.

This course is interview-style. Machiel Klerk and Akke-Jeanne Klerk – Jung Platform founders and siblings –spoke with these experts to create the Dreams & Your Personal Journey Summit. This course is a remastering of that summit.

The classes are available now.

This course is ideal if you have:

• an interest in personal development
• a curiosity in working with the imagination and the unconscious
• a longing to deepen your intuition
• a passion for dreams and enjoy experiential dreamwork
• a desire to learn about dream perspectives around the world

Course Overview

Class 1: Introduction to Jungian Dreamwork with John van Eenwyk

This lecture is an introduction to Jungian dreamwork. Jung’s mentor and colleague, Freud, described dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious”. Building on that idea, John van Eenwyk describes dreams as playdates with the unconscious. Regardless of how we define and interpret dreams, they offer us endless opportunities to strengthen our relationship between conscious and unconscious. To begin, we dive into a description of dreams and discuss best practices for recording them. Then, we list several types of dreams and examine how to interpret each category. Finally, we look at different topics of dreams: persona, shadow, animus, and nightmares. In this session you will discover:

– A Jungian approach towards dreams 

– How to work with nightmares 

– How dreams can be seen to express the persona and shadow

Class 2: Lucid Dreaming as a Way for Personal Growth with Clare Johnson

Join Dr. Clare Johnson to learn more about the transformative potential of lucid dreaming and how lucid dreaming relates to your personal journey. According to Clare, lucid dreaming is not only tremendous fun, it’s also an incredible source of healing. Becoming lucid in a dream and engaging consciously with deep unconscious imagery can help people to overcome trauma, cure recurrent nightmares, deepen creativity and learn new skills. When you realize in a dream that you’re dreaming the veil of illusion drops. This sharpens your own consciousness and it may help you find your way in life. In this session, you’ll discover:

– The benefits of lucid dreaming;

– Lucid dreaming as a tool for accessing your own potential;

– How to tap into the creative and healing potential of lucid dreaming.

Class 3: Dream Tending: Allowing the Soul to Inspire Our Personal Journey with Stephen Aizenstat

Join Stephen Aizenstat in this talk about Dream Tending; a technique that Aizenstat developed as a result from decennia of dream research. A central idea in this method is that dreams come to us and have a life of their own. Dreams come from a deeper source and so it’s not only about interpreting a dream or analyzing it, but also about allowing it in its alive actuality to come forward in the room, to be present and listened to. We can explore the felt sense of the dream. This way we connect and engage with the dream. Stephen Aizenstat explains how his approach to dreams is a dream image-centered approach to dreams rather than a person-centered approach. He suggests we follow where the image is taking us and allow the world of imagination to come to us through our dreams. This way we allow the soul to come in our experiences and to inspire our personal journeys. In this session, you’ll discover: 

 – What Dream Tending entails;

 – How to apply Dream Tending technique to your own dream images;

 – How to be inspired by the living images in dreams.

Class 4: Dream Yoga: A Tibetan Approach to Dreams with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Dive into a Tibetan perspective on dreaming and discover how Dream Yoga practices can lead to greater happiness in both our waking and dreaming states. In this Tibetan tradition, lucid dreaming is not an end in itself, but it is an awareness practice you can engage in to achieve liberation. Dream Yoga is a practice that deepens your awareness during the dreams at night, as well as during the day. Understanding how your mind creates these dreams will guide you into an understanding of how the mind forms your waking reality. This understanding can then also allow us to become free as we encounter and eliminate the blocks and limitations to our liberation / enlightened state. Through our dreams we can learn to know ourselves as they allow us to process the day, such as our thoughts, feelings and distorted perceptions. During this session, you’ll discover that:   

– dreams are a processing mechanism

– nighttime and daytime experiences are both important in getting to know yourself 

– inner freedom is the result of Dream Yoga

Class 5: Dream Dancing: Dance New States of Consciousness into Your Life with Tina Stromsted

Tina Stromsted teaches us how to use our bodies to get in touch with the healing and creative energies present in our dreams. Dancing is not only fun, but also offers a soulful and effective way of experiencing dreams on a deeper level. Tina will show us how we can experience different energy forms embodied in our dreams, while we explore figures, objects and dreamscapes through dancing. Jung considered dance as one of the forms of Active Imagination. This technique doesn’t require a deep understanding of dreamwork, making it easy for both the beginner and advanced dreamer to practice. You’ll learn how to bring the energy of the dreams into your daily life and dance more joyfully through your existence. In this session you’ll discover 

-how to bring the energy of the dream into your daily life. 

– how to get in touch with a dream character through dance.

– an experiential way of working with a dream.

Class 6: Asking the Dream for Guidance with Machiel Klerk

Join Jung Platform Founder, Machiel Klerk, in this talk about dream incubation. This is an age-old technique in which you can ask your night time dreams for help and guidance. Asking your dreams for help appears in almost any spiritual tradition around the world and Machiel has distilled a simple and effective technique that can be used in present day. During this session he’ll take us through his personally developed, powerful five-step formula and explain the steps a person can take to, quite literally, live their dream life. During this session you’ll discover:

– How to ask the dream a question

– How to apply dream incubation in your personal journey

– Some guidelines for dreamwork

Class 7: A Native American Way of Being with Dreams with Leslie Gray

Leslie Gray takes us on a fascinating journey into a Native American relationship with dreams. It’s a tradition that is deep, rich, wise, and full of insight that can benefit our contemporary world view. This understanding of dreams goes beyond an interpretative approach, and integrates the dreaming realm with our waking reality. This dream world is alive and filled with ancestors and spirit. Running parallel to our own reality, it is accessible through our waking life. Using ritual, we are able to get in touch with the dream world, and it is this contact that is essential for gathering inspiration. Our relationship to the dreaming realm should not be considered limited to the nighttime, but instead, should be viewed as a continuous practice throughout the day. Our dreams are meaningful and considered to be an important source of knowledge that can help guide us along our journey. In this session you’ll discover:

– A deeper understanding of Native American worldview towards dreams 

– Native American ways of working with a dream 

– The importance of ritual in dreamwork

Class 8: Growing Big Dreams to Manifest Your Heart’s Desire with Robert Moss

Robert Moss provides a Jungian and Shamanic view about how it’s possible to step through the gates of our everyday world, into the Other World, so we can explore the realm of imagination and dreams. He explains what kind of support is available in the dream world and teaches us how to use that support to weather tough times and embark upon traveling adventures without leaving home. Dreams can help us generate a vision for our life that is so rich and strong, that vision will want to take root in our awaken world. When we connect with our dreams, we are able to invite their support to help us realize our wishes, deepest desires, and contribute to bettering the world. Robert Moss demonstrates that it is vitally relevant, more than ever, to cultivate dream support. In this fun and wild dream talk he’ll will provide some examples related to manifesting desires and will give us instructions for materializing our dreams. In this session you will:

– Tap into the world of dream and imagination as a support to realize your wishes 

– How dreams are wishes of the soul. 

– How imagination helps to create your world

Class 9: How To Use Dreams in a Clinical Setting with Leslie Ellis

Therapy has a natural tendency to go deeper with dreamwork. It drops you into the deep-end in a way that feels important, and oftentimes topics are raised that wouldn’t get talked about otherwise. Dreams can change the conversation, but also take you off to a deeper and more lasting conversation. Dr. Leslie Ellis explains that working with dreams is a potent way of bringing you to the heart of the matter, even if you have no experience with dreamwork. Dreams frequently offer a deeper understanding of what’s going on and they can be used diagnostically or to track clinical progress. In addition, when your client feels stuck in life, dreams can help them see the world in a different way. They’ll weave in important memories and offer creative solutions that make sense to the individual and remain relevant to their personal path. In this session, you’ll discover: 

–   Why working with dreams is helpful for clinicians

–   Several ways to engage with dreams 

–   The importance of being open mind when working with dreams

Class 10: Dreams for Death and Living with Monika Wikman

Have you ever met an ancestor in your dream or had a premonition about someone dying? Are you curious about what dreams might have to say about death? Jungian analyst, Monica Wikman, and dreamworker, Machiel Klerk, have a conversation about dreams related to death and how they can help us live our lives to the fullest. Carl Jung called the unconscious the land of the dead. His life calling came to him through a spiritual visitation with ancestors who approached him and were looking for answers to their own questions about the meaning of life. For Jung, this experience altered the course of his life and helped him find his life’s purpose. Death is of supreme importance, it is inevitable, and the end goal of life. We can use death to identify our values and it can help us shape our journey throughout life. Monika shares some of her own experiences around death and her encounters with death dreams. She’ll explain why these experiences have helped her stay alive and live life with more meaning. In this session you’ll discover:

– How dreams can say something about our relationship with death 

– That ancestors do show up in dreams. 

– How exploring death and dreams will make our current live more meaningful

Class 11: A Dramatic Enactment of a Dream with Robert D. Romanyshyn

Psychoanalysis begins with the dream as a wish. A wish presents possibilities that are contrary to fact, suggesting something that might or could be the case, or even presenting a regret about roads not taken. In this context, Robert approaches the dream as the possibility of possibility. He works with the images in dreams as a dress rehearsal for waking life and he describes the process for embodying their images and dramatically enacting their possibilities. This process of embodied enactment invites the dreamer to imagine who and how he or she might be if he or she were to be that image. It is a first step that allows the dream to make sense of the dreamer before he or she tries to make sense of it. Interpretation and amplification build on the embodied enactment of the dream images.  In this session you’ll discover: 

• how to use theater techniques to feel into the dream figures
• how first to experience dream figures before interpreting them
• how to work with dreams figures throughout the day

Class 12: Embodied Dreamwork for a Change in Perspectives with Robert Bosnak

Join Robert Bosnak for tuning into the creative force that is living through us. We can do this by the process of Embodied Imagination ®. This is a creative technique for working with dreams and memories; a technique that Robert pioneered. Robert sees dream images as embodiments of their own intelligences. In his approach one explores multiple images in the dream. Over time, new images or feeling states emerge, and they present a new perspective, found outside habitual consciousness. Connecting with the flow of images is helpful, as this is the creative force that is living through us. During this session, you’ll discover:

– what it means to be embodied by a dream

– how to explore images when re-entering the dream

– holding multiple states/perspectives helps you to be more creative

Bonus Video 1: Introduction to Navigating the Territory of Change with Robert Bosnak

In this 90 minute introduction to Robert Bosnak’s course ‘Navigating the territory of change’, you’ll learn about ways to become more adaptable in a fast-changing world. Bosnak will explore change and adaptation through the lens of depth psychology, alchemy and complexity theory.

Bonus Video 2: Dreamwork Exercise with Robert Bosnak

Robert Bosnak journeys deeper into dream scenes.  During this practical 20 minute exercise, you’ll explore the different perspectives that are present in your own dream, so that a truly creative response can emerge.

Bonus Handout: Tending the Dream Image with a Partner by Stephen Aizenstad 

Aizenstat offers practical steps to help a dream image take on a life of its own.

Bonus Handout: How to Overcome Your Nightmares by Leslie Ellis

This handout is written by trauma expert Dr. Leslie Ellis. She reassures that there is a lot you can do, and some compelling reasons why you should take action to quell your nightmares, especially if you suffer from post-traumatic stress injury.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• engage with your dreams in new, deeper and different ways
• connect with the Soul and tap into its wisdom, creative energy and healing potential
• tap into a varied body of dreamwork and techniques, like Lucid Dreaming, Embodied Imagination and Dream Dancing
• utilize dream incubation and other methods to answer your questions and assist in your personal development journey
• discover and enhance the magic and playfulness of dreams in your own dreamwork
• move beyond dream interpretation and truly engage and relate with dreams in experiential ways