Dreams & Your Personal Journey II

Course Description

Dreams can provide guidance in our life. They help us deal with the challenges of daily life and carry insights and experiences that prompt our personal development.

But how do we fully relate to these nightly experiences? What do dreams reveal about our day-to-day life and our personal growth? How can we make sense of these, sometimes disturbing, images? How do we embody dream images and get to a bodily sense of our way forward? And what are the benefits of lucid dreaming?

Our 15 dream experts will share their unique ways of being with a dream. The talks will be full of examples and practical tools.

What these teachers will illustrate is that dreams are valuable experiences. Each teacher offers a perspective or a technique to work with a dream. All these approaches, you can apply to yourself with the aim that you can find and walk on your own path in life.

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 Part II. This course is a remastering of that summit.

The classes are available now.

This course is ideal if you:

• sense the power of dreams
• want to retrieve the dream’s wisdom about your life
• are drawn to experience the reality of the dream, dream people and dream images
• want to learn about different approaches to dream work

Course Overview

Class 1: Dream Guidance with Machiel Klerk

Join Jung Platform founder Machiel Klerk in this inspiring talk on dream guidance. Machiel founded the Jung Platform because of a guiding night-time dream he once had. He learned that you need not only wait for receiving guidance. You can, proactively ask the dream, for support. The practice of asking your dreams for guidance can be found in almost every spiritual tradition around the world. 

Machiel Klerk has distilled an easy and effective five-step approach that he also describes in his book Dream Guidance. The Compassionate Friend, who lives in all of us, wants to help, and offers help when we ask for it. Ask and you shall be given, ask better questions and you get better answers! The effectiveness of this method is figuring out what is alive in you and secondly, which questions want to be asked. Listening to and working with those dream responses can help you—quite literally—to live your dream life. During this session, you’ll discover:

• How dreams can provide guidance on your personal journey
• How to nurture the relationship with the Compassionate Friend through dreams, and
• The importance of the question

Class 2: Dreams, Death and the Ancestors with Monika Wikman

What do dreams reveal about death? In this beautiful conversation, Monika Wikman and Machiel Klerk journey into the great mystery of death. They explore what dreams might be revealing about death and what we might experience after we cross the great threshold of death. 

For many people, the encounter in dreams with their ancestors are among the most impactful dreams of their lives. Monika and Machiel talk from their own experiences and that of their patients’ who have met their ancestors in their dreams.

Dreams also seem, sometimes, to announce when people are about to depart to the other world. The encounter with death and the revelations that come from the dream can give one the courage to live life fully. During this session, you’ll discover:

• that deceased family members and friends might show up in our dreams
• that dreams can possibly reveal elements of life after death, and
• that life becomes more meaningful and valuable by learning about death through dreams.

Class 3: Lucid Dreaming with Robert Waggoner

A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming. In Tibetan Buddhism, lucid dreaming is considered as one of six paths to enlightenment. In lucid dreaming, you receive an opportunity to interact with dream figures and the larger awareness behind the dream landscape, asking for guidance and support. 

Join Robert Waggoner in his extraordinary journey into the world of lucid dreaming. Robert shows how once you become aware of your lucidity in a dream, you can begin exploring the dream landscape. In his personal experience, Robert has traveled beyond the dream, reaching into the larger awareness that is behind it. In this fascinating conversation, you will learn how a dream reality is constructed and how these very principles of the dream world can be used in your daily life. A  larger, meaningful, and fulfilling life awaits you. During this session, you’ll discover:

• How lucid dreaming can help you become more conscious in daily life
• How you can learn more about the nature of reality when lucid in the dream, and
• How to elicit support from the dream for personal development

Class 4: Mythic Dreaming with Michael Meade

Dreams are personal myths and myths are collective dreams. Join Michael Meade in this session on mythic dreaming where he shares some of his personal ways of relating and being with dreams and how personal dreams and collective myths reinforce each other. 

Michael has had a long-standing and deep relationship with his dreams. He weaves, in his unique poetic way, the insights from this relationship about myths into the personal life of the dreamer. However, he also highlights the power and responsibility of the individual dreamer to help and contribute to the collective myth and dream. As you would see in this session, we are deeply interconnected with the tapestry of life; our personal dreams are one among the myriad traits that are woven into this tapestry. During this session, you’ll discover:

• How dreams are personal myths
• How an individual life can help and heal the collective, and
• Personal ways of Michael Meade of being with dreams

Class 5: Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams with Leslie Ellis

Join Leslie Ellis in this talk on somatic dreamwork with a method called focusing. Focusing looks for a felt-sense in the body, which is the body’s take on any aspect of our lives. This felt-sense is an ideal way to explore dreams as they unfold. It is a sensing that is turned inward to find what’s present and what new aspect wants to come forward. 

Eugene Gendlin developed the focusing method and published a book on its application to dreamwork. Leslie Ellis has decades of clinical experience integrating focusing and dreamwork methods with the work of other contemporary pioneers in the field of dreamwork. 

Dreamwork and focusing are both doorways to the body’s immense and subtle implicit knowledge. This approach to dreams brings new possibilities into our full-bodied lives. During this session, you’ll discover:

• Benefits of somatic dreamwork
• How dreamwork helps us to connect with something outside of our awareness 
• A few simple guidelines to somatic working with dreams on your own

Class 6: Dream Tending with Steve Aizenstat

Join Stephen Aizenstat in this talk on Dream Tending, a technique he pioneered. The central idea is that dreams come to us and have a life of their own. Stephen Aizenstat will show that dreamwork is 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.

This approach to dreams is a dream image-centered approach; that is, we follow where the image is taking us and allow the world of imagination to come to us through our dreams. With this technique, we learn to connect and engage with the dream. And, we allow the soul to come in our experiences and to inspire our personal journeys. During this session you’ll discover:

• What Dream Tending is
• How to apply Dream Tending technique to your own dream images
• How to engage with the soul expressing itself through dreams

Class 7: Dream: The Life of the Soul with Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore believes that dreaming is another kind of living—one, which might be closer to who we are than the waking life is. Dreams get to the essence, the real conflicts and desires that define us. For Moore, working with dreams is not an aid to successful living. It is about becoming acquainted with our essence as it unfolds during the process. This essence can be called the soul. In a dream, the soul is working out its materials, its purpose. Therefore, dream work is much similar to the process an alchemist uses in contemplating long and deeply on the materials of the world, held for this purpose in his or her vessel. We look deeply into our dreams to glimpse narratives and images that unveil for us, ourselves. In that way, dreams are unlike waking life—they are episodic, varying in their settings and narratives every night. Life, on the other hand, has a more obvious and surface continuity. And yet, our essence (soul) unfolds in both realms as we will see in this session. During this session, you’ll discover:

• How dreams might be even more real than daily life
• How to tend to the soul in dreams and daily life
• Some guidelines for thinking about dreams that can enrich your life

Class 8: Dreamwork to Inspire Creativity with Kim Gillingham

In this session, we will explore the practice of creative dream work with Kim Gillingham. Building upon the foundational work of Marion Woodman, creative dream work stands as the threshold where creative and inner work (personal development) meet. The practice allows you to be inspired by dreams to be more creative in any endeavor that you are engaged in.
In her extensive work with Hollywood actors, Kim Gillingham has used dream work to help her clients become better at their art. She will share some of these ways, including the methodology used by the great Stanislavski who sought a reliable and repeatable way to bring an artist into a creative state, to inspire creativity. We will work with some simple practices including breathwork, sounding, and subtle movements to enter a mindful state, from which to engage creatively with the dream.
The session will also include a brief experiential creative dream work practice. You can bring along a dream image that you would like to explore, a journal, and some basic art supplies (pastels, colored pencils, paint, etc), to this session.During this session, you’ll discover:

• How to work with dreams in the creative process
• How to get in a creative state outside the dream
• Practical tools to work creatively with your own dream

Class 9: Dreams and the Dark Night of the Soul with Ashok Bedi

In life, we often come across crossroads where we must make difficult choices and crucial decisions that can have a profound impact. As helpful as conscious deliberation can be, in these crucial moments, it may yield unsatisfactory results, and we find ourselves seeking additional guidance.

It is in these dark nights of the soul, where even experts and mentors can’t help us, that we must be willing to listen to the whispers of the soul. There, in the deep recesses of the Unconscious, lies our archetypal repository that holds profound insight and wisdom, which informs the soul. Join Ashok Bedi as he takes us on a journey to this world of the soul. Bedi takes inspiration from Indian philosophy to explain the nature of the soul and how it communicates to us from its depths, and the Vedic concept of Brahman awareness—the infinite, eternal truth that underlies all existence—which is believed to take many different forms, including the form of dreams. During this session, you’ll discover:

• Dreams can help us during the dark nights of the soul
• Jungian and Indian perspective on dreams and the soul
• Recognition of dreams as a manifestation of the Brahman awareness

Class 10: Embodied Imagination with Robert Bosnak

Join this session with Robert Bosnak to tune into the creative spirit that is living through us. We can do this by the process of Embodied Imagination, a technique that Robert pioneered, which can be applied to dreams.
Robert sees dream images as embodiments of their own intelligences. Using this approach, we are encouraged to explore multiple images in the dream. The embodiment of images connects us to the creative force that is living through us. Over time, new images or feeling states will emerge. They present a new perspective that is found outside the habitual consciousness.
Embodied Dreamwork helps us to find new ways of being in the world in a creative and truly original way. That is our personal journey. During this session, you’ll discover:

• What embodied imagination is
• How to explore images and embody them
• How true creativity and originality are sparked by dreamwork

Class 11: Dreamwork: How to Become An Agent of Change with Robert Romanyshyn

In this interview, Robert Romanyshyn explores how historical events, such as the pandemic and the current climate crisis, show up and speak to people in their dreams. He will also ask us to consider historical events as collective dreams of humanity.
These two fascinating ideas, unraveled in this interview, will take you on an important inward and outward journey. A key theme of this class is to invert our usual relation to dreams; that is, from being the dreamer to being dreamed by the dream. It also elaborates how we can be agents in service to the dream world. Then we must move from knowing about the dream to becoming figures and landscapes of the dream world, which offers new possibilities in our approach to these crises.During this session, you’ll discover:

• That outer nature and inner nature are connected
• How we can become agents of change by experiencing the dream consciousness
• How events in the world could be manifestations of the dream

Class 12: Jungian Dreamwork with Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee

Dreams show us the secrets we keep from ourselves. They are a keyhole that allows us to peer into the recesses of our inner world. A dream provides a holographic view of the psychic situation, allowing us to see it from the point of view of the unconscious. Even a brief, seemingly unimportant dream can yield rich insights.

Deborah Stewart, Joseph Lee, and Lisa Marchiano from the popular podcast This Jungian Life will discuss essential principles of Jungian dream interpretation. They’ll demonstrate how to apply these principles by interpreting in-depth, three dreams submitted by Jung Platform users. During this session, you’ll discover:

• Some Jungian dream work principles
• How to view a dream from the perspective of the unconscious
• That all dreams are relevant

Class 13: The Dream People Are Waiting for You with Robert Moss

In this session, you will have the opportunity to experience shamanic lucid dreaming as Robert Moss teaches it.

Robert discusses the “turning-point dreams” in our lives—dreams that enable us to reset our inner compass or may give us the courage and coordinates to follow an unexpected path. He recounts the BIG turning-point dream that unfolded for him when he re-entered an unsatisfactory dream lucidly. He found himself invited to undergo an indigenous ritual of “requickening” that confirmed his calling to follow the path of a dream teacher. He may invite you to enter a similar tent of vision, in a lucid dream journey fueled by shamanic drumming, to confirm and follow your own path with heart. During this session, you’ll discover:

• A shamanic experience to follow your own path more deeply
• How to lucidly re-enter a dream—and how helpful that is
• How your dreams can help you discover and connect with your calling

Bonus Video 1: Tending to the Dream Image with Stephen Aizenstat

In this short video clip Stephen Aizenstat offers an exercise for working with the living image. Using his suggestions, you can engage with any image. A great tool to work with your dreams.

Bonus Video 2: Poetry from a Dream Image by Kala Ramesh

Kala Ramesh is a poet, editor, and anthologist from India. In this short video clip she recites a poem that she dreamed entirely. She only had to add punctuation when waking up. This video also includes a short interview with her.

Bonus Handout: Embodied Imagination Exercise by Robert Bosnak

Work with a fresh dream in a fresh way. Feel into the Other and Self through a dream.

Bonus Handout: Focusing and Dreamwork by Leslie Ellis

Leslie offers a summary of Eugene Gendlin’s somatic approach to dreamwork