Honoring Dreams as Sacred Gifts
Rev. Bonnie Tarwater leads weekly dream groups and workshops and is also available for individual dream sessions.
There are many ways to work with dreams, and I support and use many different techniques. There may be more than one meaning to every dream, and because dreams come to teach us what we do not necessarily know about ourselves, we embark on the hero’s and/or heroine’s inner journey. Before we begin, I give you my blessing and congratulate you on your courage to begin this inner journey of the sacred and of your soul.
As a minister, I use God language when people are open to it, and I have also studied Jungian dream theory and many different dream traditions. I encourage using all the world’s religious stories, myths, metaphors, archetypes, and symbols for our individual and collective healing and consciousness raising.
Three Suggestions for Honoring Dreams
Keep a dream journal. Write and/or draw your dreams regularly. Keep a journal next to your bed and record your dreams immediately upon waking, or use a tape recorder or phone audio to “catch” the dream. If possible, bring written copies of your recent dream for the group to read as well as hear. Making drawings of dreams is often even better than words, for as Carl Jung wrote, “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
Recognize the value of all dreams. There are many different kinds of dreams, and even the smallest dream fragment is worthy of our attention. Dreams come for healing, especially nightmares.
Create emotional and spiritual safety. Confidentiality is essential in the dream group, as is the appreciation that only the dreamer can truly know what their symbols mean. Dreams are gifts and messages from God, our higher self, or whatever language feels comfortable. Whatever our beliefs, the more we honor our dreams, the more insights they will give us. Sharing dreams in small groups can be a profound source of intimacy and sacred experience.
The Dream Group Process
Each dream group begins with a short check-in and ends with a check-out, inviting everyone to share what they are feeling. We suggest no “cross-talk” during check-ins, check-outs, or dream sharing. Everyone is invited to share a recent dream, and then we honor each dream individually by inviting its characters and symbols into our sacred circle and interacting with them.
We begin and close with a prayer and/or meditation in order to invite holy blessings on our dreams and on our time together.
The Sacred Nature of Dreams
Dreams and visions yearn to be known, interacted with, and even played with. If God is the creative force and if God is love, then what a gift of love and creativity dreams offer. The bringer of dreams is the creative improviser extraordinaire! All of life dreams. If God is a process and in relationship with us, then God seems to want to play with those who are awake!
“…we tell ourselves stories, make-believe stories, we create our own versions of other people’s stories, we pretend to be people we admire and people we fear, we imagine what it would be like to get things we desire most, we revisit (in a safe space) recent experiences that were strange, disturbing, or scary, we mischievously overturn the many rules that burden us in our ‘serious’ lives, and we envision what life might hold for us as we grow into the future.”
— Visions of the Night by Kelly Bulkeley
God and dreams are both relational, luring us not only to survive but to thrive. Dreams are God’s messages, luring us to adventure, zest, truth, beauty, peace, and love. All visual and performing arts are inspired by dreams—both day and night dreams, visions, and imaginations.
Honoring dreams helps us celebrate the universe as creative, interrelational, and dynamic. It opens us to a new future. Healing comes when we can take the pain of our past and transform it into a new life story.
In process theology, God is relational—present in every moment of our lives and in all entities and levels of being. The world is interconnected, in effect a giant ecosystem where what harms or blesses one, harms or blesses all. God feels everything with every life form, and as my teacher John B. Cobb says, “To love God is to attend to what God is doing in the world, especially in ourselves. It also means to open ourselves so that God may work more effectively in us.”
Dreams are an ancient spiritual practice whose time has come again.