*Toko-pa Turner* # Progressive Summary Dreaming is the path of life-force. It is the mounting of rebellion from within. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Preface Metaphor is the biological language of connection. > We are a gentle multitude, mounting a revolution from within. ## Introduction > Every night, we fall asleep, dropping our allegiances to the physical world, and an alternate version of ourselves awakens on the other side. We step into a dreaming body, the only vessel that can move in the mercurial dimension of symbols and story. It is a kind of nightly death to leave behind the weight of bones and flesh, abandoning the storylines of our lives. > ... there is a friend who lives within and around us, called Wisdom, who patterns our dreams with intent to pull us toward our unique destiny. That destiny is a smaller pattern that fits into the larger pattern of nature itself. In other words, dreams are nature, naturing through us. ## Chapter 1 - The Imaginal World The book's title is a nod to Taoism. Just like the Tao, dreaming is nature's way. To be guided by one's dreams is to work with nature effortlessly. The Sufis believed that there are 3 realities. Our everyday physical reality, an imaginal real, and the Beloved (or Divine, nature, God, etc). The imaginal realm of symbols and metaphor is where we can encounter the Beloved. > Though it is nearer to us than our own blood, we cannot enter the Divine realm directly because it is formless—and we are not. But when we slip into our dreaming bodies, we can meet its emissaries in this middle realm. Dreams are the act and evidence of reciprocity between our sacred and physical realities. They are the fruits of our exchange, carrying the seeds of novelty and healing within them. When these seeds are planted, they have the power to alter the nature of physical reality. If we have the presence to see it, signs of the sacred are written into every inch of the phenomenal world. > > Mystics, shamans, and artists have always travelled to and from this “country of nowhere” to retrieve healing images, songs, and visions to guide and inspire others. But as rationalism took hold of our collective imagination, fewer and fewer made this challenging voyage. We gradually started forgetting how or why to make the journey, and our own world grew fractured and exhausted. In times of isolation, loneliness, and hardship, we can still hear the Imaginal World calling us back, luring us through dreams to the living edge of discovery, meaning, and purpose. > Though we tend to think of dreamwork as interpreting our nocturnal visions, I’d like us to hold a broader definition: **Dreamwork is the practice of a dynamic reciprocity between matter and spirit.** In this way, our concept of dreaming extends beyond personal psychology into the animate, unseen world behind this one. I emphasize practice in this definition because dreamwork is a devotional artform. There will always be more to learn (and unlearn). But as we reach out to the mystery, it is amazing to discover that it reaches back! Whether that reply comes in the form of a new dream building upon our last understanding, synchronicities that affirm our direction, or signs from nature that we are onto something, we can feel that a momentum is underway. Like any good conversation, that dynamism is only kept alive by a reciprocity of attentiveness. > Out of our need to belong, we learn to hide what’s magical in us to survive in the modern world. We set up camp on the side of materialism and eventually we begin to believe there is nothing beyond our clocks and calendars, careers and capitalism. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these pursuits but when materialism becomes our fundamental ideology, it atrophies the imagination. Seen through this lens, forgetting is a choice. It is a passive choice, but a choice nonetheless. ### The Imaginal World is not an ATM machine > Even with respectful treatment, dreams in the abstracted context and language of academia are considered puzzles to be analyzed and interpreted. This is what I call the “acquisitional approach” to dreamwork. Not unlike treating nature as a resource to be exploited for profit, the underlying question is typically “What does it mean for me?” as if in analyzing a dream correctly we should get a payoff in the form of advice or answers. Rather than treating the Imaginal World like an ATM machine or fortune cookie, I believe we need to consider that our dreams possess their own aliveness. We need to start asking what they want and need from us. ### Acknowledge the ways you are supported > In a time of great hardship in my own life, I met an intuitive who told me that instead of wishing for a torrent of support, I should honour the trickle. She told me that the very practice of appreciation is what grows the trickle into a rivulet, a rivulet into a stream, the stream into a river, and finally the torrent I’d been wishing for. In cultivating a relationship with the Imaginal, there is no gesture more powerful than to acknowledge in tangible ways how your questions are being answered. Even if that answer comes in the form of a small affirmation, do something to celebrate and recognize this magic. In Chapter 12: Rituals and Enactments, we’ll explore rituals and practices for following our dream breadcrumbs, but remember that any conversation of depth needs responsiveness from both sides to stay engaged. It is this reciprocity that strengthens magic, so try not to drop this thread. Or if you do, just pick it back up again. ### Rebellion from within > By redirecting even a measure of your devotion from external life to the imaginal, you are contributing to the shifting of power in the world. You are enacting a revolution from within. > By choosing to enter into kinship with your dreams, you will come to recognize a deeper authority than the ones of the dominant culture. As a result, you will likely experience erosion in your ability to tolerate hierarchical structures of power. And you will have to navigate their mighty and tenacious counterparts within you that try to keep you from realizing your origins. You will encounter the ways in which your life force has been inhibited, thwarted, co-opted, or neglected. As you unlearn the habits and conditions that led to these losses, so too will you receive guidance, synchronicity, and inspiration as your rewards. ### Thinking relationally > Thinking relationally is the great aptitude needed in our times. One of the skills that comes directly out of dreamwork is our ability to find cohesion in seemingly disparate narratives, or between contrary symbols. With enough practice, we start looking for symbiosis in all matters—seeing through the lens of mutualism. We discover that what is needed by the other is essential to our own wellbeing, and vice versa. Soul doesn’t end with the perimeters of your own body, it is attached by invisible arteries to the world’s soul. ### Evolution of planetary consciousness > We can think of the personal psyche like a node in a vast ecology of interconnected psyches. The figures we meet in our dreams are the inhabitants of this world, giving shape to the unseen forces thrumming behind the visible surface of all life. Those symbols are the counterparts of the experiences we have in waking-life, and they are also representations of ancient patterns, and emergent phenomena from the cooperative sums and differences of that ecopsyche. Understood properly, our dreams are meant to guide not only our personal growth, but the evolution of planetary consciousness. ## Chapter 2 - Wisdom of Sophia > “Wisdom is a knower in you,” says my old friend and Jungian analyst, J. Gary Sparks. “Not something that you know, something that knows you. There’s a reversal of centrality.”⁠ > That Sophia is feminine is one of her most compelling qualities. Her gender is revolutionary in that it challenges us, after 2,000 years of abolition by biblical patriarchy, to associate the feminine with the divine. > The written history of Sophia dates back at least 2,500 years, though scholars believe we can find her by many names revered in much older cultures, such as the ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis, Ruha d'Qudsha, the Goddess of the Iraqi Mandaeans, and the Hindu Goddess of Wisdom, Saraswati. Appearing in early Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Alchemy, Sophia is one of the most powerful figures in divinity. But over the centuries, her name and image have been so actively suppressed that she is also the least known. > You could say that Sophia is the architect behind the narrative unfolding of our dreams, leading us into our next becoming. Through the images in dreams, Wisdom gives form to the obstacles, limitations and problems in our life, so that we can transcend them. The scriptures mention Sophia as God's feminine co-creator. She is depicted under God's left armpit in Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. But she has been denigrated by patriarchal forces. > Sophia reaches out to us in symbols and synchronicity, and we reach back to her through dreamwork and contemplation. > I think what’s really being asked of us in moments of crisis is to discover what wants to be given a good death. To acknowledge, grieve, and find a way to say goodbye to the old landscape of your life. To move forward and discover its new shape. To find what new things, however tiny and fragile, want to live in its wake. See [[How to make good ruins - Questions from Dougald Hine]]. ### Composting old stories > When a story we tell about who we are gets old, we feel a growing sense of ennui about its repetitiveness. We may hear ourselves telling the story to someone new and feel as if we’re speaking from a script that’s lost its meaning. This is how we know that something is ready to be composted, sent back to the primordial soil to fertilize our new story sprouts. ### Wisdom is the path of paradox > Wisdom cannot be seen or proven, like knowledge can. We don’t arrive at it through a chain of logic, so we can’t explain the route for someone else to follow. Wisdom appears of her own accord and can only be substantiated in our embodied resonance. Through a delicate alchemy of focus and receptiveness, Wisdom delivers us from the roiling of opposites into paradox. She gives us the ability to embrace bothness, releasing the need for a duel between contraries, so we can rest in their symmetry. From this relational ground comes a surge of energy, like picking up a scent to better track the way of the world. > Following Wisdom can be disruptive and arduous at times, especially when it takes us down unconventional paths. Bushwhacking through the brambles of the unorthodox way, one can lose faith in the unseen, especially when the route grows painful, exhausting, or lonely. But as we cut the path, it is also shaping us into the kind of person who is called wise. > Wisdom is synonymous with the Way. It is that which is pulling our lives toward purpose. We always have a choice to walk that path, or not. We are never punished for leaving it behind for a time, or prevented from renewing our commitment to it. ## Chapter 3 - Orientation in the Otherworld ### Resisting the dominant worldview > The dominant attitude toward dreams is so banal and dismissive, yet we rarely consider challenging those inherited beliefs. In large part this is because capitalism is set up to keep us distracted and scrambling to survive. On another level, I think we know that if we valued the imaginal life even half as much as the physical one, the whole structure of our world would tremble, because upon those materialist foundations a million other ideas are built. In fact, whole civilizations are constructed upon these mundane cornerstones, and we live in stacked compartments along their paved roadways. ### Wilderness of dreams > The Dreaming Way is a living ecology of ideas and forms that are in a constant flux of exchange, erosion, emergence, and decline. In this place of seeming disorder, this country of nowhere—with no roads, no cities, no rules—we have a chance to discover the true source of power and originality. In this unconstrained wilderness, dreams unfold in a slow-motion music of cosmic cycles, leaving glacial striations in the bedrock of who we are. Like original instructions from a greater intelligence, we can follow those patterns of wisdom to bring our lives into harmony with the Way. # Quotes >From below the tree eats earth and drinks water through its roots. From above it partakes of fire and breathes air through its leaves. Every tree is a cosmic pole grounding Heaven in the soil of Earth and inspiring in Earth the soul of Heaven… A tree has no itinerary or destination. What better guide could there be on the pathless path – which leads not from here to there, but from nowhere to everywhere. >– Pir Zia Inayat-Khan (https://sufinz.com/nature/) > The living edge of renewal requires us to shed anything that hinders life. > Healing is not linear but more like orbiting core wounds, looking at them from shifting perspectives, gaining distance and discernment on each turn of the circle. > right rhythm with the rest of nature. # References