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5-week Series: The Dream Journal--A User’s Guide

The Dream Journal: A User’s Guide

Dreams show us what we haven’t been able to express in words or images in waking life. Attending to dreams opens us to intuition, our own unrecognized thoughts and feelings, and the symbolic mode of thought. But each morning most of us forget the riveting scenes we’ve encountered in the night. In losing our dreams, we lose touch with the deepest sources of creativity, and the “royal road,” as Freud said, to the understanding of our own motivations and choices in life.

This workshop can guide you on the first steps on that road. Even if you never remember your dreams, you can easily master a few simple tricks to catch them before they fly away, and establish a practice for keeping a dream journal, exploring your dreams, and drawing upon them to bring the inner life to creative expression. Participants will share dreams, using a gentle, non-intrusive method for unlocking the metaphors that structure dreams. Along with contemporary theories and ancient cultural traditions, we will study dreams empirically and experientially, trying out techniques for deepening insights, drawing on modern psychology, ancient and diverse cultural traditions, and practical exercises for artists.

Consistent attendance will create a secure space for dream-sharing and help establish your dream-journal practice.

5-week series

Thursdays 7-930pm Nov. 8, 15, 29, Dec. 6, 13 (skip Thanksgiving week)

Cost: $75.00 for the series

Minimum of 6, maximum of 12 participants. Please register by Nov. 1 if possible.

Bernard Welt has taught dream studies courses at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He is the co-author, with Phil King and Kelly Bulkeley, of Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education (State University Press of New York), the first major academic study of the use of dreams in education. A former member of the board of directors of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he is a widely-recognized authority on dreaming and its relation to cinema. He is also the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art, and of poetry in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry.