Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

I have a pretty high tolerance for weird. In fact, for most of my life, I’ve been someone who welcomes, and even seeks out, weirdness. I’ve been interested in the paranormal, the supernatural, and altered states since I was a very little girl. (In recent years, as I’ve become more familiar with astrology, I’ve come to believe this may have to do, at least a little, with a stellium in my 8th house.) 

Like many people, I noticed early on how strange dreams were compared to waking life: how time operated differently in dreams, how creatures that don’t seem to exist in waking life can and do in dreams, and how people you may never meet in waking life can end up right there in front of you, as intimates, in dreams. I marveled at what we humans seemed capable of in dreams that we aren’t in waking life: to appear and disappear at will, speak in foreign tongues, fly in the air like birds, levitate, play musical instruments we were never taught how to play, visit eras from before we were born, interact with the dead and the fictional. 

I have been fascinated by my own dreams and dreaming, in general, precisely because dreams are much weirder than waking life.

However, lately, waking life is starting to make less and less sense; especially for those of us old enough to remember a time when life seemed to make sense (even if that was an illusion.) There are many potential reasons for the breakdown of shared, objective reality, and we could debate for hours when that breakdown began. I’m not even sure myself of when I believe the breakdown began: 1995 (when I got my first email account)? 1999 (Y2K)? 2001 (9/11? my parents’ divorce? my marriage?) 2012 (Mayan calendar doomsday predictions)? 2016 (election of Donald Trump)? 

Maybe it’s been breaking down for as long as I have been alive and I only started to realize it slowly over time. Maybe reality is ultimately not even put together at all and therefore cannot be broken down.

Nevertheless, reality seems increasingly strange, out-of-sorts, discombobulated. No?

In 2017, I started listening to as many Terrence McKenna talks as I could. The famed psychedelic philosopher spoke a lot about how the world was going to get weirder and weirder. In fact, he predicted in the 1990s that humans were headed in the direction of not just a technological singularity, but a psychological one. He claimed that as a result, traditional social boundaries and definitions would begin to blur and life and reality itself would get more chaotic and unpredictable. As a result, rational and logical thinking emphasizing sense-making, would serve us less and less. (Check out McKenna’s “Novelty Theory”, especially if you are interested in the topics of time and consciousness.)

I would say that the world we live in today as I write this at the end of April 2026 is weirder than even I — a self-proclaimed proponent of weirdness — could have imagined. And I believe it’s only going to get weirder.

I remember during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, my then-71-year-old-mother and many others repeatedly would ask, “when is it going to get back to normal?” I was very clear in 2020 it was never “going back to normal.” I wonder how many people alive now still believe there is a normal we are going to return to, if there ever was truly an absolute “normal?”

With all that said, I would like to suggest an alternative to waiting for reality to be normal again: Start getting used to navigating the world in its weirdness. Start acclimating to a reality that no longer presents itself in the orderly, predictable ways it once did. 

Start doing this with your dreams.

Our dreams are a wonderful, personal playground for each of us to slowly learn how to be inside a world of experience that presents itself out-of-order, in ways we can’t explain or understand, but that sometimes surprise and delight us precisely because of how unexpected and novel they are.

Most of us accept that our dreams are going to be different from our waking life experiences, and yet inside our dreams, we often still find ourselves confused and reactive. Why? Because we are expecting our dreams to unfold like waking life — in order, as expected.

In Natural Dreamwork, we seek to be in and with our dreams as they are, not as we wish they were.

Have you ever noticed how we constantly seek to recall the narrative of our dreams as an ordered story rather than simply accepting the flow of images as they arrive to us? When we write our dreams down, it’s quite common to make the dream images fit more neatly into our ordered, labelled categories. (ie. The house in your dream that looks like your childhood home, but also isn’t your childhood home, often just becomes “my childhood home” when you write the dream down. Or the man who you don’t see clearly but feels like someone you love and share a life with becomes “my husband” when you write the dream down.)

Many of us have either been born, raised, or conditioned to very quickly turn what we perceive outside of us into a story inside of us that fits so we know how to respond or behave. We do this quickly. We often do this without knowing we are doing it.

In Natural Dreamwork, we endeavor to let go of our conditioned tendency toward sense-making and analysis, labeling and narrative construction. Instead, we return to a dream, this time with more attention to our sensory experience and attunement to our feelings.

In a dreamwork session, we will re-enter a dream and go more slowly. I may ask you: What did you actually see or hear in the dream in this moment? You can take a moment right now to ask yourself this question about a recent dream.

This gets us into the habit of meeting what we perceive as new, rather than already categorized, labelled, and storified. 

Let me give you an example of how easy it is for us to construct a story about a dream. Here is one from a very recent dream of mine. I woke up in the morning and wrote down: “Walked off the bus at camp. Entered the bunk with Jodie. Was so excited to be there! Saw girls in bunk beds, mostly darkened room. Scanned to see who returned. Lynne enters and tells us we need to mop the floors as soon as we get back from ‘installation.’ Elise is there. Looks unhappy.”

In the dream, I was convinced I was back at overnight camp. I was super excited to be there. However, when I considered the actual dream images the next day, I realized all I really experienced with my senses in the dream was entering a darkened room, filled with bunk beds very close together; much closer together than bunk beds ever were at my overnight camp. There were no dressers. Nothing decorative or fun. All the girls were in bed and none looked happy to be there. Only “Lynne,” the supposed counselor spoke, ordering us to mop the floors after some “installation.” What made me think this was summer camp? The more I sat with the images the more it seemed like a prison or an orphanage, not summer camp. The more I sat with what I saw and experienced right there with my senses, the sadder I felt.

In fact, now I’m quite sure the dream wasn’t showing me a return to camp, but rather how I might positivize or idealize experiences that are actually prison-like or dreary.

Meeting dreams where they are as opposed to denying what you perceive and instead constructing narratives is quite difficult to do at the start, but it’s a skill you can develop over time. Once you get enough practice engaging with your sensations and feelings in dreams (in sessions where we work with a specific dream), you start to naturally shift how you respond and behave to events in your subsequent dreams. You aren’t as confused. Or if you are confused, you aren’t as reactive. You take more time to receive the people and events in your dreams before labelling them, categorizing them, or reactively responding to them. You listen more. You look more. You take your time. You learn how to meet experience with new ears and eyes. You quit expecting everything in dreams to proceed as it would in waking life.

Over time, this new way of being in experience bleeds over into waking life, too.

In short, you learn through your own dreams and dreamwork how to navigate life when it appears chaotic, disordered, or weird. You stop expecting life to be some kind of normal, and instead meet it as it already is, and always was: New.