Whenever I am invited to tell my origin story as it relates to dreams and dreamwork, I always start with the psychic stuff because that is how I ended up being someone who studies dreams and works with dreamers professionally. The story I tell starts around 2012 when I confronted a precognitive dream I couldn’t ignore or deny. However, the full story starts way earlier; when I was a child, interested and curious at a very young age in the paranormal. I wrote a short lyric essay in 2019 about being as young as six and seeing what may or may not have been a ghost in my bedroom. That’s one of my earliest memories of a personal experience with the unknown or uncanny. There have been others.
I don’t know which came first: my experiences or my curiosity. Sometimes I wonder if my curiosity is in fact what draws the experiences to me.
What I do know now is that this was always my work, if not always my job — confronting the images, sounds, smells, feelings, and encounters we can’t make immediate sense of. I have always been drawn to the liminal; if not always comfortable there. What I now understand is that I have an unusual tolerance for, and a deep interest in such states, as well as a curiosity about others who do, too.
I just didn’t know this or accept it as my professional work or purpose until midlife. I also believe that even if I had known it as my purpose, I was not ready for it until now.
Sometimes I still don’t feel ready for it — for example, late at night when a creepy image makes its way into my hypnagogic state, or in the middle of the night when a particularly disturbing dream encounter wakes me up and reality seem unstable, or when someone brings me their own destabilizing image or encounter and I need to dig deep to implement my own spiritual practices to feel safe and calm enough to hold it with them.
That said, part of my initiation into this work with liminal states of consciousness and liminality in general has been and still is accepting my own limitations, and then choosing to show up as humble and as transparent as I can in my interactions with others.
What I humbly offer you today with caution and care is that if you are someone who has had unexplainable experiences with material entities or nonhuman intelligence, or if you have received seemingly telepathic images while awake or asleep, or if you suspect you may have slipped, so to speak, out of or in between linear time, dreamwork with an empathetic, open-minded practitioner may enable you to perceive more subtly and feel more deeply in a way that contributes to discernment. This has been my own experience, and I offer this to you completely from my own experience.
To be clear: This idea is not in the “Natural Dreamwork handbook”. (Fwiw, there is no Natural Dreamwork handbook. Ours is a rigorous hands-on training in a mentoring / apprenticeship model.)
However, what I have discovered for myself, on my own, is that dreamwork teaches discernment through deep sensing and feeling — and this has been extraordinarily useful and comforting to me over the last many years as I have confronted my own shifting beliefs about reality, consciousness, identity, form, and lived experience.
It’s not just Natural Dreamwork that’s contributed to my improving ability to discern what is true or good or healthy for me, but also my study of Kabbalah and my developing relationship with prayer and the Divine. However, for today, I want to focus on dreamwork because I do think Natural Dreamwork, in particular, has been beneficial to me in practical, lived, and sustainable ways as I explore topics like consciousness, psi, and the Phenomenon.
In my experience, dreamwork is not really spoken about very often in the UAP community, where I believe it could be supportive to experiencers in their processing of images and encounters, as well as to heal from them, if and when necessary.
Through recalling and working with dream material (often with the help of a supportive dreamwork practitioner who companions me in my personal inquiry, rather than interprets or analyzes my experience), I have come to understand how my own attempts at sensemaking of such experiences sometimes derail my inquiry and processing, rather than further it.
I have learned better how to slow down and take in with my senses what is in front of me or around me — both in waking life and in dreams — and allow those sensations and feelings to move through me before trying to make logical sense or meaning out of it. Admittedly, this is not as easy to do with distant (and possibly unreliable) memories as it is with recent dreams I have recalled or recent waking life encounters. However, I still believe that this work also positively impacts how I relate to memories of supernatural encounters from the past, or natural encounters that have left me with some lingering sense of confusion, unease, or lack of resolution or closure.
I have learned through my dreamwork practice that my first “interpretation” or “understanding” of a person, a sound, a vision, an encounter, or an environment has historically been reactive and rooted in storymaking I was not aware of. This is a common human tendency.
Over time, I have become more skilled at noticing when I am reacting, and then allowing myself to re-orient and stay with an encounter long enough to sense or feel more deeply into what is I am actually perceiving as opposed to what I think I already know about what is happening.
That “knowing” is often based on a story or belief about what I am perceiving rather than the sense or feeling of the present moment.
Five years after starting to work my dreams with a Natural Dreamwork practitioner on a regular basis (2x a month), I also am starting to be able to discern better for myself what feels in my body, in my senses like a truth (for me) in the moment versus a reaction to a story about what is happening. I am not talking about an absolute truth, mind you. There is a whole philosophical conversation to be had on that topic alone.
I am talking about a relative truth that enables me to ground in what is here for me physically, sensorially, atmospherically, and emotionally, while still also understanding that “truth” for human beings is always contextual. It’s near impossible for any of us to experience pure reality without context. (Another fun philosophical discussion for another time.)
Rather than needing to land on absolute certainty before healing or growth, I can choose to sense and feel deeply into whatever is present for me in the moment and benefit from that deep relational self-knowledge.
This type of posture toward dreams, paranormal experiences (including out-of-body and near-death experiences), and the mystical or unexplainable has come slowly via my work with dreams in sessions and on my own, as well as through embodiment practices and contemplative work aimed toward slowing down and tuning in. It is still very much a work in progress.
So much of the pain felt by those of us who have had nonordinary experiences or encounters has to do with not being listened to, not being believed, and not being sure ourselves of what occurred and what to do with it after. What can be supportive and healing in the face of that is a kind of embodied discernment, a willingness to trust what one senses and feels in this moment, and acceptance that one may never know the absolute truth of what happened, but can still integrate it.
Dreamwork can help you learn better for yourself what in particular for you leads to lack of trust of oneself and one’s ability to perceive what is true in any given moment, and what in particular for you enables you to get better at discernment. Dreamwork also encourages individuals to learn what conditions, qualities, and atmospheres enable them to stay embodied and dwell longer in feelings, and which do not. These conditions and qualities can then be explored in waking life, as well.
We do this work through and using new dreams, not old dreams, not memories. My belief is that our new dreams know that we are doing this type of work and supply us with dreams that can help us explore more deeply whatever it is you need for your own growth and healing at this time.
If you’re curious about this particular topic, or you want to know for yourself how Natural Dreamwork may be supportive to you as someone who has had an anomalous experience, please feel free to be in touch via the Contact Form. You can also read more about Natural Dreamwork and the introductory package I offer.
