Part 3 of DreamWork: A Soulcentric Approach
DreamWork is a section of the Real Imaginal online magazine, dedicated to the re-enchantment of Neptune.
The planetary archetype of Neptune engenders dreams and dreaming, both in the sense of the states of consciousness experienced during sleep and those more diffuse, permeable and unfocused of the dayworld, in which imagery and fantasy seep into our ordinary or everyday consciousness. In DreamWork, we will explore various ideas about and experiences of dreaming, with an open mind which honors Neptune’s infinite ocean of potentiality, and the seemingly inexhaustible variegation of meaning contained within imagery itself.
DreamWork honors dreams as a potent way of engaging with the imaginal realms, the archetypal and creative, and dreams may even provide a portal to conversation with the vast Earth Community, the greater-than-human world. The field of ecopsychology honors dreams as a doorway to place, a way of connecting our inner geography with the outer topography of Home, our planet Earth, through our shared depths of psyche.
This is the final installment of the DreamWork: A Soulcentric Approach series, in which we explore the soulcentric orientation to dreams set forth by the depth ecopsychologist Bill Plotkin. Its main principle—which can be challenging—requires setting aside the primacy of the ego, that conscious sense of self which seeks to narrate our individual lives, in order to listen for a more profound patterning, an often strange or foreign nibbling of longing and desire emerging from a deeper dimension. In the soulcentric approach, we are invited to a conversation with soul, which promises to disrupt the middleworld ambitions and opinions of our ordinary sense of self and personal trajectory.[1]
Continuing with the dreamwork experience recounted in Part 2, in which a series of
synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) led me to live beside a river of which I first dreamed, I notice here the temptation to assign myself—my ego—all the agency. As if these are “my dreams,” as if I knew all along what was going to happen if I ever met this river. In fact, it took me several months to recognize the dream river as the Navarro River, alongside which I came to live for about 18 months. The trees were what alerted me to the connection, by eliciting the same feeling tone as in the dreams.
As James Hillman critiques a typical psychotherapeutic approach to dreams in which Freud’s via regia (royal road) to the unconscious “has become a straight one-way street of all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious towards the ego’s city,” we choose, with Hillman, “to face the other way” and enter the twilit wilderness of soul.
beating hearts. To enter the interiority of dreams seems to require being within its living reality, just as one would seek to understand dayworld experiences within their greater contexts and not isolate events in an attempt to understand them.