Dear Dream Tending Community,
Dreams contain inherent healing properties. Our bodies contain innate healing wisdom and abilities. When we tend dream images as Medicines of the Soul, we enter into a relationship that honors the exchange of wisdom between our body’s inner healer and the story of the wounded image. Cultivating a dream healing practice can expand our capacity to more deeply understand the nature of a wound and to discover what actions are needed for healing. We learn to recognize the healing potential contained within the wounded image.
When wounded, broken, or sick dream images or landscapes visit during the night, they share the story of their wounding while also offering unique insight about our body. The images contain a hint of the cure. Treating the image and self with dream guided interventions supports the resilience and healing process of both dreamer and dream image.
I distinctly remember in Dream Tending Certificate I when Dr. Aizenstat said, “The body is always dreaming.” I immediately stopped taking notes and listened with every fiber of my being. His words, resonated throughout my body, landing in my heart-space. In my work as a physical therapist, clients often share imagery or dreams associated with their injuries. Yes! Of course! The body IS always dreaming! His words made perfect sense.
After a bicycle accident several years ago, I experienced multiple serious and lingering injuries. Images of wounded animals and buildings with crumbling, failing foundations began to visit in dreamtime. One very significant image that captured my curiosity was Puppy with Wounded Hip. A veterinarian who explained Puppy’s wound was also very present.
During my dream tending praxis, I invited Puppy with Wounded Hip and Veterinarian to meet me in the dreamscape in Veterinarian’s office. While compassionately tending these images, I gained a deeper understanding of Puppy’s wound. I listened carefully to what Puppy needed to heal: warmth, hip massage with pain reducing salve, gentle walks, and rest. With Veterinarian’s guidance, I gently applied the treatment to Puppy and observed Puppy’s responses. Puppy could now stand without pain, curl up with ease, and enter into restful sleep.
In ordinary reality, I was experiencing hip joint pain and interrupted sleep. For the next week of my dream healing praxis, I applied the same remedy to my own body as well as to Puppy. We took gentle walks together. Each day, I took note of how my body responded and how Puppy responded. We both experienced signs and sensations of healing. Inspired by this dream healing experience, I pursued further treatment options and engaged in restorative self-care activities.
The next time a wounded, injured, broken, sick, or damaged image or landscape visits, here are some ideas for tending these dreams and exploring the development of your own dream healing practice:
1. Journal the dream and/or sketch the wounded image.
2. Sit or lie in a comfortable position. Become present in your body, in the here and now. Notice your heartbeat. Allow your breath to move naturally.
3. Begin to connect to the landscape or image with an attitude of curiosity, deeply listen with all your senses. Utilize the skills of animation. Listen to the image or landscape’s voice, watch how it moves and reveals itself. Notice. Sense. What moves through your body?
4. Notice any helpers, trusted soul companions, that emerge.
5. Invite the wounded image and any helpers to engage in reciprocal dialogue about the wound, injury, illness, brokenness. Who is visiting? What is Happening here? What is dream wanting to share?
6. Is there an area of your body that resonates with the image’s injury? Notice that.
7. Ask what the image or landscape needs for healing, or repair. Allow the image to show you. Sense, feel, hear with your soul. Inside the mystery of the wound, sickness, brokenness, or disrepair is an intelligent image offering something we can’t quite see, extending knowledge of the wound as well as providing a hint of what is needed for healing.
8. Offer, to the image, the medicine, remedy, elixir, salve, or specific care being requested or shown.
9. Notice how the image responds to the medicine of the dream time. Notice how your body responds.
10. Journal your observations, sensations, reflections.
In Dream Tending, we treat the physical wound by treating the wounded image. When we heal the wounded image, we begin the process of healing the physical wound from which the image arises. This is the essence of the practice. To assist the wounded image with healing is to heal ourselves. As the image experiences resilience, vitality, and healing…so do we.
Healing with dreams is a powerful, sacred, ancient practice. Our work as dream tenders is in adjunct to medical and mental health care.
In dreamtime,
Monica Tweet, PT, CST-D, and Mentor of the Academy of Imaginal Arts and Sciences
Inside The Curious Mind
This is a quote that resonated with me this week…
“The body is always dreaming.”
-Dr. Stephen Aizenstat
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Stephen Aizenstat
Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., is the founder of Dream Tending, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Academy of Imaginal Arts and Sciences. He is a world-renowned professor of depth psychology, an imagination specialist, and an innovator. He has served as an organizational consultant to major companies and institutions, and as a depth psychological content advisor to Hollywood film makers. He has lectured extensively in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is affiliated with the Earth Charter International project through the United Nations, where he has spoken. Professor Aizenstat is the Chancellor Emeritus and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has collaborated with many notable masters in the field including Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, and Robert Johnson.
