Today, I’m delighted to welcome my first musician in the House of Dreams. Travis Wernet is a professional dream teacher with three studio albums under his own name and musical moniker ‘Outlaw Dervish.’

Simone Weil called attention prayer. I think she was onto something. When we listen to music we are paying a special consideration to sound. Over recent years I’ve become increasingly observant of how, when I am dreaming, I seem to be engaged in an attentively mindful space of awareness. As a musician, there are even ways that I see how I’ve got to give attentiveness to the instruments I am playing. This serves the evocation of sounds that feel the most fulfilling as they emerge, seemingly out of the invisible ethers surrounding the instruments in the space where I am creating. How similar this seems to my experience of the way dreams appear!

In my experience, dreams can influence the creation of music, they can feature and contain music and, as it turns out, music also influences the creation of dreams.

While recording the didjeridu tracks for my meditation album, Yoro Yoro,  dreams synergized with the work we did in the studio one day. As we gathered tonalities for various songs, I remembered a dream from the previous night.

In the dream I am in the company of three aboriginal people… The first, a tribal elder, invites me to spear fish with him. Next, I see a woman and a man who are sitting in the ocean meditating. I notice all this and then the scene becomes somehow ethereal. I drift up into space and see the earth, which shape-shifts into what I know are the call letters for a radio station “K Be Radio”. Upon witnessing this I float back down to earth and witness a peaceful scene near the sunny seaside where softly blowing sands mix with waving grasses in the wind.

At the time we were recording, the energy of this dream supported a fluid ability to get what are called “one-takes” for the songs we were crafting. This simply means that in the studio, the first effort to add the didjeridu tracks turned out to be the most satisfying to our ears, minds and hearts. The tone of our collaboration in this sense felt effortless and energizing. Exactly what we wanted for the meditation album! The ambience of connection with the meditators and the vision of the globe, as well as the hint at an aura of pure being, with the “it’s okay to be” radio station, all added a felt dimension to our project.

Beyond this, I can see over recent years how that dream was helping to set the stage for current creative endeavors. I’ve become very fascinated with and involved in musical dream incubation. This is the use of certain kinds of sounds and music to invite and receive helpful, healing dreams. Alas, that’s a story for another time.

Receiving and imagining the dream of “the Three Aboriginals and K Be Radio” has also afforded me the message of a deep spiritual experience which set me on a path of renewed authenticity wherein I have sought to tune myself to the frequencies of who I am at an essential level. In addition the dream has inspired me to share its messages with others, through music and my work with dreams.

Following years of international travel, co-leading ceremonies from the Great Pyramid in Egypt to the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, Travis shares his work at home in the US and offers online video dream groups, workshops and private sessions. To find out more about his work, check out his blog and website