The first time I offered my ‘Writing in the House of Dreams’ workshop series I was slightly concerned that several of the people who signed up were therapists who had worked in an interpretative way with clients’ dreams in their professional life.

I wasn’t sure how they would feel about coming at dreams from a completely new angle, as pure imaginative substance, so you can imagine how relieved I was when, at the end of the first session, one of them told me, ‘I feel excited about looking at my dreams is a different way.’

Dreams can be an invaluable source of insight into waking life, but if you only focus on that you can miss the greater opportunity they offer, to enter and engage with the dreamworld on its own terms and experience it as a completely different kind of reality.

In order to do this, in workshops, we share dreams as simply things we have experienced, and don’t try to interpret them any more than we would try to interpret the events of waking life. It’s a discipline, because in Western culture we are so centred in the material life and our first instinct is to try to analyse and make sense of things. A train going into a tunnel? We know what that means!

But what if it’s just a train going into a tunnel? Then the experience of dreaming is fundamentally changed. Dream-working in this way gradually expands the mind to inhabit wider realities, instead of just shedding light into some of the corners of this one.

When I’m mixing dreaming with writing in workshops, we begin by sharing a dream; we take material from the dream to spark a piece of creative writing, and then we share the writing. The dream-sharing and the writing-sharing feel exactly the same, as in neither case do we try to analyse any connection between the dreamer/writer’s personal life and the stories they bring.

There is a connection, of course. A writer shows the tones and colours of their own personality, experience and ways of being in the world in all their writing, but as with dreams, if we try to extrapolate more than that, we are likely to make mistakes based upon our own experiences and assumptions.

Writing and dreams are creative processes, and that’s both the value and the joy of them. They don’t literally tell our story; they don’t all refer to the narrow facts of our life. They can take us anywhere, if we are ready for the adventure.

I was delighted to discover this review by Susan Price on her ‘Nennius’ blog recently, because she totally gets what I was trying to do in the book that relates to the workshops, Writing in the House of Dreams. Actually, she describes it better than I managed to myself and, with her permission, I’ve changed my amazon book description accordingly!