How to Listen to Your Soul

Dream Tending: How to Listen to Your Soul

Inspired by Pacifica Graduate Institute's DreamTending course taught by Dr. Stephen Aizenstadt

During the holidays we can lose ourselves, become so involved with others' worries and needs that we forget who we are. One way to check back in is to record our dreams. If you don't remember your dreams, take a situation from your life and write it as if it were a dream.

The sheer act of writing down our dreams allows our inner self to feel respected and heard. However, we can take this a step further. Here is a fun and easy process that I learned when I attended Pacifica Graduate Institute's DreamTending course, taught by Dr. Stephen Aizenstadt. Dr. Aizenstadt learned this process from an unnamed poet.

How to check in with your soul:
Write the dream (in present tense), and then write it a second time, adding any details that might have been forgotten. Now, write the dream a third time but this time you'll write a poetic version. For this you can simply add flowery language, or your third version may sound totally divergent from the original dream. The point is that the third version is inspired by the first two, and I think you'll be happily surprised by what opens up when you give yourself this freedom to play.
Here's a sample of my first time trying the process.

My dream, first version:
"I'm in a restaurant where people are eating breaded fish. I can't eat fried food so I de-bread mine. Dan is in the corner. Does he see me?
There's an overlay on us like I'm in the dream and creating it at the same time; it's like watching a movie being filmed. I notice the hairy guy who has fish sticking up from his fingers, like half-moons. They're not breaded."

Second version:
I'm in a restaurant where people are eating fried fish, holding the thick breaded rounds in their hands, some with white paper napkins around the bottom. I have a dilemma because I don't eat breaded, fried food and I know that makes me different.

I think I don't want Dan to see. A black woman kneels at my feet. For some reason she's so grateful to me. Does Dan see her? Does he know that people value me? I think it must be hard to be black in the 1950's because that's part of who I am. I think I'm also posing as a man and yet wondering why she would see me as a man. She's crying. "Stunt" person has all the half moon fish slices between his fingers. He seems really accomplished."

Version 3-Poetic Version:
"Fish, like half moons, stays in his hands. I can't imagine how he does this. I also want my fish clean and new but I lack this wild man's command. I see Dan but I don't know. Are we seeing each other this year? I long for him to know me, to say hello and make it mean more than hello's supposed to mean. We're so far from who we were we were, I don't know me anymore."

See it doesn't have to be great poetry. Dream tending is about paying attention to the images and allowing them to speak. As I typed this sequence today, I saw different aspects of the dream.

Later in that workshop we were asked to draw a picture of our dream, something I dreaded doing because I can't draw. However, in submitting to the exercise, and drawing it anyway, I realized the dominance of the character of the "wild man," the man with the fish. I was then able to add that character to a story I was writing, as well as look at the wild man in myself and that concept in my life.