Full moon over a nighttime landscape with clouds and distant hills

Dream Work As PRAXIS

Exploring dreams as a creative, contemplative, and community-building practice

This propaganda...was capable of almost anything. It could produce the events it fed on... it could also worm its way deep into the innermost spheres of the people to whom it was directed..

~ Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams

Martha talks about her relationship to dream work

This is an online educational/experiential workshop designed to support mental health professionals, artists and writers, those engaged in spiritual practices and anyone who wants to learn to work with their dreams in service of healing, creative or contemplative processes.

I advocate an agnostic processes of working with dreams (daydreams/synchronicities/imaginal content)- sitting in relationship to symbols & emotions they surface, amplifying and exploring them, without trying to “decide what they mean” or without dismissing them as nonsense or worthless. Paying attention to what our bodies and our psyches have to say helps us live in better alignment with our intuition and our values.

Dreams offer us a powerful shared symbolic language for connecting to personal and collective intuition in an era of dissociation, disinformation, challenge and transformation.

  • More about my work with dreams and dream collections here:

  • You may also preview some of the themes in this workshop by watching this recorded discussion in the archives: Dream Work as Praxis -focused on the collective aspects of dreaming .

    Free using this discount code at checkout: 8QGBGUB

  • To read what lovely folks who have put in a good word for me have said about my groups - click here

  • Dream work requires encountering the structures of whiteness, colonization, supremacy, domination, extraction and control as they move through the body/psyche.

    Sitting with the symbols that our dreams produce at night requires forging some comfort with uncertainty, with not knowing anything definitively.

    It is a process that requires humility and discernment as we encounter natural instincts and archetypes that are more ancient and more powerful than our waking egos.

    It requires confronting all the oppressions that lurk in the back of our brains, and are foundational to the dominant psychological, and scientific systems of modernity - any system committed to reductive, literal certainties about the function of dreams, or to their outright dismissal as “nonsense.”

    Dream study requires that we look at ourselves embedded in a dominant culture that actively - through advertising, social and mass media, and propaganda -attempts to shape our thoughts and behaviors by activating our instinctive reactions,

    It demands that we respect indigenous communities, and elders around the world who have always seen dreams as part of the way that human beings are inherently and inescapably entangled with each other and with the environments and natural world that we are beholden to.


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WINTER 2026- ACCEPTING MEMBERS

  • DURATION: 10 session for 1 hour

  • TIME: Tuesdays at 4:30pm Pacific, 5:30 Mountain, 6:30 Central, 7:30pm Eastern

  • DATES: Jan 13, 20, 27, Feb 3, 10, 17, 24, March 3, 10. 17

    Those who complete this workshop are invited to join a Weekly Dream Circle as openings permit.

Content

The workshop will introduce subjects such as:

  • the structure and relationship between consciousness and the unconscious,

  • understanding archetypes

  • the personal unconscious.

  • Jung’s method of dream “amplification,”

  • “Big dreams” and dreams of the collective,

  • a review of contemplative and creative exercises that can help expand upon dream themes

  • an exploration of dreaming and synchronicity,

  • and the relationship between the creative process and dream work.

  • We will explore not only the useful aspects of Jung's thoughts on dreaming, we will also confront and challenge the Eurocentric, and misogynistic notions that exist in these texts and theories.

  • We will look at the notion of collective archetypes and the through line to liberation psychologies.

This workshop includes didactic teaching and discussion as well as respectful and boundaried exploration of dreams that are either shared by a participant or selected from the available readings.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Remember that this is a peer group not a therapy group.

Examining dreams may shed light on conflict or complexes or challenges which may be better processed in a therapy or counseling process than in a workshop. This group is supplemental to other therapeutic, creative, or contemplative processes - and not a replacement for appropriate therapeutic services, professional supervision or spiritual direction. 

Standard Donations, PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN and SCHOLARSHIP FUNDS

  • Those who are experiencing financial challenges are welcome to consider donating half ($332) or a quarter ($166) of the suggested donation of $665 - or whatever is affordable.

  • I offer this workshop, and most of my services for “pay-what-you-can” contributions so that no one is turned away due to financial hardship

  • I expect to offer up to four free/pro bono seats in my workshops depending on group size/enrollment

  • If you are in a position to do so, please consider making a donation to provide scholarship funds to community members who have interest but do not have resources. For example a $70 donation subsidizes one full scholarship seat in the group, and $45 covers 1/2 of a scholarship seat

Materials

I will forward each registered workshop member:

  • a syllabus of optional readings to explore before and after the workshop.

  • a pdf of my e-booklet of brief teaching essays compiled for this workshop

  • Some essays from my public blog will also be suggested.

  • All reading is optional and made available for those who are interested.

Application

This group actively welcomes members of different professions, races/ethnicities, gender identities and socioeconomic realities, spiritual/religious beliefs and practices.  The expectation is that we come together to try to hold each other’s diverse experiences with mutual respect.

In order for me to make sure that members receive what they need from this group please fill out the application form below.

All answers will be confidential. 

I am usually able to respond promptly so please check your spam folder if you don’t receive confirmation in a day or two: