I recently returned from Australia’s first conference on dreaming, Dreams & Imagination: Healing Pathways, hosted by Dream Network Australia in Sydney.
This professional conference brought together a rare combination of scientists, environmentalists, academics, and counsellors, who stand united on the importance of dreaming to our health, our sense of community, and and our connection to the land.
The stunning keynote was given by David Tacey, Associate Professor of Humanities at LaTrobe University. He spoke of the need for a new spirituality for modern times, and that we are the first culture in history that has tried to live without a connection to something greater than ourselves.
Also presenting was Robert Bosnak, a Jungian Analyst and author who developed the Embodied Imagination technique of working with dreams. Robert has literally put a stake in the ground around dreaming by building the Santabarbara Healing Sanctuary, which combines dream work with western medicine to aid in the healing of the seriously ill, or those recovering and wanting to maintain optimum health.
Margaret Bowater ran a dynamic workshop combining live dreams with psychodrama. I offered up a particularly controversial dream I’d just had to her technique, and the room fell pin-drop silent as my dream revealed itself with remarkable speed and clarity.
Passionate environmentalist and artist, Lisa Roberts, gave a presentation called “Living Data: Artists and scientists contribute to a grand narrative for a sustainable future.” Lisa also had her dream worked on by Robbie Bosnack, and later animated the “Calm Fury” she’d discovered, using her trademark line-drawings. See Lisa’s dream dynamics here.
I could go on. The conference ran for three days, and there was always a fascinating workshop, a paper or a panel to choose from.
Overall, this conference left me feeling that dreams will eventually make their way back into our mainstream culture as a unifying and health-promoting resource, just as mindfulness has been accepted as a natural resource for balance and well being.
Dream Lab is proud to be part of this movement, and to help us come back into relationship with something greater than ourselves – something each of us accesses every night through our dreams.
