ABSTRACT

Dreams of Animals and the Environment for Healing and Sense of Place.

Summary of Presentation

Psychotherapists and dream workers should be sensitive to how dreams reveal spirit animal guides and environments that place our souls for healing and development. The presentation plus three videos illustrate how we can work with dreams to help connect us to potential animal guides and environments that can give us a sense of place.

Learning Objectives:

Evaluation questions:

Did the presenter illustrate how science and synchronistic experiences in conjunction with dream work can further our connection with the land?

Abstract 

Jung and deep ecologists maintain that we are capable of far deeper connections to the environment than most Westerner's experience. Jung and James Hillman offer models of the human psyche and ways of working with dreams that recognize and cultivate a transformative relationship with dreams of potential spirit animal guides and sacred environments. The connections established through dream work can become the foundation for environmental activism and bring healing and richness to our lives.

Big dreams and numinous dreams of animals, environments or cities are especially potent dreams that can help the dreamer achieve a deeper relation to the natural world or a particular city and develop a sense of place that grounds the soul. Weather and seasonal images in dreams can be powerful metaphoric statements about the condition and processes of the psyche and can be worked in a manner that facilitates a psycho-spiritual connection to it. A spirit animal guide may initially appear in a frightening, even nightmarish form. How one responds to the dream experience can determine if the animal will be transformed into a helper guide. Synchronistic experiences with dreams reveal levels of connection to the environment that go beyond western scientific models.

The main processes of working with dreams in a transformative manner include the Jungian method of amplifying and relating to dreams that is in many ways similar to that of Native Americans. Jung's framework for this approach is his dream of living in a house with many historical levels, the bedrock being the animal soul level of human consciousness. The Greek god Hermes offers valuable perspectives for relating to the animal soul level, especially for men. James Hillman's use of the neo-Platonic concept of Aphrodite as the Soul of the World helps one see soul in the world, in animals and objects, and not confined within individual human psyches. A third significant approach is to examine each element of an environment as if it were a dream image. Three videos illustrate important elements of this process.

References

Hillman, James. 1992. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Spring Publications: Connecticut.

Merritt, Dennis. In preparation. The Dairy Farmers Guide to the Universe: Jung, Hermes and Ecopsychology.

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