Presentation: Touch Drawing; Touching Dreams: Creative Expression as a Source of Vision and Transformation

Jon Lipsky is the author of a book on collaborative dream enactment called Dreaming Together (Larson Publications, 2008). He is also a director and playwright who has written a number of full-length dream plays include: “Dreaming With An AIDS Patient,” adapted from the book by Robert Bosnak, and “The Wild Place” adapted from the pregnancy dreams of Susan Thompson.

Other plays he has written have been produced at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival, The American Repertory Theater, and other regional theaters. He has been Associate Artistic Director of the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, where he lives, and playwright-in-residence at The Merrimac Repertory Theater, and TheaterWorks/Boston. In 2007, he received the Boston Critics Eliot Norton Award for Best Director.

Lipsky is also Professor of Theater at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. He introduced dream enactment as part of the curriculum of the Theater School’s professional training program over twenty years ago. His early work in dreams involved the study of Embodied Dreamwork with Robert Bosnak, a diplomat of the C.G. Jung Institute and past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Since then he has conducted “Dreaming Together” classes and workshops at academic and theatrical venues in the United States and abroad. Currently, he is developing an on-going cabaret theater for dreams called The Dream Café, produced by The Underground Railway Theater at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA.

 Presentation: Dreaming Together Psi Workshop

Paco has been involved in language, art, psychology, music and dreams, in various capacities, for four decades. As a teacher, Jungian therapist, sculptor, flamenco guitarist and writer, he has dedicated himself to the study of images and dreams -- the intricacies of soul.

Recently his interests have converged upon the “shamanic imagination,” a desperately needed antidote for the disorders of our cultural life. To say “shamanic” is to evoke a deep, imaginative recognition of and response to the inter-connectedness of all life. If we are to build a new ethics  adequate to the challenges we face, we must draw on these shamanic inspirations, in whatever forms they come to us.

Paco finds evidence of shamanic imagining in many areas of art, poetry, science, literature and even daily life. But most acutely he finds it revealed in dreams, particularly what he calls “world dreams.” These are dreams which transcend the personal concerns of the dreamer and show us re-vitalized ways of imagining what is happening, not only to us, but to the world. By following the hints such dreams provide, we as individuals can help body forth a new vision with which to guide ourselves into the future of our troubled planet.

Presentation: World Dreams

Robert Moss was born in Australia, and that is where his fascination with the dreamworlds began. He survived three near-death experiences in childhood, and first learned the ways of a traditional dreaming people through his friendship with Aborigines.

He has been described as having succeeded in reincarnating himself several times in his present lifetime. He has been: a professor of ancient history, a foreign correspondent and magazine editor, a radio show host and a best-selling-novelist. When he moved to upstate New York in the mid-1980s, he started dreaming in a language he did not know that proved to be an archaic form of Mohawk. He studied the language and spiritual practices of the Iroquois to interpret his dreams, and the voice of an ancient arendiwanen ("woman of power") who was speaking through them. The life-changing experiences of this time set him on a path for which there is no career track in Western society: the path of a dream teacher.

He created a new approach to dreamwork, healing and active imagination that he calls Active Dreaming. This incorporates shamanic practices for journeying, soul recovery and working with spiritual allies. He leads popular workshops all over the world, a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming, and online courses at www.spirituality-health.com 

His seven books on Active Dreaming include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates, The Three "Only" Things and The Secret History of Dreaming. His website is www.mossdreams.com
 

Dr. Charles T. Tart, professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, and Professor Emeritus in Psychology at the University of California, Davis, has been involved with research and theory in the fields of Hypnosis, Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, Parapsychology, Psychology and Mindfulness since 1963. He has authored over a dozen books, two of which became widely-used as textbooks; and has had more than 250 articles published in professional journals and books.

The End of Materialism is his most recent book.