How can we take our insights – deep messages from our night dreams, dreamwork and dream analysis – and convert it all into a collection of Journaling prompts? Taking a long view, we are going to start by making a simple list: ‘Unfinished Business in this Lifetime’…
Our night dreams are great natural helpers in lifting those often unrecognised problems, pain points from the depth of our consciousness where they resided quiet and low, waiting for a right time to resurface….When something comes up in a dream it usually means that by some chain of associations there is something in our life right at the moment which is either similar or holds a clue or offers a different angle on some old issue; something which will help us to understand, to see more of what was forgotten and when the issue resurfaces in a dream – in all this glorious naked truth that our dreams provide – we can see it better, either in a content or a tone of the dream or during our subsequent dream analysis.
‘Unfinished business’ is a broad definition which could be divided into two simple categories for our dreamwork + journaling = inner work purposes:
- External unfinished business: anything to be done/completed/developed in a real life
- Internal unfinished business: our growth and development as a human being.
Here we can start with our dreamwork – recalling our recent, frequent, or recurrent dream or dream theme (this was part of our prep work before Day 1 of Level 1 Dreamwork Challenge ‘Dream Yourself Together’) – or with our journaling (stream of consciousness or list journaling): you can simply write a prompt for the list journaling at the top of the page and try to come up with around 20 entries (big or small) as quickly as possible, without thinking too much: ‘Unfinished business in this lifetime…’
You can also do both at the same time and see if there is any interplay between the two – ultimately, these are all different aspects of our inner work and so the prompts for associations, train of thoughts, feelings or bodily felt senses can arrive freely from any angle we choose to take to spotlight ‘unfinished business’.
With recurrent dreams, the issue is pressing; it’s a real – thought often hidden or poorly understood – internal pain point; it is right under the surface and maybe connected with the parallel waking life as an ongoing problem.
Speaking of unfinished business type of dreams, this can be something in the past which we didn’t fully face; acknowledge, digest, complete, transform or took further at the time. This unfinished business is now holding us back (even if without us being fully aware of it) and demands attention.
The start of the list is our intention which sends that internal impulse which is often enough to ‘open up’ the field and more items to the list will be naturally coming on their own as and when. There is no need to force the process. There is no need to trying to grasp the overview all at once: this is a long view. It will unfold in its own time.
When we lovingly create this opening starting this list journaling, we acknowledge that part of us, which yearns for our attention, recognition, acceptance and love. This part of our self and our life story could be an old wound; or this could be simply busy-at-the-time-so-forgotten-to-be-lived-fully experience.
Starting on our inner work with journaling, we will also start on discovering different types of dreams we tend to have, the themes to our dreams and the characters inhabiting our dreams. Taking our inner life as seriously as our outer life, we can easily create the tags and the categories for future references and over time make the dreams and dreamwork part of our inner life into a fascinating novel.
Attending to our unfinished business dreams we will light up and transform our inner landscape and our dreaming life: we will facilitate and support conflict resolution dreams instead of conflict dreams; we will sense new ways of being instead or replaying the old set up; we will start seeing aspects of ourselves in need of discovering or developing which we never knew existed.
This video is a part of our Dream Yourself Together Q&A session where we discuss common challenges we face in our dreamwork: intentional dreaming and dream analysis – and our learnings and fascination with the process.
Our dreamwork groups are kept small for a reason: we focus on individual attention with dream analysis and on creating a friendly and trusted space with dreams being very personal matters; if you are interested please register on a waiting list using the form below:
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