There’s a quote from a movie that’s stuck with me for years: “If we cannot see the wind, we can at least see the wind’s will.” We may not be able to directly see how the wind is moving, but we can look to the flags, the weather vanes, the leaves — we can throw sand in the air and watch where it blows, where it swirls and eddies.

The same is true of the Psyche — we can’t observe its patterns and currents directly, but we can watch how it moves the images, figures, and atmospheres that drop into it. There are lots of ways to observe this, and lots of ways to use those observations, but dreams are the most obvious starting point, as well as one of the most powerful.

Humans know — we’ve always known — that dreams are important. It takes a lot of effort to blind us to that fact. From North American shamans to dream-interpretation tablets in Mesopotamia; from dream-incubation in ancient Greece to Tibetan dream yoga; from the Jungian analyst’s couch to the university sleep lab’s beds, every culture in every age has known there’s something to be learned from our nightly excursions into the Dreaming.

Even in a culture like ours that actively attempts to repress that knowledge, that tells us it’s all random brain static or neural defragmentation, most people still sense of the significance of their dreams when they wake up from a Big One. Even with all the jokes in movies and tv shows about how terrible it is to listen to someone describing their dreams, we still try from time to time to tell our friends about the strange visions from last night. “I know it’s silly, but I feel like…”

Humans know that dreams are important. It’s obvious.

For this course, we can frame their importance like this: dreams are the most vivid and direct method of communication that the Psyche uses to speak to us. If we get good at listening to the language of dreams, we can use that language to converse with the Psyche, to hear its messages and send back our own. We can become full citizens not just of the limited ego, but of the vast Psyche and everything in it. We can take back our birthright, become a force of nature.

In this course, we’ll be learning to listen to the language of the Psyche. There are 4 main aspects to the endeavor:

1. The Waking Journal: Like a dream journal, with some tweaks. This habit builds dream recall; you can’t listen to the dreams if you don’t remember them.
2. Image Return: Meditatively holding the entire “image” (we’ll come back to that term) of a dream and allowing it to move, shift, unfold. In the linguistic metaphor, you might think of this as conversation practice with a native speaker. You’ll start out really clumsy and prone to misunderstandings, but build skill over time.
3. Somatic Resonance: We spend most of our lives unaware of most of our experience. If we can’t sense what we’re feeling, we’re missing aspects of the Psyche’s communications, in dreams and elsewhere. Deepening awareness into the body is the most direct route to connecting with suppressed and ignored experiences — it’s also the most direct route to building intuition and reflexes to respond to experience.
4. Mapping Eros: One key aspect of experience we tend to suppress is the feeling of what we really want — what we feel drawn to, what brings us alive, what deadens us, what drains us. Re-connecting with eros is a necessary step to letting the Psyche untangle itself, and practicing this reflex both helps and is helped by dreamwork.

We’ll dive into the basics of all 4, and I recommend you take the practices slowly, letting yourself try them out and see how they feel over time, letting them braid together and harmonize in ways that feel natural to you. A good rule of thumb is to spend at least 10x more minutes practicing than reading, before moving on to the next practice. These aren’t skills you can microwave and be done with quickly; the passing of time is a critical ingredient.

After going through the 4 main elements of listening to the unconscious, there will be a gallery of pages you can take in no particular order. Those pages are there for you to follow your own interests, deepen into dreamwork slowly, and check out multiple perspectives as you go.

After that gallery of pages, there will be a few finishing pages, suggesting ways of tying the skills together and carrying them into the world — into the day-dream.