Dreams & Death - Exploring Consciousness and Mortality

This retreat is an opportunity to explore the idea of dreaming as an apprenticeship for death.

When we sleep we drop through unconsciousness into a kind of afterlife. For many people, waking and dreaming states feel equally real. In both states we sometimes have an awareness or suspicion that the reality we’re in doesn’t stretch out endlessly. Often we lose track of the realm we left when we shift states; some of us have no memories of our dream lives while we’re waking or ability to recall our waking lives while we’re asleep.

In many older cultures the tunneling nature of our waking/dreaming relationship was understood to hold tremendous opportunity to learn about the fabric of our consciousness and mortality. Those of us who have been raised in industrial, capitalist cultures where death is feared and avoided have often been taught to ignore and denigrate this resource.We invite you to reclaim the experience of dreaming as a guide for transitioning through states of being and opening to wisdom beyond cognition. 

Over our three night stay we’ll work with writing, meditation and gentle yoga practices that will guide us to explore our conscious mind. We will also work with a variety of dream practices including Dream Theater, collage and sand box work to learn more about the world we live in while our bodies rest. We’ll have opportunities to share our dreams and talk about our relationships with death with each other, and invitations to share and connect with the vast consciousness that holds the natural world at and around Breitenbush.

If you are scared of death, or estranged from it and you’d like a better understanding of this universal milestone this gathering may be for you. If you’re curious about dreamwork and would like to better connect with the insight and wisdom available to you in that phase of being, we would love you to join us. If you have little or much experience with death and dreams, if you have a diagnosis and can see your death ahead of you or are aware of your mortality with no way to guess the shape of your particular death, if you’ve lost loved ones to death or know you will, if you dream robustly and remember everything or never remember a dream but feel curious about the state you live in so much of the time, we welcome you.

We hope to leave feeling broadened and able to move with more ease through a life that is much bigger than our thinking brains imagine.

The Details:

Before The Retreat

 We’ll offer some specific suggestions for ways you can work with nature, your conscious mind and your dreams in the week (or weeks) before you come including ideas for sitting and walking meditation and prompts to start or continue building dream and nature journals.

We will be (lightly) drawing from the teaching of the Tibetan Buddhist Bardo practice. Mind Beyond Death is a lovely book about this practice. 

Tina’s book Ask For Horses is a lovely resource for insight into what it means to live a dream guided life.

Neither of these books are at all required but, if you’re so inclined, reading through both or either could be interesting preparation.

The retreat schedule can be viewed here.