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PRESENTER ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Kirsten Backstrom (USA) is a spiritual director and dreamworker, who founded Compass Dreamwork to facilitate individual and group dream exploration and education. She has been exploring dreamwork as a spiritual practice for over thirty-five years, and specializes in working with threshold experiences where dreaming and waking lead us into the unknown.
Chameleon Dreaming: Where Dreams Meet and Dreamers Exchange Gifts
In the intricate web of the dream world, strands intersect and dreamers encounter one another. I believe that these encounters occur when common elements or energies in the dreams overlap to create openings. Such openings transcend time and space, so that someone I will never meet in the waking world might find a way into my dream, and we might even help one another spontaneously and naturally, changing both of our lives.
This presentation will explore a dream in which two dreamers encountered each other in desperate circumstances. I was one of those dreamers. I’ve never met the other dreamer, though he and I are now connected in a bond of trust, mutual respect, and wonder. The dream, and the other dreamer, left me with a tangible gift—a strength that I can still feel in my right arm as a red and green chameleon whose legs grip my forearm and whose tail is wrapped around my wrist. I know his eyes, his shifting shape, and his name. But what gifts does this “Big,” transformative dream have to offer beyond its personal impact on my life? Can we actually change the lives of others, and even make a difference on a cosmic scale, through our shared experiences in dreams? Dreaming allows me to question my own assumptions about my separateness, inviting me to make connections that would not otherwise be possible. I’d like to extend this invitation to others as well. So, in this presentation, the chameleon will invite you to connect: wherever our dreams overlap, we can find each other.
Cindy Lubar Bishop (USA) developed DreamWebbing out of her longtime interest in dreams, synchronicity, art, and spirituality. She was ordained by Rev. Jeremy Taylor as a Universal Life Minister, and graduated from his Marin Institute of Projective Dream Work. She lives in Santa Rosa, where she sees individual clients and leads DreamWebbing groups.
DreamWebbing: What’s a porcupine like you doing in a dreamweb like this?!
Having worked with dreams, art and synchronicity in a variety of ways for 40 years, I’ve developed a practice that I call DreamWebbing. It’s another way of working with dreams that complements dream telepathy, precognition and dream lucidity. In this presentation, I’ll describe and give examples of the concept and practice of DreamWebbing by placing a particular DreamTime cover at the center of a “dreamweb” and tracing the strands of connection between the dreams and waking life events of three people as they relate to this image. As I identify and weave together diverse threads of poetry, dreams,disasters, everyday life and art, we will explore the deeper intelligence of the dreaming web through perceiving its subtle, labyrinthine patterns.
I will demonstrate how bringing dreams into relationship with ordinary waking life using a webbing approach suggests and opens a window into a meaningful, underlying order of reality. I will offer ways that other dreamers can supplement their dreamwork with DreamWebbing and further carry the intelligence of the dream into waking life.
Maureen Boyd Biro (USA) is a psi dreamer and author with a special interest in mutual and extraordinary dreams. She teaches workshops and leads creative retreats for dreamers, writers and all who are seeking to live their deepest, boldest dreams.
Abide With Me: Dream visits on the threshold between worlds
When souls are in transit, crossing from this life to another, their energy intensifies, shimmering through time and space to ripple into our dreams or visions. In my encounters with souls on this threshold, I’ve come to recognize markers that signify these profound dream visits: a figure standing in a doorway; a boat setting sail; a flight departing. During mass crossings this place of transition often manifests as a communal lodging or school, a space where souls may gradually come to understand they’ve crossed over, assisted by a caring guide.
This paper will consider several of these vivid psi dreams and discuss what is common or different in each, based on the circumstances of crossing, or near crossing, emphasizing why we may receive these visits and what, if anything, we are asked to do, or not to do. I’ll discuss how these visits expand our psi awareness, revealing our inter-connectedness with astonishing clarity, while preparing us for the moment we, too, shall cross.
Kelly Bulkeley, PhD (USA) is a psychologist of religion focusing on dreams. He is Director of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), Senior Editor of the journal Dreaming, and former IASD president. His books include Lucrecia the Dreamer (2018), Big Dreams (2016), and Dreaming in the World’s Religions (2008).
The Dangerous Power of Precognitive Dreaming: A Historical Case Study
This presentation discusses one of the most dramatic and best documented cases of precognitive dreaming in history. The dreamer’s name was Lucrecia de Leon, a young uneducated woman from late 16th century Spain, during the Siglo del Oro and the peak of Philip II’s imperial reign as the “Most Catholic King.” Lucrecia was a vivid dreamer from childhood, with a reputation for accurate prophecies about the royal family and the fate of Spain. Although she was illiterate and grew up in Madrid under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church, Lucrecia managed to learn a great deal of mystical and magical lore about dreaming, astrology, visions, and other unorthodox spiritual beliefs and practices. She also learned about Islamic dream practices, and perhaps the ritual of istikhara, from a young Moorish woman who lived in Lucrecia’s building for several years. Beginning in late 1587 a group of priests interested in apocalyptic omens arranged to come to Lucrecia’s house each morning to transcribe what she had dreamed the previous night (the manuscripts are still preserved in the National Historical Archive in Madrid). A recurrent theme in her dreams over the next several months was the terrible fate awaiting the Armada, Spain’s invincible navy, which King Philip was planning to use in launching an invasion of England. When the Armada finally set sail in August of 1588, the results were disastrous, almost exactly as Lucrecia’s dreams had foretold. For a time, her public reputation soared as many Spaniards questioned Philip’s leadership in the humiliating and disorienting aftermath of the Armada’s loss. Eventually Philip decided to reassert control, and he personally ordered the Inquisition to arrest Lucrecia. She was brought to a secret prison in Toledo, interrogated, and tortured to make her confess her guilt and admit the dreams were all fabrications. For five years she refused to do so.
The Inquisition’s trial of Lucrecia de Leon will be considered as a cautionary tale for anyone seeking to explore and actively elicit the powers of precognitive dreaming. What should a dreamer do if her community is unwilling or incapable of recognizing a truly prophetic dream? What happens when dreaming revelation is perceived as a threat to political and religious hierarchies? Is this one of the vital roles of esoteric spiritual traditions, to provide under-the-radar nurturance for people with extraordinary powers that are denied or forbidden by the social authorities?
Laurel Clark, DD (USA) Board Chair of IASD, author of Intuitive Dreaming and chapter editor/author of Dreams that Change Our Lives, Laurel has kept a dream journal since 1977. She teaches and leads workshops on dream incubation and using dreams for spiritual guidance. Laurel loves all kind of dreams but especially extraordinary dreams like visitations, precognition, and mutual dreaming.
Virtual Connections: emailing in dreamspace!
The Talmud says, “A dream not interpreted is like a letter unopened.” I wonder what the Talmud would have to say about emails?
I have discovered that connections with other dreamers happen virtually, both in dreams and with email! I received an email dream from famous dreamer Bob Van de Castle the night he died … which I believe was his way of saying goodbye. I have often discovered that I dream of (or with) someone, and wake up to an email from that person. Or sometimes I dream of email exchanges and then discover that they were dreaming of me.
How does this intersection occur? What is similar about mutual dreaming, dreamtime connections, and virtual communication? I find that this kind of dreaming-email link increases many-fold during the two weeks of the Psiberdreaming conference. I invite other psiberdreamers to share their experiences during the discussion. It seems that boundaries become even thinner during this intentionally shared dream time.
Steven Ernenwein (USA) is a spiritually-conscious hip hop artist. His latest album, The Night Sea Journey, was exclusively inspired and guided by his dreams. Currently, his dreams are inspiring new song/album material! Steven has been an avid dreamworker and oneironaut for the past 13 years and recently created a platform and blog for his dreamwork: MythicSoulDreamwork.com
The Girl of my Dreams
Our souls long to reconnect with those we are destined to walk through life with. And our dreams can be just the catalysts we need to touch base with that yearning in a way that really reaches deep. Here I will recount the various lucid and non-lucid dreams that prophesied the coming of my soul mate and the journey to her they initiated.
Jayne Gackenbach, PhD (Canada) is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology at MacEwan University. She has been doing research and writing for 40 years about dreams and is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
Color in Dreams: A Scientist/Artist Perspective
At the recent annual IASD conference I attended a paper session where color in dreams came up. It’s a topic I’m often asked about when I teach courses on dreams. People ask do we dream in color? I typically answer: “Well if I asked you what you had for breakfast today would color be part of your answer?”. Sometimes but most often people say no. I point out that is the same process when we recall a dream. While color may be part of it, unless it’s a detailed recall and retelling, we typically don’t mention it. Various scientists came up to the podium and pointed out how they don’t often remember color in their dreams. Suddenly it burst upon my awareness that I very often .have a key color in my dreams. Or at least this has been the case over the last half dozen years of Jungian therapy. I pointed this out and attributed it to my other major self .hat, artist. When I mentioned color in my Jungian dream sessions my therapist always .attended carefully it as well. In this presentation, I’ll briefly summarize the science .behind color in dreams along with my personal experience of color in dreams psychologically in terms of interpretation and artistically in terms of painting expression.
Loren Goodman (S. Korea) wrote Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for t.he 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Suppository Writing (2008) and New Products (2010). He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, and serves as UIC Creative Writing Director.
Dream Telepathy Experiments: Close encounters of the “Three Only Things”
Robert Moss devotes the second half of The Secret History of Dreaming (2009), to exploration of what he terms “the Three ‘OnlyThings”—dreams, coincidence, and imagination—as expressed in the lives, works and influences of six Master Dreamers: Joan of Arc, Lucrecia de León, Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, Wolfgang Pauli, and Winston Churchill. This paper presents the results of two sets of dream telepathy experiments inspired by Moss’ studies of these six Masters. The first set reads closely several reports collected over a five-year period documenting dream travel attempts and meetings with the six Masters by university students in (and out of) the Dream Writing classroom. The second set presents the results of the Dream Writing instructor’s attempts to meet each of the six Masters, devoting one week to each, over a six-week period.
Dale E. Graff, B.S., M.S., (USA) is an internationally recognized lecturer, writer and researcher in psi topics. He is a former director of project Stargate, the government activity for research and applications of remote viewing. His books, Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness and RIVER DREAMS discuss remote viewing, psi dreaming/precognition and synchronicities. www.dalegraff.com
Three Extraordinary Dreams
Three extraordinary dreams on the night of June 17, 2017 had realistic and symbolic imagery. The first two presented attention calling action that transitioned into lucidity. The third dream invoked powerful energetic feelings. I was certain that these three dreams were precognitive due to their focused action and the thematic consistency of each dream. Their content associated with Tibet, New York City, and the Arctic Ocean. They were a mystery; an alert for an approaching situation, but what? Two days later, an unexpected email from someone unknown to me solved the mystery; it led to an interview as part of a documentary film production. The dreams prepared me for excursions into the “waking dream” scripts and the visionary art of Ingo Swann. They also revealed the Dream Yoga aspect of achieving dream lucidity directly from the awake state.
Louis Hagood (USA) In the first half of life, Lou was an Engineer/MBA business type. In the second half he has become a psychoanalyst who works with dreams. Lou has presented at IASD Annual Conferences, PsiberDreaming Conferences and published in DreamTime.
The Net of Indra
The Self can be a jewel in the Net of Indra, connecting the web of divinity in all of us. For years I have tuned into this net through dream-incubation questions before sleep, receiving verbal and visual responses in dream. After reading A Course in Miracles, I decided to ask questions of the Self while awake, with interesting results.
Curtiss Hoffman (USA) recently retired from 40 years of teaching archaeology and anthropology at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. His interests are in cognitive archaeology: the ways people’s spiritual beliefs are reflected in their material objects. He has written the recently published book Stone Prayers: Native Constructions of the Eastern Seaboard.
Rolf Pabahtanumwe Cachat-Schilling (USA) is Medicine
Elder for the Native American Inter-Tribal Council of Western Massachusetts and Ethnohistorian for Oso:ah Foundation, who received traditions from his grandmother and great aunt of Mohawk, Nipmuck and Delaware ancestry. Rolf edits research in translation covering a range of biology, ecology and environmental science disciplines. Home is Sanakkomukit (Shutesbury, MA).
A Web of Stone: Indigenous Stone Constructions of the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and Canada
Scattered throughout the woods and fields of the Atlantic seaboard of North America are tens of thousands of stone structures. Both scientific inquiry and Native traditions indicate that these monuments were constructed by indigenous peoples both before and after European contact. At some sites there are hundreds of individual structures, arranged in what appear to be intentional configurations. The placements of these sites are directly related to fault lines, to watershed boundaries, and to solstice and other astronomical alignments which relate to the connections between earth and sky which are central to surviving indigenous belief systems. For indigenous people in eastern North America, stones are the oldest living beings, the grandfathers and grandmothers of all who came after them. These traditions indicate that the sites and clusters form a stone prayer web caretaking our realm, Earth; and also caretaking the connections between the Earth and both the Heavens and the Underworld. Some indigenous ceremonies reinforcing this linkage are still practiced at these sites today in their complete form. Their placement on the land commemorates persons and events and cycles which unite groups across tribal boundaries in a common web of conscious reverence for the land. This web relates directly to the web of dreams which we form as we explore the relationships between consciousness and place.
Linda Lane Magallon, MBA (USA) wrote Mutual Dreaming (Simon & Schuster, 1997), after facilitating more than 50 telepathic dream experiments and group dreaming projects. As a field researcher, she specializes in lucidity, psi, and flying dreams.
The Wild Nature of Mutual Dreams
The members of a mutual dreaming project deliberately dream together. Sometimes we go to sleep with the intention to “meet” in our dreams. So often, it’s assumed that such meetings will be just like those we experience in the material world:
- -We’ll meet at the same time.
- -We’ll observe the same sort of fixed scenery.
- -We’ll appear and act like we do awake.
Except…we aren’t awake. We’re in a sleeping state of consciousness. We aren’t people embodied in a physical world. We’re dreaming selves, in a psychic reality with a unique set of rules and tools for being, joining with and recognizing each another.
Time is slippery and realistic depictions make way for special effects. Our usual set of sensibilities is augmented by social-sensory perception. To identify one another we might use x-ray vision and analogy instead of symbolic projection. We pop into picture targets, connect at a point. Beyond meeting, we’re meshing and melding and co-creating Environ-Mental Dreamspace.
We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Katrina Martin, MA (USA) has worked with dreams for a decade. She holds a master’s degree in Consciousness and Transformative Studies from JFKU and is the Northern New England regional representative for the IASD. She is co-host, with Mary Kay Kasper, of the podcast Dreaming Back to the Earth.
Mary Kay Kasper (USA) has an MA in Counseling and a CAS in Ecopsychology. She is a dreamwork practitioner and rites of passage guide who offers individual dreamwork, enactment groups, webinars, and an apprenticeship. Her article “Dreaming Back to the Earth” is found in Depth Psychology’s online scholarly journal Depth Insights.
Being With the Dream; Being With the Earth (WORKSHOP)
In this workshop, Mary Kay Kasper, MA and Katrina Dreamer, MA will introduce participants to a two-layered process which provides guidance for engaging our dreams and the Earth with mindful awareness and presence. In the initial stage, participants will choose a place, element, or animal they wish to be present with, whether literally or through images/video/imagination. Katrina will ask participants to set an intention and keep a journal so they can track what occurs internally and externally during the course of the conference. Next, Mary Kay will teach earth-based awareness strategies for approaching dreams. These strategies will nurture a non-interpretative observation of dream moments to activate feelings, associations, and memories otherwise hidden from the dreamer. Finally, Katrina and Mary Kay will demonstrate ways to weave these two practices together into a powerful method of dreamwork. This approach supports the integration of awareness practices which guide the dreamer into a deeper relationship between earth and dreams.
Kimberly R. Mascaro, PhD, LMFT (USA) has worked in the fields of mental/behavioral health, and education for 20 years. Her doctoral dissertation was on women’s dreams. Dr. Mascaro’s most recent publication is Extraordinary Dreams (2018). She is a member of the APA, CAMFT, and sits on the Board of Directors for IASD. Contact her at consciouschimera.com.
Extraordinary Announcing Dreams
Announcing dreams can be considered a unique form of pre-birth communication between the child-to-be and his/her future family members. Announcing dreams are reported to occur during pregnancy and sometimes even months or years before conception. Beyond conception or fertility dreams, in an announcing dream, the future child makes his/her presence known via visual or auditory channels. Through this impactful experience, information is sometimes exchanged. While announcing dreams are often reported to be vivid and quite meaningful, lucid dream announcements and out-of-body announcements, are particularly unforgettable. This paper will highlight the most extraordinary announcing dreams collected by the author.
Janet Mast (USA) is a longtime dream enthusiast with a background in writing, editing, marketing communications, and publication design. Janet is the graphic designer and advertising manager for the Lucid Dreaming Experience magazine, and a certified dream teacher through the Robert Moss School of Active Dreaming.
Walking the Wide Road with my Father — Dreams of Loss and Healing
After my father’s death, reviewing a series of dreams I had recorded over a 15-year period was a valuable part of my grief and healing process. Clearly dreams had been preparing me for this significant loss, years in advance. The first dream opened with my father and I walking together down a wide road which led to an encounter with some of our Amish-Mennonite ancestors. Immediately I felt the sacred importance of this experience—my first awareness of ancestral dreaming—but it was many more years before I began to view this dream walk with my father as the start of an ongoing journey.
This paper shares examples of precognitive dreams of loss, plus offers a glimpse of how dreams weave connections beneath the visible surface of our lives. Awareness of those connections invites us to expand our consciousness and to consider how significant relationships might continue to grow and heal, beyond the perceived boundaries of life and death.
Glory Nelson, BMsc. (USA) is a Spiritual Coach and Speaker. She is the owner of Utah-based Awakendream. Glory is a retreat leader and teaches the tarot, dreamwork and an empowerment technique called Transformation Dreaming™. Glory facilitates dream circles and is developing her mediumship skills. She is an IASD regional representative.
Juliana’s Dream
We often dream “warning dreams” or dreams of someone who we later find out has passed away. But what about a lovely dream of a nineteen year old who is about to tragically leave the physical world but doesn’t know it yet? Was this a sign, an indicator of what was to come? I was given the unique opportunity to share this dream. Join me as we explore the dream and different possibilities of what dreams may tell us about the end of life.
Delia Puiatti (Australia) is an artist, designer, writer, former transpersonal counsellor, dream explorer, and creative director of Unknown Quantity. Combining all of the above, she explores spirituality, psychology and dreams mostly through design and art, resulting in her multi-faceted Psi-Fi book series. She has also kept dream journals for over 25 years
Mapping Inner and Outer Worlds: Mapping dreaming and waking psychogeography
While the practice of mapping dream locations is useful for visualising dream experiences and discerning their possible meanings, there’s always more to places than just their location and layout. When personal impressions and waking-life counterpart places are included in dream maps,numerous layers of meaning, perception, and interconnection are revealed. By creating a multilayered map using Google’s custom map function, various layers can be documented and overlaid, revealing fascinating insights and often eliciting more questions than answers. How deeply does our psyche embed itself into, or connect with, the land around us in waking life? Do the experiences of places weave equally through our dreams, memories, and life events? How much does place itself – in dream and waking-life locales – act as a container or conduit for our thoughts, emotions, memories and experiences?
By mapping both dreams and and inner-world territories, we can see into the the many layers of our journey as it weaves through inner and outer worlds, creating psychic imprints and connections implicit in dream places, our physical world, and both dreaming and waking life.
Valley Reed (USA) is Executive Director with the Kolo: Women’s Cross Cultural Collaboration and owner of Chrysalis Healing Arts in Dallas, Texas. She teaches classes and depth workshops in Active Dreaming, and offers annual Women’s Retreats in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Visit – ChrysalisHealingArts.org or Kolocollaboration.org
Blog – Dreamsawake.wordpress.com
pasQuale Ourtane (The Netherlands) is the founder and owner of LD4all.com. This lucid dreamers community is dedicated to spreading the art and knowledge of lucid dreaming and has been online since 1996. A lucid dreamer herself, she holds a MSc in applied cognitive psychology and a MA in European Media. In addition to tending to LD4all, she is employed as a consultant at a global IT company.
Stranger Dreaming
The collaboration for this paper begins in dreams, which connect us all. Valley Reed had a dream, which included Jean Campbell, prior to their ever meeting, which she then did soon after, at her first IASD conference in 2000, at Washington D.C. Three years ago, pasQuale had a dream with Valley, even though having never met previously, and so she shared the dream with Jean, to pass along to her. The dream it turns out, had a number of psychic hits for Valley, which were reflected in her waking reality. The dream continues unraveling, and brings together these two dreamers, perhaps to discover something hidden, trying to come out.
In this presentation, we explore the conundrum of dreaming with people you have never met, and what this might indicate for our levels of interaction in dreams and the waking world. When strangers meet in dreams, and then connect in waking reality, there may be an awe of mystery, or a sense of felt purpose or significance. In exploring this topic, we invite PDC participants to share their own experiences of “Stranger” Dreaming.
Vivek Sharma (England/UK) is completing a Masters in Consciousness Studies at the University of Philosophical Research and had the privilege of being taught by Kelly Bulkeley amongst others. My research is in the exploration of different states of consciousness and the alternate realities they reveal.
Shamanic Dream Hunters: how dreams are used to map hunt and kill, and their effects in the physical world
A number of different shamanic dreaming cultures across the world have used their dreams to access a shared non-ordinary reality, one that geographically corresponds to the ordinary real world and which they can map. This has allowed dreamers within these hunter-gatherer societies to track hunt and kill their prey within their dreams, and then follow the dream trails in the physical world to collect their reward.
Powerful dreamers can also foresee future events within this parallel dream world, where the past-present-future is ‘now’ and use this to their tactful advantage in battles and hunts, and to act as diviners of death for those in the physical world.
This presentation will follow the dreaming cultures of the Beaver Indians of British Columbia, the native American Iroquois, and most significantly the mysterious mazzeri, the dream hunters of Corsica, seeking the uniqueness of each tradition but also their similarities in relation to the parallel world of non-ordinary reality they access in their dreams. My personal experiences with the dream hunters of Sardinia a few years ago inspired me to investigate the nature of these phenomena.
Matthew Thomas (Japan) is a teacher and school administrator living and working in Japan. He has been fascinated with dreams since his first “big dream” at the age of four or five and has years of experience with lucid dreaming and active imagination. The PDC is one of his highlights of the year and he is honored to be able to present at this year’s conference.
Levels of Lucidity: A Close Reading
This paper will examine the experience and implications of dreamers “waking” through multiple dream levels in a dream state. The paper will ask these questions: i) what is it like to move through multiple dream levels and think that each level is the waking world?; ii) what types of evidence do dreamers use within a dream level to attempt to establish whether they are awake or not?; iii) what are some of the “tells” that indicate a dreamer is still in a dream level?; iv) if we are able to “wake” through multiple dream levels and believe that each new level is the waking world, how can we ever be sure we are awake?; v) what is it like to feel that we are dreaming while in the waking world?
The presentation will be based on substantial personal experience with levels of lucidity as well as historical and research examples from the dream literature. the author takes the twofold position that on the one hand anecdotal reports of dreamers experiencing multiple dream levels should be taken seriously and seen as real, and on the other hand that claims that the waking world is “but a dream” bear careful, yet critical examination because of their staggering metaphysical implications.
Mary B. Trouba, PhD (USA) obtained her doctorate in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Recently she has launched Another Stage of Life, a podcast in which she and others share facets of their cancer journeys in spunky, life-affirming, memoir-style episodes. This year marks her 6th Psiberdreaming Conference.
IASD’s Dreamwide Web(psi)te
Have you ever been unable to attend an IASD Conference and found that you seemed to be participating anyway, having dreams connected to the Dream Art Show, Dream Telepathy Contest, or other facets of the conference? This dialogue will be an exploration and celebration of the psychic dreamwide web that IASD fosters among its members. After kicking things off with a story about the 2016 Rolduc conference, I invite dreamers to share their own stories of dreams with psi connections to IASD conferences and events.
Misa Tsuruta, PhD (Japan) obtained her doctorate in cognitive, social and developmental psychology from the New School for Social Research.
Currently she has a small private practice in Tokyo as well as acts as a school counselor at a small international school.
In Search of Indigenous Cultures in Japan: Ainu dreaming and Kamui
When I was a graduate student pursuing a psychology PhD degree, I developed this interest in culture and indigenous people. It was a gradual process that led me to encounter with Native American people, incorporating anthropological literature in my dissertation, traveling to remote islands within Japan, etc.
This March I took advantage of a trip to Hokkaido (our northernmost island)to do some research on Ainu people, the northern indigenous people in Japan. I was astounded to learn that Ainu people believe that dreams are messages from their god, Kamui. At the museum I visited I heard the recording of a story recited by an Ainu woman about a woman who left her baby in the mountain. The story included a dream as a message from Kamui.
Jeanne Van Bronkhorst, MA, MSW, (Canada) is a former hospice social worker and the author of Dreams at the Threshold: Guidance, Comfort and Healing at the End of Life (2015), and Premonitions in Daily life (2013). She volunteers with a children’s hospice and trains other hospice volunteers on grief and mourning.
The Dual Nature of Visitation Dreams
Visitation dreams/visions are powerful experiences in which we vividly feel the presence of people we love who have died. They are the only dreams people in grief long to have. But what does it mean when the visitor we want to see doesn’t show up?
In this paper I will describe how I’ve come to appreciate and welcome the dual nature of visitation dreams, using my own story and the work of two remarkable grief counsellors, and explore both their visitation and their dream qualities.
Mary Walsh, DMin, LMFT (USA) is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, consultant, biofeedback trainer, dream researcher, and writer. with private practice offices in Berkeley and Vallejo, CA. and is an adjunct professor in the graduate Certificate in Traumatology and Treatment Program at Holy Names University, Oakland, CA. Dr. Walsh has presented at numerous conferences and workshops including the Illinois Association of Marriage and Family Therapy State Conference, the National Conference of Catholic Charities, and IASD. Dr.Walsh has graduate degrees in Psychology, Theology, and Literature. Recent research explores the impact of Heart Rate Variability and Dream Group on dream content and post traumatic distress in adolescents.
Precognitive Dreams in Adolescent Trauma Recovery
Research shows ESP correlates with reported higher levels of emotional abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, and traumatic intrusions (Scimeca et al, 2013; Cardena et al, 2009). In the light of this research I discuss precognitive dream reports and spiritual guide dreams shared in a dream group I facilitated for adolescents in early recovery from substance abuse and trauma. I report the conclusions adolescents drew about their own dreams, discuss the importance of honoring their beliefs, and show how these dreams facilitated healing.