Dream Tending is a method of working with dreams that considers dream images as “living images.” It makes the particularity and presence of these images available to the dreamer. The “intelligence” of the dream is listened to from the inside out.
To “tend” a dream is not just to interpret or analyze it. The figures and landscapes of dreams are experienced as alive and moving about with a certain degree of autonomy. When a dream is ”tended,” images come “awake,” imagination is animated, and we participate in life more fully rooted in the way of the dream.
1. The Dreaming Psyche Is Multidimensional
Three “dimensions” of experience
2. Dreams Are Alive
Images interact; Images are alive; they are moving about in the dreamscape, coming into relationship with each other, changing one another.
3. Everything Dreams
People are dreaming, rocks are dreaming, mountains are dreaming. It is the idea that the world itself is always dreaming — that all things, phenomena and creatures have a subjective interiority.
4. Dreams Happen Now
Dreams exist in the immediacy of our experience. Dream images are like a poem or a painting that ask us to hear or see differently.
I. Preparation - Entering the Realm of the Living Dream
II. Working with Living Images
- Contacting the Archetypal Ego
- Asking the Core Questions
- Using Language to Vivify Dream Images
- Hosting the Guest
- Sustaining Relationship with an Image by Using the Senses
- Portals of the Soul
- The Intelligent Image
- The Evolving Image
- The Love of an Image
Interview with Stephen Aizenstat where he gives a definition and examples of the technique he developed for working with dreams: Dream Tending.