Since the last tree weekend in Eberswalde, a few participants have been reporting very vivid dreams.
Trees, animals, intense symbolism, the kind of dreams that leave a residue in the morning.
I’ve noticed this before.
When I’m spending long stretches of time in the woods, working with plants through the body and senses, paying attention in these ways, my dreaming life often seems to get louder. More available, porous, right there.
I remember this from David Abram:
“For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world.”
I love that partly because it messes with the usual location of dreaming.
We tend to think of the dream as something that happens inside us, somewhere in the private cinema of the sleeping brain, and then we wake up and return to the solid world of pavements and emails and coffee and paper whatever else counts as reality.
But what if dreaming is not quite so private?
Is the body is already participating in a much larger field of image, sensation, memory, relationship and intelligence *all the time*? (I wonder about this often).
Seems like spending a weekend deliberately opening those channels of attention gives the psyche a very different kind of material to work with.🌀
I don’t know whether these dreams are meaningful in any grand sense, or whether the psyche is simply busy digesting.
At the tree weekend we were immersing ourselves in widening our sense of connection with earth, bark and branch, breathing with trees, hearing folktales about witches, the land of the fae and giant beasts, spending time alone in the woods and generally giving the nervous system quite a lot of material … that does not resemble scrolling Instagram while half-watching Netflix.
And then funnily enough…we are, of course, already connected to all of this.
We’re already breathing with trees, eating sunlight transformed through leaves and roots, moving through landscapes full of other lives.
And a huge amount of our lives is simply spent *Not Noticing*
It amazes me how quickly the magic and mystery becomes available when we do.
The Dreaming Body of the World
