THE DREAM JOURNAL: A USER’S GUIDE
Presented as part of revolve’s series of workshops, exhibitions, lectures, and forums celebrating the traditions and practices of the arts and exploring new directions for creativity in the 21st century
Seminar + Workshop with Professor Bernard Welt of the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University
Sessions running in May and June
Every night the mind presents us with tantalizing images, plots, and mysteries, as rich and fascinating as the offerings at any film festival. If dreams really were movies, we’d consider ourselves lucky to get free passes to a show that gave us so much to delight in, to feel, and to think about. But every morning most of us forget the riveting scenes we’ve encountered in the night. In losing our dreams, we lose touch with the deepest sources of creativity, and the “royal road,” as Freud said, to the understanding of our own motivations and choices in life.
This workshop can guide you on the first steps on that road. Even if you never remember your dreams, you can easily master a few simple tricks to catch them before they fly away, and establish a practice for keeping a dream journal, tracking dreams, and drawing upon them as a resource for inspiration and insight. Participants will share dreams, using a gentle, non-intrusive method for unlocking the metaphors that structure dreams. We will treat dreams as experiences that deepen with exploration, and try out techniques for working with dreams, drawing on modern psychology, cultural traditions, and practical exercises for artists.
Dreams show us what we haven’t been able to express in words or images in waking life, and valuing dreams instead of dismissing them opens us to intuition, our own unrecognized thoughts and feelings, and the symbolic mode of thought. In this workshop, we’ll come to appreciate why so many innovators have experienced breakthrough moments by recovering their dreams.
If you’ve never explored your dreams before, prepare for a great adventure...