A dose of dream alchemy

If you’ve decided to do a dream alchemy practice, should you complete the prescribed dose before starting a second?

Is it ok to combine practices?

Tim, one of our Dream Academy students, posed this question, and she also wondered if it’s wise to park any interesting dreams that come up during the time that you’re focussing on doing a dream alchemy practice. Tim thought her question might make an interesting blog, so here it is!

Let’s begin with the basics.

If you want to experience profound positive change in your life through working with your dreams, I suggest a two-step process. Step 1 is interpreting a dream to bring you fresh self-awareness and insight. This can be powerful enough to cause positive change, but when a dream reveals long-held unconscious limiting beliefs it can be hard to shift these. This is where Step 2, the art and science of communicating directly with your unconscious mind using dream alchemy techniques, comes in.

Dream alchemy techniques come in a range of modalities including visualisations, artwork, and writing practices, each specifically prescribed according to a precise formula using symbols and dramas from your dream. The techniques focus on transforming unconscious limiting beliefs or patterns by transforming the symbols and dramas that represent them in your dream. Those dream symbols and dramas are unique to you, born of your life experiences, expressed in the unique language of your unconscious mind. The most powerful way to reprogram such limiting beliefs and perspectives is to communicate with your unconscious mind using its own language, the very language it expressed so vividly in your dream.

As a very simple example, many, many years ago I had a dream of not being able to walk properly because my legs were as heavy as lead. You may have had that type of dream before. I call it the ‘slo mo’ dream. It’s a common dream theme for many people, although each person’s variation of the dream has a unique and revealing story line. As Step 1, I interpreted the dream to understand it. I wanted to know what was holding me back (resulting in slo-mo), and whether I felt ready to let it go. I created a dream alchemy visualisation where I imagined myself back in the dream only this time my legs were light and powerful, and I danced all the way to my destination. (There were other details to the formula, but I’m keeping it simple as an example here.) Results in my life were fast: within days so much of my life had changed – some due to my actions, some due to unexpected events – and all for the better.

Some dream alchemy practices create the desired outcomes rapidly, while others take time, in the same way that a caterpillar takes time transforming into a butterfly, or a seedling takes time to burst into the sunlight even though the growth began, weeks before, deep in the earth.

These are the precious, gently transforming times that prompted Tim’s question. If you’re doing a dream alchemy practice that is stirring and unfolding deep with your unconscious, preparing to burst through into your conscious life, would it jeopardise progress to begin a different dream alchemy practice based on a new dream?

Moreso, Tim asked, should we pay attention to dreams that come up while we’re in the middle of a dream alchemy practice?

Should we interpret them, or park them until later?

My advice is to pay attention to all dreams that come up during a dream alchemy practice period, as they may reflect the deep unseen progress – giving you an update – or they may indicate that you would be wise to review and tweak your practice.

I advise not mixing dream alchemy visualisations. Generally a dream alchemy visualisation is a daily practice that extends to 2-4 weeks. It would be both time consuming and potentially weakening to overlap two different visualisations.

However it can be powerful to do a dream alchemy artwork practice while doing a dream alchemy visualisation if the two desired outcomes are in alignment with each other. In other words, the outcomes can be different, but do need to be mutually supportive.

So the question of mixing practices depends on the type and duration of the practice, and on the desired outcome.

I prescribe a new dream alchemy practice each week for people who do the 12-week dream therapy programme with me, taking care to not overlap visualisations and to prescribe all practices in ways that enhance and build upon each other. A good analogy is to see this as an opening process, each practice opening a different petal until a flower is in full bloom.

While most dream alchemy is prescribed to reprogram limiting beliefs and perspectives, you can create dream alchemy to magnify and enhance a positive attribute identified in a dream, perhaps something you’d like to foster and grow from an unconscious glimmer into full sunshiny life-fulfilling gold.

Prescribing dream alchemy is an art and a science. In the Dream Alchemy online course that you can do in your own time at your own pace at The Dream Academy, you learn how to do this as I guide you through filling in – step-by-step – the Dream Alchemy Prescription Charts that you download as you go.

Once you’ve created a dream alchemy prescription following my steps, all that’s left is for you to DO the practice and stand by for results!

 

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