Your 2019 alchemy bowl

I’d love to inspire you to create an alchemy bowl, a vessel to collect totems from your dreams and act as a sacred alchemical kiln.

It’s a variation of ancient divinatory practices, healing rituals, and wisdom oracles, given a dream alchemy twist. It’s a way of consolidating and connecting the insights you draw from your dreams across a period of time, and then allowing them to surprise you by revealing themselves in transformational combinations.

That’s the poetry. Now let’s get practical.

The alchemy bowl

Firstly choose your bowl, dish, pouch, tray, box, or whichever kind of container feels appropriate to you. It needs to be big enough to hold a collection of small bits and pieces.

The totems

If you want to keep this really simple, collect or buy a few handfuls of small, smooth pebbles. When you interpret a dream, summarise your insight into a single word or short phrase, and paint those words on a pebble. You might like to varnish the pebble to seal the words, as well as to bring out the colours within the stone. If you’ve created a dream alchemy practice for the dream, paint a word that encapsulates the alchemy onto another pebble. Build your pebble totem collection dream by dream.

If you’re feeling a little more artistic, paint symbols or images to convey the insight or encapsulate the dream alchemy. Dream alchemy usually involves transforming a dream symbol, so paint the transformed dream symbol onto a pebble.

If you’re inspired to dedicate more time to creating your totems, you might like to craft them from clay, wood, fabric, or found objects from nature that fit the bill. Take care to ensure that your totems accurately reflect your insights or dream alchemy. It can be very tempting to gather pretty or curious things, to create a bower rather than a collection that authentically embodies your dream work.

How to use your alchemy bowl

Build a sacred practice around your alchemy bowl. Keep it in a special place, and decide on a ritual to follow each time you sit down to draw wisdom from your bowl. Your ritual might be as simple as closing your eyes and taking three deep breaths, or it might be more elaborate than this. The point of the ritual is to focus and open to the alchemy.

You might want to make this a daily ritual, or you might prefer to consult your alchemy bowl when you have a specific question or issue you want to explore.

Then draw from your bowl. The idea is for your various insights and dream alchemies to combine in different patterns and juxtapositions for you to explore. Synchronicity will play its part. Your unconscious mind will play its part. The universe will play its part. The greater mysteries of life will play their part. So draw more than one totem from your bowl!

You might like to dip your hand in and draw out three or more totems (without looking), placing them in a row or a circle, then standing back and seeing what comes to you. Effectively, you’re drawing on your wise insights from a number of dreams, and on transformed elements of your being from a number of your dream alchemy practices, and seeing how they interact and resonate.

You might like to shake the bowl and empty, or ‘throw’ all the totems onto a table or ritual mat, and focus on the way they connect and gather together.  Or you might like to draw a number of totems and then throw them to watch how they assemble.

You could adapt this to use it as a divinatory or guidance tool, but that is not really the purpose that I’m advocating. My suggestion, as a dream analyst, dream alchemist, and one who embraces the synchronicities and mysteries of life, is to let your totems – originally derived from your unconscious mind as expressed through your dreams and from your unconscious mind as reprogrammed by dream alchemy – draw you ever more deeply into your unconscious to further elucidate your beautiful being. From that well springs the wisdom.

A variation

As well as an alchemy bowl, you might enjoy setting up a dream bowl. Instead of using it to collect totems of your dream insights and dream alchemies, collect totems representing both your common dream symbols and some of those dream symbols that mystify you. Keep it simple: if you dream of cats, put a cat totem in the bowl. If you dream of feeling blocked, put a block totem in the bowl. If you dream of being late, put a clock totem in the bowl. Dip into your bowl in the same way as for the alchemy bowl, and explore the patterns that emerge. This is absolutely not a substitute for dream interpretation or analysis, but the interplay of symbols that originally sprung from your unique unconscious mind may assist you in knowing yourself more deeply.

Ancient oracles

At the start of this blog I mentioned that the idea is a variation of ancient divinatory practices, healing rituals, and wisdom oracles, given a dream alchemy twist. I asked intuitive bone reader Alexandra Moulding, who also works with dreams, to share her knowledge and wisdom on the use of totems in her work:

“While many cultures still honour their tribal roots and use their ancient practices, modern life has sadly caught up with us. Totems ask us to reconnect, helping us to access the divine both within and in our outer world. Traditionally, totems were used collectively for divination or ‘the casting of lots’. These could be a collection of stones, shells, bones, sticks or more elaborate carved figures. Every ancient culture had its own method. Thrown to the ground, the reader interprets their meaning, helping communities make decisions and offering a way for people to understand their lives. This may be done with the assistance of ancestors or other helpful spirits. It was so prevalent: the Bible quotes this method seventy-seven times as a means to access ‘the will of God’. Of course, this can still be used today as a technique that allows us to tap into, in a tangible and conscious fashion, the workings and drivers of inner landscapes and lives, in a symbolic way.

In my own practice I have found that animating the type of symbols found in dreams, animals, archetypal figures, feelings, and situations helps to give me focus. Bringing them to life promotes me to creatively explore the deeper parts of myself. I practise this as a method of divination but also I use the items in my bowl to help me work through the aspects they represent in a more intentional way by arranging them consciously, inviting me to engage with those same themes. Sometimes the theme of a dream will prompt me to create or find a new item, exploring why it was offered. Or I might make an item whose purpose strikes upon something so powerful within me that it will prompt a dream, allowing me to further understand its meaning. There is an ancient connection between man and totems. The transformation of ‘meaningless’ materials into something sacred and imbued with meaning is a wonderful experience!”

You might like to explore Alexandra’s work through her Instagram account.

Have we inspired you to create your 2019 alchemy bowl? Go to it!

 

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