The first story was a dream. The first storyteller, the Dream-maker. Long before words. Long, long, long before complex language, or tools, our deepest ancestors were dreaming.
The proof is obvious: your dog, or mine, curled in slumber, her paws quivering with what is clearly a sleep-paralyzed chase, her bark muted to a chittering whisper. You know she is deep in dream—dreaming is such a universal experience we recognize it immediately. Even the octopus dreams!
It seems incredibly likely that our Neolithic ancestors developed the practice of telling their dreams as a community practice. Certainly there are many Indigenous peoples who have kept this practice alive. I would even argue that dreamwork––communal dreamwork in particular––is one of the foundations of the development of art, ritual, and shamanic medicine.
That we have lost our capacity to share our dreams in a meaningful way, and even more so that most of us no longer collect dreams from our sleep, speaks to a collective lost self, for without our dreams we lose some connectivity to the very spiritual forces that brought us into a shared experience of story, and we lose also the deeply nourishing experience of communal dreamwork.
I am a lifelong student of dreamwork. Now squarely in middle age, I can look over my shoulder and catalog a great number of highly potent dreams that shook my mind open and gave me footing for my spiritual journey. But I’ve also had seemingly normal dreams that I can see, from where I stand now, were preparing me for deep challenges, some years away from the dream itself.
Many of my most potent dreams have been dreams of animals. In these dreams it is clear that I am being visited by non-human entities, and the energy they bring is always electric and alchemizing. When we dream of animals we have entered a deep place in the dreamworld, for we have left our human-centric world and entered a forest filled with other ways of knowing and being. These are the dreams that wildly inspire us, or shake us loose of our moorings, and deliver us to the mystery of life.
This exhibition, Dreaming Animals, will explore dreamwork specifically through the lens of these potent animal dreams. First it asks the question, What might animals dream? so that we can explore the capacity of all mammals (and apparently octopuses) to dream. And then, What shifts in us when we dream of animals? Both of these questions take us outside of ourselves and our waking consciousness and into a deeper experience of life, challenging us to consider how the inner dream life of all conscious beings is woven into our waking life.
The deeper quest, though, is to activate a space for communal dreaming, to bring dreamwork and its capacity for deeply connecting us to all of life, to the table, so that we might begin to recover that part of ourselves, the dreaming self, that is collectively lost, electric with meaning, and deeply needed.