Dream Cultures (Around the World)

A 6-module lecture-based course with interactive dreamwork practices.

This course will take you into the roots of dreams, dreamwork and dreaming practices through a cross-cultural and imaginal approach to understanding the significance of dreams in human life. While the psychoanalytical and Jungian approaches to dreamwork remain an essential pillar within modern depth psychology, they are but one pearl within a far older and wider chain of being; one fragrance within the World Soul. However significant and useful these approaches remain within our hyper-individual and psychologically oriented societies, we cannot begin to grasp the depth of dreaming without turning toward the ancient traditions that understood dreams not merely as subjective phenomena of the individual psyche, but as bridges between worlds, timelines, ancestral sources of guidance, physical healing, initiation and collective meaning.

Across cultures and civilizations, dreaming was cultivated through practices, rituals and communal forms of attention that recognized the imaginal as a living reality. Dreams guided migrations, battles, informed political and spiritual decisions, carried prophetic insight, facilitated healing and sustained the connective tissue between community, land, ancestry and the more-than-human world. In this course we will therefore move between psychoanalytical and Jungian approaches to dreams and ancient dreaming traditions rooted at the foundations of Western civilization itself.  We will specifically focus on incubation practices in ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as Celtic traditions of dream shamanism. We will also make a stop into mystical traditions like the Sufis and the role of dreams for the disciple on a traditional path. 

Then we move into the indigenous philosophies and approaches to dreaming that understand dreams as part of a larger relational field between humans, nature, spirit and cosmos. Through these perspectives, dreaming and dreamwork becomes a mode of participation; a way of listening to the soul of the world and to the unseen dimensions that continue to move beneath the surface of our noisy contemporary life.

The classes will be a combination between talks/lectures as well as hands-on dreamwork and experiments with these different ways to approach and work with dreams. It also includes creative work with dreams for those that attend in-person.

About the Teacher

Faranak Mirjalili is a Zürich trained Jungian analyst, Sufi mystic, scholar and teacher of the imaginal and has been working with dreams in both individual and group settings for nearly a decade. Over these years she has developed a mode of dreamwork called Anima Mundi Dreaming, which weaves together Jungian and James Hillmanian approaches to dreams alongside indigenous understandings of how dreamspace is held, cultivated and shared. Drawing from her clinical work in her private practice as well as years of facilitating collective dreamspaces, she explores both the importance of holding the dream in relationship to the individual psyche, and the equally vital movement through which the individual dream enters a wider collective river of meaning and belonging. Central to this work is the experience that dreaming does not belong solely to the isolated self, but can open into a larger field that reconnects us to community, imagination, soul and the wider fabric of life -- and ultimately to the World Soul as our ground of being. Faranak teaches dreamwork around the world and offers an in-depth training for those called to work with dreams at the 3 year program “Ecologies of the Imagination” taught at the Anima Mundi School. 

Format

Lectures | Dreamwork | Hybrid

Dates & Time

Sundays from 15.00 - 17.00

Sept 20, Sept 27, Oct 11, Oct 18, Nov 8, Nov 15

Language

The workshop will be conducted in English, with Dutch translations available on request.

Price* & Admission

€310,- in-person, including museum visits

€295,- online via Zoom

* Early Bird (5% Discount until July 31st)