May 16, 2010
WHO: Contact Tzivia Gover: Tzivia.Gover@gmail.com
WHAT: Upcoming workshop at IASD Conference,
WHEN: June 27-July 1, 2010
WHERE: Asheville, North Carolina
MORE INFO: http://www.asdreams.org/2010/index.htm
Writing has long been used as a first step in dream work; the written dream report is a commonly regarded as the launching ground for dream analysis. But how we write is far more important than what we write when it comes to knowing our dreams in a meaningful way, says writer and workshop leader, Tzivia Gover.
Gover, a student in the Institute for Dream Studies and member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, teaches new techniques for combining writing and dream work in her upcoming workshop, “Dreaming on the Page: Using Proprioceptive Writing as a tool for Dream Exploration.” The workshop will be presented at the IASD conference in Asheville, North Carolina, June 26-July 1, 2010.
Proprioceptive Writing (PW) is a meditative form of writing that allows you to know yourself more fully by exploring on paper the territory of your mind, memory and emotions. This technique, when used as a regular practice, helps synthesize emotion and imagination, generating authentic insight and joy. PW combines focused attention and the use of a mantra-like question to excavate and expose personal meaning and to amplify thoughts and dream images. PW also engages the auditory imagination, helping people to cultivate the skill of deep listening.
Combining this method of writing with dream work, allows us to question and come to know the dream more intimately and more viscerally, says Gover, who is a certified Proprioceptive Writing instructor. By doing so we have the opportunity to channel our energy into our waking experiences.
Through Proprioceptive Writing, we become still and quiet so that we can receive impulses from the field of unconscious awareness. As we stay in this open, awake and aware state, we turn our attention toward the thoughts that emerge. We don’t choose or direct these thoughts, but rather receive them. By “saying” on paper what we “hear” in our minds during this process, we participate in making these energies manifest. Through listening to our internal process and capturing it in writing we bring material from the unconscious into the stream of conscious thought, as described by William James.
As Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson writes in Inner Work: “When the image speaks, it is with one of our own inner voices. When we answer back, it is the unseen inner part of our own self that listens and registers.”
Writing and dreaming seem to have a natural affinity for one another; each amplifying the complementary characteristics of the other. Writing clothes the images and energies of the unconscious in words, as dreams clothe them in color, character, image and drama.
When we not only write, but write in the state of receptivity and awareness that PW cultivates, we hold the messages of the unconscious in our conscious attention long enough to know them in a truly transformative way, says Gover. Then the conscious mind can interact with otherwise amorphous and intangible systems of thought and energy and the mysterious dramas of the dream world. The written line thus becomes a story, a trail to follow, inward, ever deeper; bringing our conscious faculties to the realms of the unconscious.
For more information on Writing and Dream Work with Tzivia Gover visit www.tziviagover.com; for information about the upcoming IASD conference and Gover’s workshop visit www.asdreams.org
