An Invitation to Yggdrasil’s Dream Council
April 2014
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At Yggdrasil, we will encourage an ongoing conversation with the wisdom available in other dimensions, and we will work in a rather intimate way with our dreams to draw it forward. At the dreamwork intensive I recently attended, one of the co-facilitators told a story about his experience living with an indigenous culture in New Zealand. One day, he had a dream that he went fishing at a particular spot in the river and caught an extraordinary amount of fish. As it happened, several other members of the tribe had a similar dream on that very day. It was decided in morning council that rather than work to repair the thatched roofs that would protect the village from the ensuing monsoon – the activity planned for that day – the tribe would instead go catch fish. And catch fish they did – more than they ever had before – at the very point in the river where the dreamers had dreamed of that possibility.
What if the fish – or perhaps the sea deities to whom the fish were fingers and toes – were dreaming of being caught by the humans of Midgard? What if, like Ralph the Seedy Rug Merchant, they had some creative destiny that in ways incomprehensible to us, could be fulfilled in no other way?
What if, as we small intrepid band of dreamers at Yggdrasil work to create a mystery school-retreat where visionary contrarians can dream a more ensouled world into being, there are beings in the mythopoetic realm dreaming us toward the embodiment of that vision? What if we could enter into conversation with these beings through an extraordinary quality of attention to our dreaming – and like the Senoi of Malaya, or the Iroquois, or the ancient Greeks, or the Sufi poets, or the Waroa shamans of old, or the unknown lineages of many cultures that have long since come and gone – enter a co-creative collaboration with these dreamworlds to bring the wisdom of all nine worlds into this one?
The very idea of Yggdrasil is a dream being called into relationship with waking state reality. But as the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and contemporary non-interpretive dream pioneers might wonder, “Are we dreaming Yggdrasil, or is Yggdrasil dreaming us?” What if Yggdrasil already exists in the dreamtime, and our real job is to find our way there through the clues that it is inserting into our dreams?
This is the possibility we are currently working to explore on Yggdrasil’s Talking Council. We have decided at our last Talking Council meeting to alter Talking Councils with Dream Councils, in which the object will be to enter more deeply into our dream lives, and to see where they intersect with this common vision that we hold – to find our way to Yggdrasil in the dreamtime. Our approach will not be through interpretation, but rather through a living embodiment of the dream – and the vision – through interaction with its imagery, dialogue with the beings we encounter, immersion in the interior landscape of the dream itself, and a translation of the energy of the dream into movement, art, music, poetry and other forms of creative self-expression.
Our intention is to engage our dreams with our embodied feelings, our intuition, and our mythopoetic imaginations – in order to see what the dream world and the beings in our dreams are asking of us. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, our goal will be to “ask not what the World Soul can do for us, but what we can do to nourish and sustain the World Soul” in these dark days when the beings in all the worlds are crying so desperately for us to hear them.
If you would like to join us, there is still room on the Talking Council for more dreamers. We have six active Talking Council members now, with room for nine. If the vision spelled out elsewhere on this website speaks to you, we would like to hear from you, and from the voices in your dreams. Together, we can dream new life into the World Soul that is dreaming our world, and maybe in some small way, keep the nightmare that is destroying our Middle Garden from spreading.
Through the ceremony that I did in Colorado to honor Ralph the Seedy Rug Merchant, we were both surprised to find him suddenly transformed into Raphael the Seed Man – a liberated being, no longer hunchbacked, smiling, speaking in more translucent tones. Raphael’s new job is to help us plant seeds that can help keep Middle Garden alive. In this spring season of new growth and mythopoetic possibility, won’t you join him in his impossible dream. Yggdrasil is calling to us from the dreamtime. Is it calling you?
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