Attending Dreams and Imagination
A practice of soul accompaniment: exploring ways of being with dreams and images as lived, spiritual and meaningful experiences
Dream and Image
Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst John A. Sanford once described dreams as ‘God’s forgotten language’. Across cultures and throughout history, dreams have often been felt to carry a particular weight or significance within human life.
The Jewish scriptures are filled with dreams and visions. The New Testament begins with dreams given to Joseph and culminates in the visionary imagery of the Apocalypse. In ancient Mediterranean and early Christian contexts ‘dream’ and ‘vision’ were often used as descriptors interchangeably, as they emerged from a more porous and enchanted world in which images possessed a certain potency whether encountered in waking life or in sleep. The modern assumption that waking consciousness alone is most ‘real’ had not yet fully taken hold.
It could be said
that we do not know human life
outside of image.
In Australia, Indigenous traditions speak of the Dreaming — not merely as dream in the modern psychological sense, but as a living reality woven through land, ancestry, story, and presence.
Across cultures and centuries, human beings have wrestled with the mystery of dreaming and its place within the life of soul. From the interpretive manuals of Artemidorus to the visionary depths of Carl Jung’s The Red Book, dreams have been approached as revelation, symbol, encounter, warning, inspiration, and transformation. Romantics, Surrealists, mystics, and political visionaries alike have all been touched by the enigma and depth that dreams can carry.
Whatever we make of them, dreams remain compelling as immediate and unbidden experiences — arising without effort, often beyond conscious control, and carrying a quality that can feel both intimate and strangely unfamiliar at once.
Many people experience dreams as an important dimension of spiritual feeling and life. It can make sense, then, to companion this half of life alongside waking thought and feeling.
BEYOND THE VISUAL IMAGE
I am interested more broadly in image itself — not merely as something pictorial, but as something arising through all the senses: through sound, touch, smell, taste, atmosphere, memory, and imagination.
It could be said in this way that we do not know human life outside of image.
INHERITED IMAGES AND FREEDOM
Images have long shaped human life. They have inspired devotion, guided perception, and given form to experiences that are felt yet difficult to name. At the same time, certain inherited images — especially those bound up with power, authority, or religious language — have also constrained, controlled, and at times caused harm.
Feminist and critical approaches to spiritual accompaniment and theology have drawn attention to the ways dominant images of the divine can become obstacles to relationship, particularly when they fail to reflect lived experience.
TOWARD LIVING IMAGES
The world of image — and imagination — has long been both treasured and guarded: understood at different times as a place of revelation, temptation, creativity, danger, and encounter with the sacred.
I am especially interested in those images that arise in dreams, memory, imagination, and inner life which feel less imposed and more intimately one’s own. At times these images carry a sense of something deeply personal, and yet not merely subjective — offering forms through which soul, meaning, or even the sacred may be encountered in ways that feel more native, grounded, and alive.
While it can be used for fantasy, illusion, make-believe, and escapism, the real work of imagination is to make contact with the strange world in which we live and to serve as both guide and inspiration for our development within it.
— Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination
My Approach
Dreams, for me, are one of the most compelling dimensions of the life of soul and imagination — of spiritual meaning and a felt relationship to what has depth in life.
Dreams may or may not feel spiritually significant to you. We begin from your own experience and way of understanding.
They can weave into many other forms of spiritual and reflective practice: journalling, creativity, time in nature, silence, ritual, music, memory, or moments of quiet attention within ordinary life.
A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH
I hold work with dreams within the scope and practice of what I call soul accompaniment (spiritual direction/accompaniment). This means the work is collaborative, reflective, and led by you. It is not a type of therapy. My role is not to interpret, diagnose, or direct your experience, but to support you in developing your own spiritual relationship with dream, image, imagination, and meaning.
My own relationship to dreaming has been shaped by several different streams of practice and study.
MONASTIC FORMATION
From my years in monastic life within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I inherited a deep concern for discernment, attentiveness, stillness, and spiritual sobriety. Monastic life taught me to become sensitive to the subtle ways different influences, moods, images, and encounters shape one’s inner life and overall constitution.
It also formed in me a way of relating to creation — whether dream, chant, nature, memory, or feeling — as something porous, alive, and carrying depths that are often only partially revealed.
At the same time, my own life gradually called me into conversation with traditions and perspectives beyond the boundaries of a single religious world. While I remain deeply shaped by my monastic background, I do not believe any one tradition holds a monopoly on pathways of discernment or on understanding the mystery of dreams and spiritual experience.
JUNG AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
From my encounter with the work of Carl Jung, I developed an interest in what he called the unconscious — the recognition that our ordinary conscious awareness is only a small part of a much larger field, and that dreams may express dimensions of psyche or soul that otherwise remain hidden from us.
IMAGINATION AND PRESENCE
In archetypal psychology, particularly through the work of James Hillman and the Embodied Imagination® approach developed by Robert Bosnak, I am learning new ways of relating to dreams and imagination directly, without reducing them to fixed interpretation.
Here, imagination is approached not as fantasy or escape, but as a mode of perception and a form of intelligence. Dreams become lived experiences in which images may be encountered as presences carrying their own depth, perspective, and reality.
Hillman described this orientation as a “program of animism, of ensouling the non-human” — this is something that resonates deeply with me.
Rather than treating dreams as puzzles to solve or predictions to decode, I approach them as invitations into deeper listening and relationship. What matters most is cultivating a grounded and careful attentiveness to experience, while remaining open to what may gradually reveal itself over time.
Thoughtful. Respectful. Collaborative.
Rooted in presence and the life of the soul.
There is space here to explore the richness of dream and imagination as it moves uniquely within your life.
We have gills for dream-life, in our head; we must keep them wet.
— Les Murray
Dreamwork in Soul Accompaniment
I’m here to walk alongside you.
I BEGIN FROM
NOT KNOWING
I do not assume what a dream means.
I do not interpret it for you.
Image is not collapsed before it can breathe and live
WE EXPLORE
TOGETHER
We explore together, following your sense of interest, and the directions the dream itself invites.
We can explore different approaches and perspectives on dreamwork
We can explore the relation of dreams to your felt sense of meaning and spiritual life
THIS MAY
INVOLVE
Exploratory dialogue and sharing
An embodied, imaginal approach
Creative expression
Ritual and practice
Almost the greater part of mankind get their knowledge of God from dreams.
— Tertullian, De Anima, c. 210 CE
If you’re feeling drawn to this work
I offer a free 45-minute conversation — a chance to meet, ask questions, and sense whether this way of working feels right.
I encourage you to make use of this, so that we can both get a sense of whether the work is a good fit.
*Images of monastic clothing reflect a past period of life and its ongoing influence on my character, and do not indicate any current affiliation, authority, or representation of a religious institution.