Dreaming the Way
A path of personal initiation through dreamwork
Join Ophilia for 10 weeks of one-on-one dreamwork, ritual, and embodiment
The landscape of dreaming is real medicine
In Asklepion temples of ancient Greece (and in healing spaces of Ancient Egypt), dreaming was a means of diagnosis, treatment and oracular insight. Today, countless thousands of people experience the wisdom, power, and significance of their dreams without the affirmation of modern science or mainstream culture, but some of us are still carrying the medicine of dreamtime.
Dreaming the Way is a nine session process for those that are feeling called to embrace the wonder, wisdom, power, and deep intelligence of their dreams.
Together, we will utilize intentional dreaming and Embodied Imagination® dreamwork to address specific areas of your life, and to cultivate transformation in your area of inquiry.
Dreaming with intention is a pathway to deeper reality
In this work together, we view dreaming as a way back to source material, rather than as an abstraction or surreal slant on reality. This doesn’t mean that our dreams are literally true, but that they connect us back to the vast and mysterious aspects of our nature that underpin our existence. The more that we embrace these spaces of mystery, the more nuanced, subtle, and resourced we become in navigating the unknown in our waking life.
This work is a way of aligning with the world soul to cultivate transformation that honors your authentic desire
what’s involved?
Find your intention
First, we begin with a meeting to discuss your intention and explore what area of life is calling for your focus. You can bring anything to your dreams for support. Whether this is a question about a relationship, a creative project, a career decision, or a spiritual inquiry. We’ll begin here, by distilling the question you’re bringing to your dreams.
Activate your dreams
Using ritual and embodied dream incubation techniques offered by Ophilia in the first session, the next step is on your end: It’s time to activate your dreams, to sow the seeds of your intentions, and begin writing down the dreams that you’ve had.
Follow the thread
The remainder of our sessions will be a mixture of dreamwork and discussion. This is a series of 8 sessions completely devoted to tending your intention and the images and intelligences that arise from your dream life in response to your intention. The dreamwork method offered by Ophilia in these sessions is called Embodied Imagination®. It’s not an analytical or interpretive process, it’s a somatic, energetic, and soulful process that supports us to move away from habitual patterning and enact the transformation offered to us by our dreams.
The conclusion
Alas, if it were so simple! But in dreamwork, there is no final conclusion as the dream continues. For our 10th and final session, we will share a 45 minute meeting, reviewing the past 9 weeks and exploring reflective exercises and rituals based on your particular experiences in this dreamwork series.
Embodied Imagination®:
About the Dreamwork Process
Ophilia is certified in Embodied Imagination®, a modality founded by Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak. The theoretical underpinnings include alchemical principles, depth psychology, mimesis, complexity theory and much more.
The process is extremely experiential. It reveals our innate ability as humans to travel into altered states of consciousness with no intoxication or substance. While you will be present, grounded and safe, you will be led into a meditative state from which you revisit your dream. From here, we use embodiment tools to locate the emotional, sensory, and energetic signatures encoded throughout the dream. As the name suggests, it is an embodiment practice, not an analytical one, which is part of it’s potency as a healing process. Out of the head and into the body!
What kind of questions can you bring?
You can bring questions of any kind to this work. The most important thing to remember is that this is mystery work, meaning that we are not seeking yes or no answers. Rather, we are setting out in the work of alchemizing our emotional and physical energies into greater soulfulness. Your question or intention will be responded to, but it will likely ask that you show up for and accompany the transformation rather than simply being handed the answer. This is real growth, and it takes place in both a profound and subtle way.
Some examples of questions may include:
How may I embody more authentic and honest communication?
How may I attract more aligned connections and relationships?
Help me to live with greater courage and confidence
Support me in deepening my relationship to divinity or my spiritual practice
I’m feeling stuck in my career; help me to see the next phase and feel the best way forward
Alchemical Dreamwork
This work is founded on alchemical principles that understand we need “poison” in order to create a remedy. This means that we will likely encounter aspects, sensations, emotions and dream images that are averse to what the habitual consciousness enjoys or desires. In this case, we will mindfully engage and work with these places of challenge.
One of the benefits of dreamwork is that because the waking mind knows we are working with a dream, and not waking reality, issues that the conscious mind struggles to work through can be navigated in dreamwork. This doesn’t mean it will always be pleasant - in fact, it means that challenging subject matter may arise because dreamwork presents a safe way to approach things we’d usually like to avoid.
Our galaxy is held together by a super massive black hole
Why mention this? To emphasize a point. We have been completely inundated with the idea that in order to “better” ourselves, we must cast aside things like sadness, anger, jealousy, resentment, aggression, etc.. Unfortunately, if these “poisons” (or anything that’s become your personal poison), are not worked with from a place of presence and love, they are likely to fester and feed unconscious patterns and behaviors that are harmful or out of alignment with how you’d like to move in the world. Remembering that the very fabric of existence is held together by darkness, by a void, by the unknown, by something which has been deemed scary or even destructive, is very illuminating to how we may relate to the “shadow” aspects of our emotions and psyche.
With this at heart, we will meet everything in this work as valuable and having something important to share. Very often, the dream images or emotions that we find most scary, alarming, or undesirable, have the most pertinent wisdom to share.
I share this with you so that you enter into our work with the awareness that we will engage everything from this place of curiosity, rather than judgement, and that we will work together to move through difficult spaces in a way that honors your boundaries and comfort level. If you prefer to stay only in “the light” this may not be the best fit for you — unless you are open to shifting that pattern!
Fees & Details
Dreaming the Way is $1200
This one-on-one series of dreamwork includes:
1 introductory call (1 hr)
8 dreamwork sessions (1.5hrs each)
1 closing call (1 hr)
Once you’ve registered, we’ll schedule weekly recurring meetings according to your schedule.
A payment option of four payments of $300, due every two weeks, is available upon request.
About Ophilia
Ophilia is an interdisciplinary artist, astrologer, and initiate within the Dagara lineage of ancestral divination and healing. She’s also a certified Embodied Imagination® practitioner.
She studied writing, illustration and sculpture at California College of the Arts, and has over 7 years of experience in theatrical arts.
As a co-founder of Awake in the Dream: School of Integrative Consciousness, Ophilia has worked as a psychedelic educator. She is a musician, ceremonialist, and perhaps most of all, an ardent devotee to this dreaming earth. Her deepest inspiration is stewarding humanity’s connection to the consciousness of our planet, and the many seen and unseen beings that share it as their home.
FAQs
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No. While you may find this work therapeutically beneficial, it is not therapy and I am not a licensed mental health practitioner. If you are seriously struggling with your mental health, I encourage you to seek help from a mental health professional. If this is the case, and you’d still like to engage in this work together, we would have a phone call to discuss, and I would also ask that before beginning to work together, you first consult with your therapist or counselor to deem whether or not it is a good fit for you at this time.
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Dreamwork is a hugely beneficial way to get in touch with the subtle intelligence of your own inner-healer, as well as the guides, allies, ancestors, teachers and presences that show up to work with you in your dreams. While people have differing opinions and perspectives on the significance of dreams, the way I relate to them in this work is that we are working simultaneously with the collective unconscious, our own team of spiritual allies, and the more literal brain/mind, which has access to vast amounts of stored and implicit information or memory. I like to refer to dreamwork as a “back way in” to the psyche - meaning that we can enter into the landscape of psyche without triggering the alarm bells of the ego that might go up in a setting such as talk therapy.
What I have seen is that the shifts that take place over a series of dreamwork sessions is both subtle and profound - very much like dreams. We are not banged over the head by change, but rather we are performing an inner alchemy that can allow for shifting in our relationship to the world and external circumstances.
I’ll also share that in the practice of Embodied Imagination® dreamwork that I offer, we’re also benefitting from the neurological principle that “what fires together, wires together,” which you will learn more about in our time together. Essentially, we encourage “difficult” sensations or emotions to fire with more pleasant ones, and in this way, can create new patterns neurologically.
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That’s ok. This happens to all of us sometimes, and it’s a natural part of the ebb and flow of our dreaming. What matters is that you are invested in building the relationship with your dreams. From there, we can work together to achieve improved recall. That being said, even a short dream can be very powerful to work with.
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During the 10 session series, we will aim to meet once each week. Sometimes, you may need more time between sessions if you haven’t yet received a new dream. In this event, we will simply postpone one week. However, this process benefits from keeping the container tight - which is to say that postponing more than one week is highly discouraged. This is a process that requires you to show up continually until the 10 sessions are complete.
Cancellations are accepted without any cancellation fee, with the understanding that we will promptly reschedule and continue to honor the work.
Refunds are not available.