Processing dreams through drawing symbols:

For me, dream symbology has a way of being incredibly powerful, but at times can be straight up overwhelming. Sometimes I feel like I am processing things I saw and did in my nightly travels all day long, or even over the course of multiple days. Having an outlet like writing about dreams or creatively expressing them can be helpful in integrating and dissolving the potent energy.

Creatives who paid attention to dreams have been doing this for eons, notably Surrealists like Salvador Dali and Leonora Carrington. Dreams even converted psychologist Carl Jung into an artist, as a means of trying to unpack and process his nightly experiences.

I have gone down many paths of trying to express dreams. One way I have played with is pulling out the most power-packed symbols from a dream each day, drawing and briefly describing them, then day-by-day, creating a scroll-shaped canvas for the month. I love the accumulation of symbols, collections of energy swimming around in the unconscious, marking a period of time.

June 2023 dream symbols

July 2023 dream symbols

September 2023 dream symbols

Sometimes, a more in-depth drawing/writing about the dreams and symbols can act as an integration or meditation. Here are a few images where I spent more time mulling over the symbols while drawing and writing:

Immortal Dream: One thing dreams really like to drive home is we are immortal souls having an experience in a human form. Message received!

Tibetan stuff dream: My dreams often do archaeological digs through the history of my prior life experiences. I really like to draw these kinds of dreams as the content is really powerful. I had no idea these things belonged to me before this dream. It's like a mini soul retrieval, remembering lost parts of self.

Anointed dream: Tibetan themes show up often in my dreams. I like that I decided to draw this box of candy one day and weeks later, my dreams brought it back in. 

Sri Yantra dream

Alchemical conjunction of the sun and moon dream: You can look this being up online, it's in the old alchemical texts. But to see it and to feel it's presence and fearsome aliveness is another thing. 

*I later realized the figure 8 was also connected to a healing process I was about to embark on called Cutting the Ties, wherein the symbol of the 8 is used to energetically and alchemically cut ties with the past.

Vintage witch: I’m in a print show and I want to print a post card of a girl in a vintage era dress, in  profile.  She has a raven or a crow on her head. It’s not exactly a hat, it’s more of a symbol. It’s interesting and unique looking, it seems to indicate she’s a witch or a shaman. There is text in red, I don’t remember what it says. On the opposite side of the postcard is a coffee mug and text that is inviting people to come to an art opening.

*I found out a year later that I have an Salem witch trial victim ancestor from the late 1600s.

Dolphins on the second floor: Do you have dolphin/whale dreams? They reference the gift of channeling. I think we are all meant to be channels on some level, but if you dream of them, you are definitely meant to connect.

Saint 1: saints in dreams refer to a spiritual leadership responsibility/gift. I like how they say I joined cults, this made me laugh. It might be true, spiritual work is not exactly hard science, its an art form and I've taken many classes from a variety of teachers who each have a very particular belief system.

Spiritual leadership 2:  I don't have the name yet, still digging.

Consciousness download: I swivel around and hug an old friend. As I do, I become overwhelmed with an energetic download. My consciousness blasts open. Everything is so crystalline and out of space and time. We’re standing in a clear white light with a striking amount of information swirling around. Intense beauty, truth, and powerful love is the vibration. All these visions of lifetimes throughout space and time are floating around in the love and I see my own energy in a whole new way. 

I pull away and can barely talk. I am breathless. The friend has two new circular earrings, one turquoise, the other white pearlescent. 

How the Victorian era effected my gut: I’m in a library, looking through some images in a box. My sister is there. We’re supposed to collect images to use in some creative way like making a collage, and then share to a group later.

I look through the pictures at first, and I don’t take any, but then she tells me that’s the whole point, I’m supposed to take the pictures. The pictures are mostly of Victorian women. I choose one photo with a stylish middle aged woman whose hair is enormous and puffy, gray and kinky-wavy, like the queen in Bridgerton. I take another one of a woman whose dress looks like a rectangle with all these tube-like, undulating silk shapes weaving in and out of it. It’s like unconsciously the designer made a very conservative design to covered a woman up but it  looks sort of alien-digestive-sexual in an abstract, uptight way. 

Mowing lawns: green grass is about the heart. I really need to stop mowing lawns.

Symbols on the windows dream: I’m looking at a photograph of the interior of a gluten free-vegan restaurant near my house. It looks like an industrial building transformed into a café. I see all these small window panes that make up a huge window and each pane has a symbol in it. One looks like the star wars starbird rebel alliance symbol (a Phoenix reference). Also, sort of a Ghanaian adinkra symbol vibe.

Below the window are three adults, evenly spaced on barstools, I think they’re all men. The adults look like they’re strong and fit, maybe in their 30s. They have a powerful presence and they’re hard to see. Each man is looking down at his coffee. They are dark because of the back lighting. 

Below the three men are three children. It’s like each child fits between the outspread legs of the adults in the picture. It’s framed that way, the adults in the background have their legs out to the side, and in the 2D photo, the children’s heads are just below that, in the foreground. The children look abnormally small. they’re in front of the adults and they should look bigger because of this, but they actually look smaller. Everything is sort of backlit by the huge window. Something about it looks like a medieval painting of men giving birth. It’s stylized and meant to be symbolic, to tell a story.

The adults have their backs to the children, and the children sort of look like they’re in preschool. Like they have their own little world in front of them on a table. The two groups are not interacting with each other. It’s like they’re in different dimensions.

*This is one of the most deeply layered, symbol-rich scenes I've ever seen in a dream.

Christ Flowers dream: I went deep into the astral to find this dreamscape. I tend to have these dreams during a healing process. It's all yucky dreams about all the stuff I'm hung up on in life, then, BAM, an unbelievably magical landscape.

Vitruvian Woman: I started to have a lot of sacred geometry dreams just before signing up for a yoga teacher training course. This prompted me to realize that yoga is sacred geometry. Can you see it? How our bodies are designed with sacred geometry, how performing an asana has the potential to activate the geometry in our sacred bodies? I'm sure that to lots of people in other parts of the world this is painfully obvious, but I had to learn through dreams.

The Vitruvian Woman and the Christ Flowers dream are some of the most intense dreams I've had to date. Do you dream of sacred geometry? Message me!

As a dream analyst, part of me is tempted to pull apart or explain every part of the images I see. I could do that. But there is a way that not explaining a dream honors their being-ness in the subconscious as an epic and multidimensional art form, a gift from a divine source, open for interpretation by the viewer.