I began this blog in January 2014 as a way of exploring the significant dream experiences that had their genesis at the time of my husband’s death in 1997. I was 47 at the time and we had been married for 27 years. His passing turned life as I knew it upside down and seriously challenged my atheistic, scientific materialist mindset. The process had started six months earlier when he took up meditation during his illness and I joined him for moral support. On two separate occasions, I had visions, which I’ve described here and here. I knew nothing about meditation, so these were quite startling to me but with so much to attend to, I had no time to process the experiences.

A way forward opened up when the dream life blossomed unexpectedly at the time of Roger’s passing. I had never paid much attention to dreams in the past but now the floodgates opened. I have long felt the timing more than mere coincidence. Though it would take many years before I could fully access their healing wisdom and life guidance, I had several incidences early on that showed me how helpful they could be. Through working with them over the past 25 years I have come to truly appreciate what a gift I was given.

The motivation for writing the blog was twofold; to deepen my own understanding and to share what I had gleaned. I knew from my own experience the value of shared stories for healing and though dreams are uniquely tailored to the individual there are common themes. I quickly learnt that writing with an expectation of it being read required a more disciplined approach to extract the essence and articulate the meaning I discovered within the dreams. I found a depth I hadn’t anticipated and the highly personal nature of the more significant and transformative dreams I’ve had, alerted me to the fact that I had more inner work to do if publishing these stories was to be of benefit to me and anyone coming across them. The blog took a back seat while I did some more sorting out.

To that end, I spent 3 years from 2017 deeply immersed in Jungian work. I had been picking away at Jung for about 20 years by then and felt the need for a more focused approach. I spent 18 months in what turned out to be a very deep plunge into the practical application of Jungian psychology in a group environment in an online course through the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies. That primed me for the following 18 months of working weekly with Dr. Robert Matthews from our local Jung Society, which brought many of the threads of my life together. There were several significant dreams over the years that I hadn’t explored fully and working through them one on one with a Jungian trained analyst brought a clarity and depth of meaning I hadn’t been able to access on my own, or even in groups. It was intense and thorough work and I came to realise the value of having taken the time to prepare by plodding along at my own pace and in my own way for so many years.

The third phase of deep inner exploration began in early 2020 when I took up a serious study of Vedanta. I had a passing interest in the subject over the years but agreed with Jung’s idea that it is prudent to explore one’s own cultural spiritual tradition first, which was for me Christianity. I had been doing this for many years but got to a point where I felt dissatisfied. About this time, imposed global lockdowns due to the pandemic created opportunities for online study and when the San Diego Vedanta Monastery offered classes on zoom I immediately signed up. One of the courses was given by Swami Sarvapryananda, a very knowledgeable monk with a warm manner and an ability to explain complex theories in simple terms without diluting the meaning. That led to eventually joining his weekly classes and also attending the local Vedanta Centre when lockdown ended here in Adelaide. The opportunities afforded by the internet are truly phenomenal.

So for the past two years it’s been a deep dive into Hindu philosophy, which has provided a conceptual framework that makes sense to me and has also given me a much deeper appreciation for the path that I was set upon 25 years ago. In Vedanta there isn’t much attention paid to dreams per se but there is a lot of attention given to the dream state and especially to the question ‘Who is the dreamer?’ This caused me some consternation and I began to wonder if my dream storehouse had been exhausted and I should retire the blog but I kept getting nudges from within to continue. This year, while continuing the Vedanta studies, I am doing more work with the Jungian approach to dreams and the psyche through the Jung Archademy as a deepening of the connection between the conscious waking life and the mysterious inner depths. The most precious gift I have received through dreams is the reconnection they have facilitated with the spiritual life I had forsaken.