The Creative Power of Dreams: conference report

With abject apologies to Ira Barouch, from whom I solicited this guest post, at long last I’m posting his report on the New England Regional Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD)—which took place one long year (and a few days) ago. Two main reasons for my delay: The article happened to come to me just a few days after I had to move out of the apartment I had lived in for 26 years because my landlord needed to sell it (and I was still deep in trying to find a new place), so life was rather chaotic for quite a while. Also, a synchronistic typo occurred as I was doing a light edit of the piece. It occurred in the paragraph after the one on Kabbalah and dreams. Intending to type an em dash (Alt-0-1-5-1 on the number keypad when using Windows), I accidentally typed something I never have before or since: ק, a character I recognized as a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Because I’d heard of the Kabbalistic use of a numerology system called gematria, I emailed the friend who had told me about it for help in deciphering a potential gematria meaning of this little synchronicity. He was on his way out of the country, and at that point, I’m embarrassed to say, procrastination set in on both following up with him later and getting Ira’s post posted.

A small saving grace for me: Ira’s report has timeless relevance because of the subject matter. It also has timely relevance, because several of the people who presented at the New England conference will be presenting at IASD’s annual conference next week (June 3–8) in Berkeley, California: Linda Yael Schiller, Tzivia Gover, Curtiss Hoffman, and Deirdre Barrett. So Ira’s report can serve as a bit of a preview of the upcoming conference.

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PsiberDreaming Conference

The 10th annual PsiberDreaming Conference (PDC) of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) is running full steam. The conference started last Sunday and continues actively until next Sunday (October 9). After that, the papers and discussion threads, contest instructions and submissions, remain available on a read-only basis for two weeks. Conducted entirely online, the conference goes on 24 hours a day, and it enables copious interaction not only with the presenters but other attendees.

This year, the emphasis (although not exclusively) is on lucid dreaming. (There’s also lots of discussion, and some papers about, lucid waking.)  It’s a fun and enlightening investment of time, even if you arrive a week late!

Two IASD members from NYC are presenting: Lou Hagood’s delightful paper went up for viewing today (Sunday, 10/2). Lou is a psychoanalyst and dream group leader who writes a blog called Playing with Dreams; I thoroughly enjoyed his workshop on that topic at last year’s IASD conference in Asheville, North Carolina. His playful yet profound PDC paper relates the question he incubated a dream about—“What’s My Lucidity?”—and the follow-up incubations and dreams that came after. Inspiring!

Tomorrow, Judy Gardiner’s “Dreaming Beyond Ourselves” gets posted. It’s based on a stunning series of dreams that flooded her with information from various fields of science about which she knew little until she followed up with extensive research. She has novelized the story in Lavender ~ An Entwined Adventure in Science & Spirit, released in September. I missed her slide presentation about those same dreams at IASD’s 2007 conference in Sonoma, California (I got lost on campus!), but I sure heard about it everywhere the rest of the week. Judy became a dream-studies rock stock that year! In addition to the PsiberDreaming presentation, Judy has agreed to do a book reading for us in NYC—date and location TBA.

You can also still read and discuss papers that were posted during the past week, including “Giving Dreams Sanctuary,” by Dutch psychotherapist Robert Bosnak, who graced IASD-NYC with a talk last January on “Nieuw Amsterdam and the Dream of the Golden Age: An Alchemical Perspective.” Robbie is cofounder of the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary. As his PDC paper notes, “This is the first Asklepian residential facility—based primarily on the medicinal potential of dreaming for participants with significant physical illness—to be founded in 1500 years.”

Register for the conference at asdreams.org/psi2011. If you’re not yet an IASD member, join at the same time and the conference is free.