Weekend Workshop: Alchemical Dreamwork + Voice Work and Dreams

Weekend Workshop: Alchemical Dreamwork + Voice Work and Dreams By approaching the images in our dreams metaphorically, we are doing the inner work required for there to be a constructive effect in outer realms of our being. Our aim is to activate the imagination, open psychic space, and trigger processes of transformation.

Date: 14 & 15 September 2024 (workshops can be attended individually)

Location: Toqueur, Amsterdam

There is a limited number of places and full is full.

Saturday, Sep 14: Alchemical Dreamwork

Alchemical Dreamwork in the tradition of James Hillman ("The Dream and the Underworld"). We will focus on working metaphorically with dream images.

Sunday, Sep 15: Voice Work and Dreams

Voice Work and Dreams in the tradition of Alfred Wolfsohn and the Roy Hart theatre. On Sunday we will add the dimension of “Listening in Depth”, by awakening a sensitivity to the sounds and tones in our voices while sharing a dream, to the sounds that appear in the dream sequence, and to the vocal sound of what has been awakened within – experienced as a vibration – while working with the dream images.

PRICE The workshops can be booked as a separate one-evening workshop for €75 (please message me for this option) or as two workshops together with a 16% discount for €125.

ALCHEMICAL DREAMWORK is an “opus contra naturam” – a move against what we always do, something different from the habitual. Instead of explaining and interpreting, let us learn how to allow the images to really speak for themselves, to reveal what they want of us – often far more critical to our well–being than what we might think that we want. Let us learn how to describe in order to discover the true inner sense of whatever it is that we are focused on.

METHOD When outer supports fail us, the only realistic recourse is to go inward – actually this is the way of the shaman. “The work is within” – to then have an effect in the outer world. In addition to moving from external to internal … within can also refer to the move from literal to metaphorical: the language of Dream Images.

A fundamental way of practicing this move lies in the way that we work with the images in our dreams, which are similar to the images that structure our experience of what we call life. Images are how we register what happens to us. The challenge is to go beyond the “literalness” of an image, in order to discover the “inner sense” and meaning of whatever it is that has captured our attention in a dream sequence.

As James Hillman showed us: the trick is in how to NOT get caught in the literal. The Alchemists used to say: “Beware of the physical in the material”, their way of warning us to not get caught in the concreteness of something, in what it is literally.

Instead, we want to see through the literal and the personal of a particular element, in order to discover and connect with the invisible (the Unconscious, the Spiritual) implications of whatever it is that is at stake with a specific element in a dream (or life) situation.

Dream images invite us to discover what our ordinary Ego Consciousness does not see, and therefore does not take into consideration.

In our workshop we will awaken a “Metaphorical Imagination” – with practical suggestions for cultivating what must be called phenomenological DESCRIPTIONS – descriptions that unexpectedly speak for themselves as they reveal invisible aspects of whatever it is that is being looked at.

The invitation is to move from thinking of the metaphor as a thing, to imagining it as a way of looking at things – one that reveals hidden aspects of our lives – to then allow us to be able to better recognize correspondences between what has been discovered and its relevance to our well being in the external world.

ABOUT THE TEACHER: Sven Doehner, PhD, MFA is a 76 year-old Mexican researcher with more than 45 years of clinical and teaching experience. His work blends Ancestral Wisdom that is alive to this day in the healing and spiritual practices of native healers around the globe, with his training as a Jungian Archetypal Psychoanalyst (working directly with James Hillman for many years), and in BodyMindCentering and Somatic Experience.

He is most known for his creative and transformative work with Dream Images, particularly in connection with the human voice, always at the service of deep and lasting Alchemical transformations, both personal and transpersonal.