What is Natural Dreamwork?
In Natural Dreamwork, we believe our dreams challenge us and want us to grow.
Dreamwork enables us to connect to aspects of ourselves we may not be aware of in waking life. In this school of dreamwork, rather than interpret dreams, we guide dreamers to re-enter their dreams experientially and with the senses. We believe this approach, which emphasizes the felt-sense of the dream, empowers dreamers and enables them to connect to the deep knowing their dreams offer. We have found that when we learn how to be in deep feeling inside of dreams, there are opportunities awaiting for powerful, sacred encounters — ones that bring forth healing, provide comfort, and contribute to growth.
What do we mean by deep feeling? So often in life, we bounce from reaction to reaction, without experiencing the deeper flows of feeling. We unconsciously play out habitual patterns or cycles that on some level we understand are not helpful to us. In Natural Dreamwork, we believe that surface emotional responses obscure our true feelings, but that our dreams and dream characters may lead us back to them. Dreams offer healing medicine through vivid images and sacred encounters. When we contemplate these images and become receptive to these encounters, we find that we are able to be less reactive and to experience life more viscerally and with greater presence. In these moments, deeper feelings are revealed and may be experienced with all the senses.
Natural Dreamwork is not therapy, but rather a deeply spiritual education with practices that support you on your healing journey and point you in the direction of your soul. We work with individuals from many different faiths, as well as those without religious beliefs. It is our aim as practitioners to stand for the dream itself, not for any particular dogma. Natural Dreamwork is nonsectarian, without a specific philosophy or religious affiliation.
Some Benefits of Natural Dreamwork
Many of our clients, from various walks of life, have reported both short-term and long-term benefits to recalling their dreams and using Natural Dreamwork to re-enter them with their practitioner. These include an increased sense of well-being, improved interpersonal relationships, more compassion for oneself and others, increased access to one’s creative abilities, a greater sense of the Divine, feeling comforted while moving through illness or grief, increased job and life satisfaction, and living with a greater sense of belonging. Natural Dreamwork also has been shown to reduce or eliminate recurring nightmares, improve sleep, and integrate traumatic experiences so they no longer hold us captive. In general, clients feel more empowered as a result of engaging with their dreams in this way, and report a more heart-centered felt experience of themselves and the world around them.
Our History
Natural Dreamwork was founded in 2014 by Rodger Kamenetz in a cooperative effort with others who trained in Marc Bregman’s Jungian-influenced archetypal dreamwork. (Kamenetz goes into detail about this philosophy and training in his 2007 book The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul.) Collectively and democratically, this group of individuals decided to broaden the work, focusing on the ideas that dreams are natural, dreams matter, and that when we take the images of our dreams seriously and work with them in a deeply felt way, we may find freedom from the states of mind that arise from our wounding and conditioning, such as shame, jealousy, resentment, and anxiety.
With an emphasis on the power of primary imagination and sacred encounter, Natural Dreamwork enables individual dreamers to decide for themselves what they feel in and about their dreams. We follow a code of ethics and allow our clients to explore the depths of the dream free of dogma and without alliance to any one particular theory. Ours is a spiritual, but non-denominational approach in which we learn from experience, embrace contradictions, and remain open to the mystery. Since 2014, we have expanded into an international community of practitioners with diverse backgrounds and spiritual beliefs.
From the Natural Dreamwork Blog
The Wild Medicine in Dreams
Too often an interpretation of a dream is undertaker’s work and lays the dream to rest on a gurney of dogma. I want to keep the dream as a living breathing experience. I also don’t want to sell anyone on anything. The pret in interpret means “price”, and inter means “between.” By the root, an interpreter is no more than a broker who sets an acceptable value on a dream. I try to present the dream as it is, even when that’s uncomfortable.
Watch Oprah’s Interview With Rodger Kamenetz
When The History of Last Night’s Dream was first published in 2007 I received a call from someone claiming she worked for Oprah Winfrey. I thought it was a prank but soon realized she was serious. Oprah was going to interview me on her “Soul Series” program. I was flown to Chicago as Oprah’s guest at the Hyatt and the next day I was sitting across from her. It seemed like a dream in itself.
Dreams Are Not Narratives, They
Are A Movement Of Feelings
In Natural Dreamwork we try to separate out what I call the dream event from the client's story. In this case, what is the event and what is the story? We can get distracted in the tangle of the client's story, and end up talking about National Park regulations. Or we can zero in on the event. By an event I mean a moment of intense encounter between the dream ego and an object or a presence (an image or imago).