Stacey Kaminski had a scary dream the other night. She saw a big white owl, shrieking and devouring other birds in the forest. She woke up, startled.
For so many of us, that would have been the end of it all. For Kaminski, it was just the beginning.
Kaminski is a dream tender and a doctoral student of depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. Dream tending is a technique of activating the dream images that visit us and honouring them as embodied entities that are greater than ourselves. Kaminski believes that to understand a dream, you have to enter into a dialogue with the dream image, give it a persona, invite it into your living room, and understand the wisdom inherent in it.
For her, dreams are not merely symbols that need to be analyzed; she calls dreams the language of our souls. Take the scary owl dream.
“It’s an act of imagination, but that owl comes and sits on my shoulder.” Kaminski says, tapping her right shoulder softly. “It takes me to the forest, it guides me, it becomes a mentor, and it reveals its wisdom. It stops being scary.”
But scary dreams are an indicator, Kaminski says, that deep down somewhere an emotional wound still festers. She says bad dreams are touching into really sensitive, emotional issues buried deep somewhere in the mind.
“Nightmares are asking for our attention,” she snaps her fingers and waves her hands. “They are saying, hey, look up here.”
In the process of tending to a dream, Kaminski peels away the layers of the subconscious. By the end, a revelation occurs that can be therapeutic.
“There is anger and there’s crying, and some people feel exhausted and they want to sleep and there are some who just feel light,” she says.
Stacey Kaminski says to understand our dreams, we have to honour them first.
Kaminski has lived in Squamish for seven years. She has studied dreams all her life, both the western psychological traditions, and the South American shamanic ones.
Say the words dream interpretation and the image of an old bearded Austrian might spring up in the mind. Sigmund Freud. His idea of dreams as the voice of our repressed desires has been denounced by feminists and his own followers. Kaminski goes one step ahead. She says Freud and other psychologists have treated the dream image as a static object to be studied, almost like a dead rat in the laboratory.
Dreams, Kaminski says, are not clinical subjects that can be dissected, but are a medium to reach a higher plane of understanding about your own self. Getting to that level of awareness is the first step to happiness, she says.
Kaminski was interested in dreams and their hidden meanings since her childhood. She read extensively on the subject, and soon people started asking her to interpret their dreams.
“People would be like, ‘so, I had the wildest dreams yesterday. Can you explain it to me?’ I think people are just drawn to their dreams,’‘ she said.
Recently, she decided that she wanted to offer this as a service. She said she had dreamt about it.
Get in Touch
You can get in touch with Kaminski at 604-935-9022 or email her at info@soulspacesquamish.com. Her website is www.soulspacesquamish.com
This article was created by the Squamish Reporter. Visit them at http://www.thesquamishreporter.ca/index.php?id=32
