The Experience of Working
Alchemically with SOUND in Dream Images
Sven Doehner, PhD, MFA, is
a psychotherapist in Mexico City. Trained in Jungian Depth
Psychology, he has worked for many years with native Mexican
healers and guided dreamwork groups in several countries around
the world. An innovator in working alchemically with dreams, he
blends contemporary depth psychotherapy with ancestral native
healing traditions.
Abstract
Dream images and their telling
can bring forth unexpected sounds, often dissonant to what we
expect or are even conscious of, expressing the deepest sense, or
intention, of the soul. This group dream-work proposal involves
listening for, and becoming sensitive to, the sounds that
accompany a dream - either within the images themselves, or those
that appear as we tell it – by hearing them, repeating them,
making them differently and experiencing them, we can allow them
to guide us into different levels and processes of transformation.
Working with sound is alchemical
in that it nurtures transformation by giving body to emotions and
giving expression - and form - to the most unconscious aspects of
our physical and emotional selves . . . just as it can dissolve or
expand that which is fixed, stuck, contracted . . . and thereby
restore in the individual who emits the sound the pulsation (the
expansion and contraction) that is synonymous with life itself.
Sound-work generates new ways of vibrating within our selves and
resonating with the world around us.
More than something that can be
thought about and supposedly understood, sound needs to be MADE in
order for it to be experienced, heard, listened to - and allowed
to affect, guide and transform us. An important task will be to
free ourselves from our often long held prejudices concerning the
need to be “in tune”, or in harmony - a true “opus contra natura”.
As a practice in Alchemical Psychology, which favors experiential
learning, sound is participatory and provides a medium for
unconscious elements to take form (coagulate) - and then to
dissolve us in deeply transformative and lasting ways.
Workshop participants will
discover how working alchemically with the sounds that come with
the images in our dreams (and lives) can lead to a shift in the
imprint that we bring to difficult or conflicting moments,
creating a new register and reference point for responding to
similar situations as they continue to appear in our lives. We
will discover how a subtle awareness can be awakened in a person
that shifts his or her energy and sense of themselves - and
affects their way of perceiving, reacting, participating and
responding to difficult moments in their being.
Suggestions will be made as to how we can continue to relate to
the images in our dreams (and lives) with a sensitivity to sound,
as well as an awareness of how this particular alchemical work
with sound and images can nurture our being and awaken in the
individual who practices it more presence, embodiment, congruence,
coherence and freedom of expression in his or her daily life.
