Partnering with Dreams in Creative Pursuits

How to stop carrying your creative work alone and start collaborating wiht the intelligence that dreams through you.

*Join my Free Live Dreamwork Event September 30th @ 10am pacific. Register Here: www.intothehumm.com/Dreamweave

Creativity is not just for artists, musicians, or poets. Creativity is how we navigate the uncharted territory of our soul, how we heal from impossible situations, and how we find our way through the unknown. It is our ticket to resilience and our compass for the journey to discover who we truly are.

The creative process involves sudden inspiration (from Latin "inspirare, to breathe in spirit), those lightning-strike moments of epiphany (from the Greek "to manifest divine presence" or "reveal"), and the patient devotion that follows. All creative acts involve transformation; one that by definition cannot be reversed. Something new is born and we emerge from the process fundamentally changed.

The Liminal Space of Dreams

Dreams bring us into liminal space, between worlds, where the rules and frameworks of ordinary life dissolve. In this threshold realm, transformation becomes possible because anything can be reimagined. While we can access similar states through meditation or other practices, dreams offer our most natural gateway to this space where new visions can emerge.

Carl Jung understood this connection deeply. He recognized that psyche (soul), creativity, and myth were intimately intertwined, all emerging from the same wellspring of archetypal material in the collective unconscious. For Jung, creative works, mythological stories, and dream imagery all carried the same transformative symbols that arise not from rational thought but from deeper psychic layers, similar to what I call the Dreamweave. In Jung's framework, neurosis - or doubt in oneself - blocks this wellspring of creativity, and only creative engagement with our inner conflicts can restore the flow.

Eastern traditions describe this same phenomenon differently. From an energetic perspective, what Jung saw as psychological blocks become understood as stagnant life force. Creativity represents the natural flow of what these traditions call Jing, Ojas, or Kundalini—our essential creative fire. When this energy moves freely, we access our innate creative capacity. While we know dreams help process emotions and memories, one of their lesser-known functions is to restore this flow, awakening creative channels that may have been dormant.

Dreams as Creative Guide

When I began practicing intentional dreamwork, something surprising happened: my creativity came alive. As an engineer, I’d absorbed the message that creativity was only permissible if it had a practical application. Yet suddenly, poems spilled onto the page, songs moved through me, and I felt a vitality I hadn’t known for years. I was reclaiming an essential part of what it means to be human.

Dreams didn’t just awaken my inner artist—they also became companions in my professional life. While directing an environmental advocacy nonprofit and navigating the pressure of impacting laws and policy, I often turned to dreams for guidance.

One dream in particular showed me how tightly I had been gripping a particular outcome. In waking life, I was acting as if more effort, better strategy, and sharper arguments were the only way forward. In this dream, I was arguing campaign points with an important politician who was clearly getting bored. The politician stopped our meeting short, donned a cosmic black-and-white coat ,and took me flying through moonlit skies…but I continued my presentation as if we were still in the conference room, missing the profound shift that was happening around us. Her final act—pushing me ruthlessly over a waterfall of stars—delivered the final wake-up call: I needed to stop forcing and start flowing with the mystery.

From that moment, I began working with my campaigns on multiple levels. When facing obstacles, I would spend time tending to the emotional undercurrents and planting seeds of redemption and mercy in the energetic realm rather than just pushing through with more strategy. This inner work translated into outer effectiveness—my advocacy grew more powerful even as I worked less. Through dreams, I was able to discover how to move from forcing outcomes through personal effort to allowing solutions to emerge from a deeper field of collective intelligence.

The Long Path of Creative Devotion

The creative process is often arduous, involving sacrifice and persistence. We celebrate those flash moments of epiphany (e.g. Einstein's theory of relativity, Elias Howe's sewing machine), but forget that significant devotion came before and after those insights. The inventors still had to commit to the long work of actually birthing those innovations.

Whether we're engaged in art, technology, healing arts, or the journey of self-actualization, creative pursuits require time and dedication. Dreams can be our constant companion through every step, available literally every night.

More recently, as I transitioned my business away from technical consulting to focus more on teaching and coaching, dreams became my bridge between worlds. They allowed me to experience this new paradigm (feeling into the energy of teaching, connecting with future students, embodying this different way of being) long before I consciously understood what was shifting. When doubt crept in, dreams reminded me I could inhabit this new role. When facing crossroads, they revealed the deeper currents beneath my choices.

Once, when I was feeling particularly stuck, a difficult dream revealed how much I was emotionally and energetically fighting with my business. This was a big wake up call. Dreams don't always comfort—sometimes they confront us with necessary truths—the medicine that stings and harsh words that shake us from complacency. All dreams contain medicine, and the ones that grab our attention often carry the strongest doses.

Reclaiming Our Creative Birthright

Creativity flows through everything—from the mycelial networks beneath our feet to the spiral galaxies above. It's the force that breaks down old forms and births new ones, the energy that helps us navigate uncertainty and transform challenges into possibilities.

When we partner with our dreams, we connect to this endless creative wellspring. We move from the isolation of individual effort into collaboration with the vast intelligence that dreams through us all. In a world hungry for fresh solutions and authentic expression, this partnership becomes not just personally fulfilling but collectively essential.

Our dreams are waiting. They have been all along, ready to guide us home to our creative essence and help us birth what only we can bring into being.

*Join my Free Live Dreamwork Event September 30th @ 10am pacific. Register Here: www.intothehumm.com/Dreamweave