8 Essential Books on Dreaming
By now, you likely know that a deep hope and prayer in all of my work is to inspire people’s hearts and minds to turn in dreaming’s direction. Consider me that crazy person on the side of the road, waving a sign that says “dreams, dreams, have you thought about them? Look at them! Remember them!”
It honestly feels a bit like a sacred obsession, and the reason is this: when we turn in dreaming’s direction, we receive an incredible amount of healing through remembering, awakening and re-enchanting the creativity and magic of life. My hope is to inspire you to do the same, because when we are aligned with the wisdom flowing through dreams, we are aligned with a greater purpose.
This purpose is beyond the myth of individuality that is prominent in the culture of the current time. When we are aligned with dreams, we turn our attention toward a purpose that is greater than ourselves. It benefits us all, and raises the amount of interconnection and coherence that exists within the whole system. Why? In my belief, its because we are being dreamt by the system itself.
If you feel like these concepts are new to you, you are not alone! I was not raised in a family (or broader) culture that values, centralizes, and respects dreams and their wisdom. Quite the opposite! Instead, I was cooked in a stew of disregarding dreams, or maybe at best saying that they can support and help my personal psyche be more healthy. By the way, dreaming absolutely does do that, but it also does much more!
If your curiosity in dreaming has grown and you are beginning to remember and find meaning in your dreams, and perhaps even started to notice synchronicities or interconnections between the dreaming and waking world, please do check out my Dreamweavers Foundations audio course. This course was the answer to the requests I received so many times from people:
“how do I do this?”
“what do I do with dreams?”
“what are dreams?”
I promise, it will equip you with the essential skills you need to remember your dreams, figure out a meaningful meaning for them, and weave your life from their wisdom.
But that’s just the start! We also need other people to share our dreams with, and this is why I'm so passionate about leading dream groups, cultivating dream friends, and learning about dream sharing etiquette. That’s why, for the first time in February of 2026, I am leading a dream circle teacher training program!
If you’re like me, and you still need more to feed your dream practice, I also want to share all of my favorite books on the topic of dreaming. If you want more dream energy, and dream juice, than these books will really help to both ground and also deepen your relationship with your dreaming practice. These books will catch you up on the dream literacy that, in my opinion, we all should have been given as children.
If you are brand new to dreams, you’ll want to start with a beginners guide. I recommend:
A Beginners Guide to Dream Interpretation by Dr. Clarissa Pinkle Estes. (You may have already heard of her wonderful book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.) This is a 90 minute audiobook that will walk you through a basic intro to what you need to know about dreams and how to start a dream practice. I use this as required listening for my dream groups, and you can get it on Audible.
Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Robert is a master dream teacher and prolific author. I have taken a few courses with him over the years and his work is incredible. Its a great beginners guide to how to go about developing your dream practice and dream cosmology. I love the way he describes bringing our dreaming back into consciousness and re-centralizing the dream in our lives. He has SO many other great books on dreaming that span fiction, nonfiction, and his personal story of his relationship with the dreams. His life has really been guided by dreaming’s wisdom and I keep coming back to them again and again You can check out his website at mossdreams.com.
If you have a dreaming foundation already, and are ready to dive in deeper, these are my top recommendations:
Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. This book is especially for those of you who have a relationship with the dreaming practice already in place and are starting to have more of those trans-temporal/dimensional experiences. This book is definitely for you if you are shamanically oriented, exploring how dreaming is soul retrieval. Where parts of ourselves may have been lost along the path of life, soul retrieval dreaming can help us to recover and reintegrate those parts. Robert’s book helps to bring language and context to that incredible possibility that dreaming holds.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. I highly recommend Jung’s autobiography if dreaming is a big part of your destiny, especially if you are a dream ambassador! In my opinion, you should be familiar with his life’s work on the evolution of collective consciousness and how it was intertwined with dreaming. We owe him a lot for breaking through in the ways that he did, and this book will inform you about his life and also be inspiring to learn how life can be guided by dreaming’s wisdom
Belonging by Toko-pa Turner. This incredible book is like a warm hug, and the soulful witness of all that is beautiful, holy, supportive, kind, soulful, and connective in life. If you’re at a point in your journey where you are first awakening from the grasp of modernity's culture, reclaiming connection to yourself and your ancestry and the land, and wanting a dialogue around that, Belonging is for you. Toko-pa is a dream master teacher, and though not a central theme, dreaming is woven in through that book with a beautiful feminine perspective that is more receptive, interconnected, relational, and reciprocal. Her website is Toko-Pa.com
The Dreaming Way by Toko-pa Turner. Her newest book that just came out this year, specifically on dreaming, is also tied together with the same beautiful feminine perspective. She discusses how to have both a personal and group practice, and what I love most is how she wraps the dreaming around the wisdom of the Earth herself, whom she calls Sophia. She takes our individual dreaming right back into that web of interconnectivity with the earth mother, which in my opinion is just absolutely essential and surprisingly, not present in a lot of the Western dream literature.
Lucid Dreaming by Andrew Holochek. I especially recommend this book if you are a lucid dreamer or you're interested in lucid dreaming. I think that there is a lot of gray area in the field of lucid dreaming; even though its a really powerful practice and one not to be undertaken lightly. I think that Andrew Holochek has the most grounded and wise experience with lucid dreaming of anyone that I've encountered. He is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and dream yogi, so he calling on the thousand year old lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. His presence is so warm and loving and permeated with the feeling of the bodhisattva.
Inner Work by Robert Johnson. This book is for you if your way of thinking is more in alignment with Western psychology, or maybe you are in a therapeutic profession. Robert was a second-generation Jungian, and his book ties up how to have a personal dreaming practice in a really accessible, clear, and comprehensive way. His four-step approach to dreams is gold! I incorporate his way of thinking and being into my practice and in helping people figure out what dreams mean for them.
The Kin of Atta are Waiting For You by Dorothy Bryant. Perhaps my most obscure choice, this book was written a handful of decades ago, and not many people know it. However, if you want to be inspired by dreaming then I highly recommend it. However; a bit of a trigger warning: the book didn't age well in certain parts. There’s some sexual assault and misogyny in there that I could do without, but if you can filter that out as you read and get into the premise of what's happening, you’ll find what a world of dreaming is and can be. Dreams can be strange, non-linear, elusive beings; and oftentimes story (as opposed to nonfiction) is the best way to open up and unfurl our relationship with the dreaming.
The Wisdom of Your Dreams by Jeremy Taylor. Jeremy was one of my main dream teachers, and you likely have heard me talk about him a lot. His book gives all the context you need about what dreams are, why we have them, how to be with them, how they work, and how we can figure them out. On top of that, he adds in how to implement and sustain a dream group using his method of projective dream work. If you are wanting to hold dream groups for your people, then I would absolutely read this book and follow his brilliantly simple protocol.
When I teach dream groups I utilize Jeremy's method, and also use other techniques like dream reentry, active imagination, incorporating ceremony, incorporating prayer, earth reconnection, tracking synchronicity and many other other techniques as well that I have learned so much about from these books. I hope that some of these books find their way into your into your ears and your eyeballs, and work their way into your heart and into your consciousness. I hope they they help you turn in dreaming's direction and help you to resource your life from their wisdom on behalf of us all!
I hope you’ve taken the time to check out my podcast as well, which touches on many things that I blog about. You can listen in on all of your favorite podcast channels, but I would love it if you also considered becoming a podcast member and supporting all of the work I do over there. For only $8/month, you get so many great bonuses like joining our growing community of herbalists and dreamers, and I also have been working on a bonus list of dream centric media that includes movies, shows, podcast episodes, and more that are more that I’ll be sending to my members soon!
I send you good, sweet, beautiful dreams!
