I know that a lot of you who read the blog and/or listen to the Herbs and Dreams podcast are parents (or adults who love children). This post is to help you tend to the children that you care for, and also the children that are within your own heart: your inner child.
I'm going to share with you something really precious and sacred to me: the first dream that I had in this lifetime. It was actually a recurring dream, and I hope it inspires you to turn in the direction of your first dreams and the first dreams of the children around you.
If what I'm sharing here tickles your heart and sparks your curiosity, I want to point your attention to the Herbs and Dreams membership, where I just released a course called “Raising Up Dreamweavers: for adults with inner and outer children” that dives way deeper into all of this stuff: exploring how kids are dreamers, ceremonialists, shamans, kids souls, and herbalists: just like you. So I'm speaking to the inner children within your heart and the children that are growing up around you. The membership is $15 a month, and in it I will teach you the art of dream weaving. Whether you're a seasoned herbalist, already a deep dreamer, or are brand new to this path, the membership is there to support you in becoming a dream weaver. This space is for you if you are a prolific dreamer or if you have a dreaming gift passed on through your family, like I know many of you do, or just in some way know that dreaming is a part of your destiny. I made this for you. If you want to deepen your connection with the wisdom within, beneath, and all around you, and then weave your life and co-create the future from that place, this is for you. It's definitely for those of you that love Mother Earth, that love nature, and that sense that dreams are a deeper connection point to these places, but don't exactly know how to do it. And for those of you that want to be a part of the change that these powerful times require of us and sense that dreaming is one of the ways through the threshold, this membership is for you. Inside, you’ll gain access to the complete course library, monthly live dream group calls with me, discounted 1-1sessions with me and a discount on the upcoming teacher training program, which launches in February of 2027. That's the membership, y'all!
Human beings are dreamers. Those of you who've been blessed to hold an infant can attest that newly arrived babies possess that same numinous, otherworldly quality that our dreams also have, that same air of absolute mystery and holiness. Like dreams, newborn babies arrive to at the intersection between this world and the other world. My Celtic ancestors called this the dream world, which is that world that is just there on the other side of the veil. Having spent most of their time in this other world, newborn babies have one foot in the realm of dream and one foot in the realm of awake. This is why the energy that surrounds them is so downright magical in those first weeks of their life on Earth. It feels as though we're touching a dream and are in a dream.
What I want you to consider is that dreams also come from this same place and hold this same energy. They have one foot in the realm of awake, this world, and one foot in the realm of dream, which is the other world. Our job is to pull them across from the other world into this one. For our dreams to thrive here in this world, we must love them. They are precious. Like the babies that we love more than anything in this world, our dreams require our attention, our love, our care, our praise, and our affection in order to not only survive here but to thrive. To become a rich dreamer, a deep dreamer, a true dreamer, what you first must do is to prostrate yourselves at their very precious feet with nothing short of devotion. You must become a devotee of and to your dreams. "Come, come. Live here, live here. Dream me, dream me."
This devotion is also made manifest through our waking life practice of catching, recording, sharing and wrestling with the meaning of our dreams. Dreams require this devotion in order to be woven into this world, and weaving them into this world is, as far as I'm concerned, the absolute point of having a dreaming and dream-weaving practice at all. If we are not weaving them into this world, then we are not fully taking up our place in the web of life as dreamers, as dream weavers, as co-creators So we turn toward our dreams with devotion in hopes that they too might be woven into the fabric of this place, a world that desperately needs to be dreamt by new dreams.
So many of us in this time and place have forgotten how to remember our dreams. You know that that was true for me from the ages of about 7 to 23. I did not remember any dreams, and it was searingly painful. I know that I'm not alone in that. I know that many of you have experienced that as well. You might even be experiencing it right now, not remembering. The dreams are just slipping back across the other side of the dream door threshold, staying in the dream world. In part, that is probably happening because we, as a people, have forgotten that we need devotion in order to remember our dreams. We need to be devoted to them.
Human beings are dreamers and children are dreamers. All that they need, those children, both within us and outside of us, is to have a devotion to dreams modeled to them. If we model a devotion to dreams, then children will retain their remembrance. They will remember how to remember. YOU can model this to them. How else can you support them in their dreaming and therefore in their destiny? Well, as the great Carl Jung said in his lecture: “Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar” given in 1936-1940, "The dreams of children ought to be monitored early in their lives. Often the dreams and visions of early childhood remain for the entirety of a person's life, and are felt profoundly deeply as possessing an important meaning and eternal truth.”
So what is Carl Jung saying here? Well, he's saying that when we are children, we are closer to spirit. We are closer to the other world. Therefore, we are far purer channels for the energies that are knocking on our dream doors. We're more sensitive to the whisperings from the soul and the soul of the earth. Carl Jung also tells us that these early dreams in childhood often hint at the prima materia we will be working with, wrestling with, healing, and ultimately incarnating and weaving into our given life stream. The best way that I can say it is that these early dreams can suggest our original medicine, which we all have, and our role in The Dream of the Earth: why we came to this world.
My first dream was a recurring dream that came to me annually. Each time the dream came, there was a momentary burst of lucidity within the dream where I would think, "Oh, here we are again. It must have been one year." The annual dream took place in my childhood home, though it was a deeper layer of reality behind the home. You know those dreams that we describe as: "It was like my elementary school, but it wasn't my elementary school, but it was." You know what I mean? That often happens in the dream world because, well, anything goes in the dream world, right? I've come to think of these dream places as inner or deeper dimensions that comprise a given place that we perceive and experience as physical.
This dream took place in a deeper dimension in my childhood home, and it was an annual competition that occurred in this inner dimension. In the dream, I was always teamed up with a trio of gorillas, and the competition involved other contestants and I navigating our way through the many rooms in the house, like a maze we had to find our way out of. This is where it gets really interesting: the competition was overseen by the one and only Willy Wonka from the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The dream always felt a bit eerie and spooky, but at the same time, there was this subtle flavor of excitement, and this layer of excitement kind of grew as the years went by.
Even when my dream remembering left at the age of seven, I always retained the remembrance of this one. It took decades, however, before I acquired any clue as to what the weird, eerie scene was about. Some dreams are like that, where the meaning-making happens in its own time, and this is a part of the mysterious quality of dreaming that we have to surrender to.
My recurring dream finally decided to reveal itself not that long ago. A few years ago, I was in a weekend workshop where we were learning about dreaming, and I was grouped up with two other experienced dreamers. (This is a good teaching to remember: where many are gathered, the dream juice magnifies and grows). Being with two kind-hearted, deep-dreaming souls, who were there to support me, allowed us to propel deeper into the mystery of this dream. All three of us dreamers re-entered my dream together asking for information. (If you want to learn more about dream re-entry, I teach this in all of my courses, which you can find in the membership and teacher training!)
When I reentered the dream with this group I immediately was taken to the three gorillas, and they said to me simply, “Lauren, we do not belong in captivity. We do not belong in captivity.” When they said this, I nearly wept at the revelation that occurred. It was like I was seeing, for the first time, these beautiful, wise, noble animals being treated as soulless, non-feeling automatons, and it made me sick to my stomach. Gorillas are powerful, strong, brilliant, village-minded animals, and they are not meant to be captured, isolated, and enslaved. They are too beautiful and sentient. They belong free and wild. So of course, where that took me next is the revelation that we do not belong in captivity. I don't, you don't, none of us do. And we are all stuck in this repeating cycle of competition, which was symbolized by the repeating annual nature of my dream; a competition that we should never have been involved with in the first place. Yes, over time and with repetition, it becomes strangely exciting because of its familiarity, yet the thread of haunting eeriness remains.
After the gorillas delivered their message, I was able to turn my attention to Willy Wonka, and at long last I was able to understand why he was here in this dream. I saw and understood with wave upon wave of “Aha!” and goosebumps that Willy Wonka represented, in the perfect symbol for my childhood brain, the eerie overlord authority who I didn't trust and didn't feel safe with. He clearly had no business being in charge. He was wacko. But for some reason, he held absolute authority over the scene. Everything was a competition when it didn't need to be. Willy Wonka represented the machine, the over culture, the patriarchy, the colonized mind, the matrix…whatever word you use to call it, you know in your heart and bones what I mean. The eerie twisted spell of modernity that we are, as far as I'm concerned, all caught in under the rule of a false authority who has no business being in charge.
I was then able to understand the reason I would become lucid in the dream. This was me waking myself up from the spell, trying to hack my way out of Willy Wonka's dream. This dream, my first dream, was about waking up to and out of the over culture spell and reclaiming wild power from the false authority. Just wake up! Sound familiar? Just wake up!
Believe it or not, all of this came in a five-minute dream re-entry process. We all sat down together, one of us drumming, and we used our imaginations and the fuel of the drumbeat to ask for more insight. The other dreamers were welcome in my dream because I had invited them. After about five minutes, we came back and shared…and this is such a beautiful process. One of my reentry companions brought back a powerful piece of medicine for me. She shared that she kept thinking about guerrilla warfare while she was in the dream: a type of unconventional military activity where small independent groups use irregular tactics to fight against a larger established force. I came to realize that, indeed, my life has been a sort of guerrilla warfare.
After successfully hacking myself out of the overculture spell, which I did (it's an ongoing process of course) in my early 20s, reclaiming the wild and sacred, I have used irregular tactics in small independent groups to push back against the onslaught of the twisted false authority. My classes, my teaching, my writing, my podcast, my membership, my circle training… every circle, ceremony, class, lecture that I have given for the thousands and thousands of hours that I've been doing this since I got started in my early 20s: they are all facets of my guerrilla battle tactic. They really are. My devotion to the plants, the dreams, the earth, and the sacred are really about waking up and out of this twisted spell.
Willy Wonka has no right to be involved, to be in control. His authority is false, and all we have to do is wake ourselves up and stop. To remember our noble, beautiful, strong, powerful, village-minded nature; to remember our original nature, our original medicine, our connection and belonging to the Earth Mother, to the plants, to the web of life, to the people that we come from and to the people who are coming after us. To remember the the fact that all of this is actually happening simultaneously, and we can tap into that through our dreaming. All of this is what my life has been about so far. And being the first big dream in my life, it is very much still dreaming me, and the weaving is still underway.
Goddess willing, I live a long time, and so I'm just getting started at it. But the original contents of my first childhood dream have held true over my 39 years, and I can see the pattern, the enduring threads of it’s contents in my life. I can see its medicine. I can see how that theme has always been in the stream, working on me, even though at the age of 7 I had no idea where I would be going or what shape my life would take. Nevertheless, this annual recurring dream was suggesting my role to play in the great dream.
This is where it gets extra fun: once those revelations started occurring in me about what that dream meant, then I started to be able to feel and experience myself from now creating and sending that dream back to myself in childhood. I came to understand that these symbols actually are the perfect symbols, and this dream was actually the perfect dream to get this message across to myself as a child. I can feel myself sending them back through time. And that is where the mind-blowing, heart-opening, soul-awakening, absolutely magical, mysterious, expansive nature of dreaming comes in.
Dreams come to wake us up, to awaken us, to remember us, to remind us that we are more. You are more. I am more. This is, in part, what my life is about, my role to play here. And perhaps my dream has something in it for you, too. Dreams often do. Remember, they come from the other world, the place of magic, mystery, and holy, and they are never meant just for the dreamer alone. They long to be shared, just like my childhood dream was only able to open when I shared it with other dreamers. But perhaps, too, my early dream will inspire you to remember your first dream. I invite you to draw any parallels from the threads that have woven and comprised your life.
My guess is that if you take the time to explore this consideration, that Mother Earth will be quite pleased that you further remembered your role in her good dream. I hope this little story helped you, dear ones, and thank you. Thank you for being fellow dream weavers. Much love, and I send my blessings to your dream doors and your dream weaving.
