Q&A: The Higher Order that Dreams Us, Dream Journal Overwhelm, and Why Nightmares Repeat
I was so excited to welcome my dear friend and colleague Emily onto the podcast recently to interview me! We pulled questions from readers and students, and Emily filled some in along the way about my work, Herbs and Dreams, Dreamweaving, Plant Spirit Healing, and more! Thanks for reading along, and if you want to listen to the episode, head over to your favorite podcast listening platform and check it out!
Emily: For folks who aren’t familiar with your work, why Herbs and Dreams together? What’s the intersection? Why are they important together? Give us examples of how we might use herbalism in dreaming, or dreaming in herbalism.
Lauren: The real answer is that I'm a Gemini moon, the twins, and I couldn’t decide between focusing my work on one or the other, so I had to put them together. The deeper answer is that they have both been the medicines that dreamt me and walked with me over the course of my life. I started the herbal path when I was 20 years old, almost 20 years ago, and the dreaming came shortly after that. They’ve been the two constant threads that have meandered through my life and I had this moment a few years ago where I realized that nobody was putting these two things together. I couldn’t figure out why no one was talking about how the plants intersect with the dreams, how the earth is dreaming us, how the plants are helping us in our dreaming, how the herbs are healers that help us create and weave the future. I had this lightbulb moment: “OH! It’s my piece to contribute. It’s my offering to the web of life.” And so, Herbs and Dreams was born.
Another important piece here is that they just came together because of me following the threads of my path. For a long time, I kept them separate in my external facing world, even though in my internal world, my dreaming, they were always interacting. But externally, I would hold my herb classes and my dream classes separately. They were both potent and powerful and held a lot of space for healing, but over the years they began to intertwine more and it’s been so beautiful.
I think a lot of that has to do with the cosmology within which I live. In my path, we are all part of the Mother Earth and she is experiencing, adventuring, and unfolding her own destiny. Because we are here, as a part of her, we are part of her destiny and part of her dream, and the entire web of life is our family and we are being dreamt together by Her. I love to call this The Dream of The Earth. Through our own night dreaming, She is communicating with us about what she needs and what our jobs are. It’s our job each day to take action on those dreams that we receive, a process that I call Dreamweaving.
There are so many ways that herbs intersect with that process of Dreamweaving. In many traditions, including my own, that plants are healers and are here to help us. They are healing forces, working with us that are looking in their direction to help us in the weaving of our dreams. If I am a dreamer, and I want to help weave a beautiful future on behalf of all life, then allying and combining with the healing plants of this world really magnifies the healing that I can contribute too. I am an herbalist, a leader of Earth-based ceremony, a teacher, and a dreamweaver. If my dreams are open, the plants come and teach me how to be a better agent of soul-level healing. When I am working with the plants in the dreaming and implementing what I am learning there in the work that I am doing in the waking world, the healing that I can contribute to and that is often occurring has quantum-leaps more depth. So, I’m super passionate about teaching herbalists and healers how to bring dreaming into their practice.
This is maybe the first time in global culture where we, as a people, have turned away from our dreams, and I think we are seeing a lot of potentially negative downstream effects from that. Dreams are such a wellspring waiting to feed us and we are forgotten that. I think one of Mother Earth’s instructions for human beings is to be dreamers and dreamweavers that create our lives from the wisdom of dreams. So, if I can do my part and hold the prayer in my heart to be an agent of healing through working with herbs and dreams together, it really helps to expand what I can create and weave for my family, community, and world.
Emily: We’re all on this path to find our purpose in one way or another, aren’t we? We’re all asking in our own ways questions like: “Does this feel right?” or “Is this place home?”
Lauren: It’s all a big process, and it’s part of why I am here. I was guided by my dreams to pick back up the pieces of my life from when I was younger, and it made me realize that there is some higher order here that IS dreaming, and has been dreaming me all along. I’m still just beginning to understand it but I do believe that is true for all of us and that we are all here for a reason. We are all tiny little appendages of this larger consciousness that has spun itself into this little dream world, and we are here to awaken within this world and help it. I credit the dreams for helping me awaken and find this purpose, and so that’s part of the reason why I am so passionate about sharing it with others. We all have that yearning within… “What is this place? Where am I? Why am I here? How can I help?” And so now, 2026, at 39 years, dreaming is the best way I have found to chip away at those answers.
Emily: Personally, the more people I have seen turn in dreaming’s direction and start paying attention to what is happening there… it’s so wonderful and magical. Just the other day, I received a message from a friend who is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine that, for the first time ever in her practice, she had a dream about how to help a patient. It’s magical!
Speaking of the intersection of herbs and dreams, you (Lauren) are the author of a book, Seasonal Herbalism: a Beginners Path to Medicine Making and Dreaming with Mother Earth. That book came to you in a dream! A listener recently shared that she read your book and wants to connect with the medicinal plants that grow wild where she lives. “What are the top three things I should do or look for?”
Lauren:
1. Get a field guide. There is one for every bioregion in North America. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it is Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and McKinnon. This will help you ID plants that grow where you are. There are so many fancy apps like Leaf ID and Plant Shazam, and those help too, but a local field guide is irreplaceable. We have to be able to safely and confidently ID plants so that we can safely work with them.
2. Get a teacher! I know this is getting harder and harder to find someone, in person, to work with but it’s essential because herbalism is an art of that takes slow-cooking. We can’t become an herbalist by watching Tik Tok videos or even by doing a two-year comprehensive course like I did. When you can spend your time with a teacher or guide it’s so beneficial. Here on the Olympic Peninsula, I teach in person courses and I have don’t that since I was taught that way. I have been blessed to have amazing teachers, and so for the past 12-14 years I have been giving that gift back because of how profoundly it has changed the course of my life.
3. Maybe most importantly, see the plants as being and go introduce yourself. “Hello, I’m Lauren. I live right there and I really want to get to know you and learn about your medicine. I want to connect with you and the intention that is in your heart!” Even better would be to bring a gift: leave an offering, a bite of your lunch, something that you made with your hands, a prayer or song. Establish a connection this way that builds relationship with the plants because the plants are real beings! The land is a real being! They will respond to our courtship. Anyone who has done any amount of plant communion can attest to this! This is something that I see a lot in my teaching. I often feel, with my students, that I am just the matchmaker making the introduction. I’m teaching them how to communicate with the plant people and once I’ve done that (which usually takes a few months), I’ve really taught everything they need to know because the plants take over as the teachers.
It’s such a beautiful intention to want to connect with the plants. They will delight you and bring a lot of enchantment into your life. Restoring your connection into your kinship with the web of life is invaluable. I believe this is the task of modern human beings at this time.
Emily: Such a great place to start is in your own backyard, or a community park, or even something that’s coming up through the crack in a sidewalk. We don’t have to go on these grand adventures to national parks or across the country to learn the plants: they are right here! I’ve experienced personally that if I get to know those plants, maybe they start showing up in my dreams, and magic is happening!
Another listener, Dominique, shared about dreaming which is a great segue into the dreaming work that you do. She shared about her dream journal, and asked a beautiful question that many of us dreamers have experienced: “I’m just starting to keep a dream journal and I’m overwhelmed at keeping track of all of my dreams and their details. Do you have any guidance for me?”
Lauren: It’s a good problem to have, and I still get overwhelmed sometimes! My hope for you and me is that we can find a relationship with our dreaming that is sustainable. Just like anything else, we are still going to have to apply effort, but the sweet spot is to find a way that works with the flow of our lives where we are still putting effort and pushing back against the part of our brain that wants to forget and go back to sleep without overwhelming yourself about missing every detail. Overwhelm is not a sustainable state! If you find yourself experiencing it, just back up a bit and maybe commit to writing down one dream every night and find a pace and rhythm that is sustainable for you.
The current thinking in sleep and dream science (which, as an important note, still don’t actually know what dreams are), is that we dream every time we are in a REM cycle, which for most people is 4-7 times per night. You ARE dreaming, you just may not be remembering. But, when you turn in dreaming’s direction, start having a practice, and start remembering these dreams, that’s a LOT to record. Here is an insider tip:
We can’t control our dreams, that’s like trying to control the great mystery… never a good idea! What we can do is help to shape them through our intention and prayer. If we are overwhelmed, we can send out a prayer such as “Can you condense these dreams a bit for me?” It works! So often now, my written dreams are just one phrase or a couple of sentences.
When we become more skilled at working the material of the dreams into our waking life, it can take the pressure off of our dreaming a bit. Because dreaming is trying to bring us the most important material for us to work with, often if we are not getting the message, the intensity of our dreams can grow. So, if we develop a practice of examining our dreams, searching for their meaning, we are doing something about moving these energies and the dreaming will respond!
Emily: Additionally, there are times in life where things are generally more overwhelming. Maybe you have an infant, or your child or spouse is going through an illness, or you have a challenging work project. At times, we have to give ourselves a break. The process of looking at our dreams should be fun, something we look forward it.
Lauren: Some dreams are NOT fun sometimes. Especially in the beginning, there can be some not-fun material that we have to work through. But generally, we start to see that the dreams are enchanting, magical, inspiring, and exciting. And that will make the process sustainable.
Emily: Listener Rachel shared about how her dreams have ebbed and flowed as she has gone through shifts in life, especially since becoming a mother. She asks, “Why does our dreaming practice ebb and flow with life’s journey?”
Lauren: For myself, I was already a deep and committed dreamer before becoming a mother. I was preparing myself to enter into a lower dreaming chapter when I became a mom. What happened was exactly the opposite! So, why does it ebb and flow? That’s a question to bring to the great mystery, the creator of this world. My understanding of it is because WE ebb and flow. Our dreaming is in no way separate from what’s happening in our waking life. My job is to keep the commitment to dreaming, to recording, and to weaving. I have a trust in dreaming’s wisdom, because it comes from the Earth and ultimately, we are not in control of when things ebb and flow.
There are big dreaming times in a life’s stream, where we are getting dreamt, and awakening, and getting seeded with the next mission. In these times, the dreams will be big, have big energy, and maybe even feel mythic. They will be important, and we have to weave those dreams into our lives. That’s why my favorite word for the practice is Dream-Weaving, because it’s the weaving where we incorporate dreaming’s material into the world. For me, that’s why my early motherhood years were huge dream years because we had just moved to a new land, I didn’t know many people here, and I was in the threshold of changing chapters. My dreams were giving me clues and ideas into what this new chapter was about.
Keep your commitment to yourself. Trust what comes. If you find yourself going into overwhelm, keep in mind what I call the potential pitfalls for dreamers:
1. Overwhelm
2. Disappointment: my dreams suck! They are not coming at all and I am not remembering anything! Why is it the same anxiety dream on repeat? Why can’t I have a magical dream?
3. Over-literalism or rigid thinking: Well, an elephant must mean X,Y,Z.
4. Spiritual Bypass: using dreams to avoid waking life.
Emily: There are times in life where things aren’t fun. We go through these thresholds, these big changes, multiple times in our lives: we’ve moved, we’ve had a baby, we’re grieving. And these things show up in our dreaming practice. We have the anxiety dream, we have a nightmare that’s recurring.
Can you touch on these kinds of dreams that aren’t fun? Why do they tend to repeat themselves? Marcella asked about recurring dreams: “Why are they happening?”
Lauren: First, I'll say that I have a whole podcast episode on recurring dreams that really speaks in a longer way to that question. Backtracking a bit, in the more challenging times in our lives, dreams can be a lifesaver because we can get messages about the larger process that is afoot. One time I was going through a hard chapter where a lot of stuff had fallen apart. I had a dream where I was looking down through broken glass, and I thought what I saw would be rotting and moldy. But instead, there were all of these beautiful crystals growing. That dream was medicine, and carried me through. You can be tapped into by that larger time that knows that this is just a step in the process.
What about those not fun dreams that we all have? Children have them more than grownups, and I believe this is because they are starting to experience themselves as individuals. They are gathering personal power and differentiating, and so nightmares come to make them strong and help them find out who they are. One tactic we can take as grownups supporting kids is to help them find strength by reworking their dreams, which is another topic in itself! But just knowing its common is helpful because we can get so worked up about them.
But why do we have them? My wonderful mentor, Jeremy Taylor, now in spirit world, wrote the book Wisdom of Your Dreams. Her said, “There is no such thing as a bad dream, only dreams that take a dramatically negative form in order to get our attention.” Here is how I conceptualize this: Inside of me, there is a part that creates the dreams: my inner dreamweaver. She creates stories that are exactly what I need to hear when I wake up. She is connected to my soul essence; she knows the broader story of me and the broader story of everything not connected to time and space. She knows what messages I need to get here and now to take the next step on my journey of awakening. If I am not getting her message, for whatever reason, such as I have forgotten how to remember my dreams or am not taking action on my dreams, my “dream door” get clogged with that material and she will keep sending the same message over and over again until I take action! And she might use dramatically negative forms in order to get my attention: a zombie, a cougar chase scene, etc. They work! They grab our attention! Working with them and trusting them grows with time and experience. The more practice you have at facing your scary dreams, the more you build an embodied trust that they are here to help me! When I have had the courage to face the transformative energy power in those dreams, things have really changed for me.
I think it’s also important to note that we don’t have to work these scary dreams on our own. My rule is: Does the thought of the nightmare instill a sense of primal terror in your body? Does it make you feel terrified? If so, then don’t work those dreams alone. Call a soul friend, a dream literate therapist, a healer… bring it to a circle. Don’t carry it alone.
Emily: Theres great magic in working those dreams, and it’s so great when we can get help with that. And bringing it back to herbalism: the plants can help us! We’ve all woken up from a nightmare, or our children have, and our heart is beating fast or our kids are upset and crying. There are herbs that can help us with that, they can take the edge off and help bring us back into our hearts and bodies and calm us down. Especially with the children, who often respond so quickly to these medicines!
Lauren: That does bring it all together. When I am in touch with the contents of my dreams, the dreams of my children, and the dreams of my clients, then I have a sense of what they are actually wrestling with and transforming- and I trust them to be able to get through that. I trust that dreaming is bringing them what they need. And I have a better sense of which plant allies would be a good match for them. I call it “next level intel” from the dreams. Like your friend, the Chinese medicine practitioner… I would bet money that the dream gave them next level intel on what their client was wrestling with, and the medicine that is then administered is going to be a better fit. Emily, did you know that this person was into dreams? Had you talked to them about dreams before?
Emily: I had!
Lauren: I want to bookmark that because it happens all the time. If you and I are carried by the dreams and have dreaming in our energy signature, then just talking to people will awaken the dreaming in them. Anyone who comes and sleeps at my house is almost always like “Wow! I had so many dreams last night!” And I didn’t do anything, I didn’t pray anything, it’s just in me. And it’s also in them. So, spending time hearing that, will awaken it. I’ve heard from listeners that their dreaming will kick up after listening to an episode. It’s super enchanting.
Emily: Energy goes where energy flows! Lauren, let’s start to wrap up. I have two more questions that I want to ask you. You’ve talked about a few of your teachers and inspirations along the way, but if you had to pick two or three, who or what have you been inspired by as you’ve deepened your life’s work into herbalism and dreamweaving?
Lauren: I want to give credit to Jeremy Taylor. He was such a beautiful man! The way that my relationship was with dreaming before I met him is that it was just me and the plants. I had already awoken, shamanically, and I had built an awareness of the relationship with the dreams as well. But then, through Jeremy, I met this whole world of dreamwork, which I had no idea existed. Jeremy was a leader in this worldwide movement of dream work. The reason that he was so inspiring to me is that he was a Unitarian Universalist minister, and his ministry was dream circles that he brought all over the world. He was like a Johnny Appleseed of dreams, and he believed so deeply that dreaming belongs to the people. It doesn’t belong to the scientists, or the PhD psychologists, or the leaders or shamans… it belongs to the people. When we are equipped to lead dream circles together with each other, we tend to the soul of the individual and that ripples out to the collective community. He inspired me to bring dreaming back to the people.
My beloved teacher, Dr. Deborah Frances Dancing Crow has been a blessing in my life. She is my medicine teacher. I’ve learned so many things from her that I don’t really have words for. If I were to try, I would say she has shown me a truly Indigenous way of connecting to the web of life and the world. I’m referring here to the Indigenous heart it all of us. I believe that all of our people, no matter how far back you have to go, walked this way. We are part of it all, we are here for a reason, and we are part of the dreaming. Let’s tend to each other and grow each other’s medicine and soul.
Part of the magic of Dancing Crow and my relationship is that we were brought together by a night dream. I was on a vision quest 11-12 years ago, 4 days fasting on the land. I had heard of Dancing Crow before, but we had never interacted. I had a dream where she had a medicine basket and I was told that there was something in this basket that I needed. When I got out of the vision quest, my action step was to find her email and send her the dream. Lo and behold, she had just moved to Washington State, and invited me to come visit. So, I packed up myself and gifts for this medicine woman, and went. I hope that you can take away is that the power of listening to the dreams and taking action on them will create more in your life than you can comprehend.
The third is Hawthorne. The Hawthorne tree has taught me a lot about what it means to be a doorway to the other world and the connection between the old world and the new. She has taught me what it means to be generous, but also to have boundaries and how to wisely and safely navigate other worlds. Also, my birthday is May 1st: I am a Beltane baby. Hawthorne is the tree of Beltane.
Emily: Hawthorne is such a beautiful plant. The way I think about her is as a gateway. You know when you are first starting to make herbal medicine and elderberry syrup is the gateway to realizing how accessible that practice is to all of us? I think that when you are first learning about connecting with the plants on a deeper, more spiritual level, Hawthorne is such a great gateway. Her medicine has been so generous for me and my journey, she was one of the first ones that showed up and that I had a conversation with. I thought, “WOW! This is actually happening!” I love that she is on your list.
Lauren, this has been such a wonderful conversation, thank you. I have one more question. In the context of your work, Herbs and Dreams, what is your dream for All of Life, for humankind?
Lauren: I have so many, but I think that I’ll put it this way. I think that my job is to dream, because I think that we are all dreamers. Part of this job is to hold a specific dream for creation. The dream Mother Earth wants me to hold is that the children don’t forget, that they can remember and retain their membership and interconnectedness with the greater web of life. I hope that they can carry this across the threshold of becoming a grownup. The Web of Earth is their mother. The plants are their friends. Their past lives are right there…it’s all just there for us all as children. And so, I hope that they can retain their remembrance about the truth of this world, who they are, why they came, and what is theirs to do. I pray that the work of Herbs and Dreams serves that prayer for the collective: that we can remember our connection. The plant kinship and dreaming are the best ways I know how to do that. My prayers are for the children, and for the future generations, but here and now it is the adults that need to remember so that we can model it to the children and tend to them as well. So part of that prayer is to help the adults reclaim their ability to remember and to reconnect so that the vibration can stay on this planet for the future ones.
Emily: Blessed Be!
