We must find a new story and new practices that foster embodied experiences of wholeness to experience for ourselves the value, relationality, and transformation that Whitehead and Jung show us is true at all levels of reality. When we understand this at a deep level, and experience that reality for ourselves through practices like dream work that foster sacred encounter, we learn that we matter, we belong, and we can experience positive change.

In this course, we’ll look at the fragmentation that ails us, the healing power of numinous experience, a wider view of perception, the power of spiritual dream work, and a possible role of the vagus nerve in dreaming to reflect on how dreams can be understood as both embodied and as the kind of religious experience that can transform lives.

Whitehead tells us that “Expression is the one fundamental sacrament.” If we understand his word “expression” as meaning the same as what Jung means by “symbolism,” then we might better understand the profound capacity of dreams for engendering healing in the psyche. We might argue, then, that dreams are a fundamental sacrament, or, as Jung himself said about our experience of dreaming, “Every night a Eucharist.”