DREAM WEEKEND

For several years, I had been using my dreams as guides to actions and attitudes in my waking life. Sometimes I would use them as inspiration for creative projects by painting images or using dream ideas in my plannings. I was beginning to value my dreams not just as tools, but as an independent part of my existence, as important as my waking life. I realized that along with "feminine intuition," dreams had been devalued by our exclusively rational society. Even psychology's "rediscovery" of dreams amounts to using them as a tool for working out "neuroses," so that dreams are not understood to be a positive and important part of our lives. I had found other women who were beginning to live their dreams. I had been in a dream group which met every week for six months. We recorded our dreams, told them to one another, and contemplated them; we drew and sang and wrote and acted out the visions we received in them.

In the summer of 1975, a friend of mine, Barbry MyOwn, suggested that a group of us spend a weekend in the country doing a dream circle with other women. She wanted to see if we could have a collective vision of how best to use our female energy to build the kind of world we wanted to live in. Several of us joined together to help plan it and to add more ideas. We invited women who were connected with one another, even though some of them had never met. By focusing our energy on our dreaming, we hoped to strengthen our connections with one another and help break down the barriers of geography, politics and sexuality, which often prevented us from working together.

Several of us had studied ways in which other societies use their dreams. Invariably, we found that cultures which value and act upon their dreams are more peaceful and creative than our society. Some of these dream communities are completely free of neuroses. We were also inspired by Dorothy Bryant's novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, about a people who sleep in a wheel formation, tell their dreams to one another when they awake, and plan their day according to their dreams.

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