Icons of a Dreaming Heart: The Art and Practice of Dream-Centered Living

"Behold a beautiful book: fresh, alive, penetrating, subtle. It's not just about dreams, but about life's daily waking dreaming, the mysteries that permeate our days, the images that swarm abound us. It's written as narratives folded into narratives, always captivating and educating, always enticing and even entertaining. I fell into its stream and wanted it to go on and already imagine its sequel."

--Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and The Planets Within

We are accustomed--it is now part of our culture--to imagining dreams as some kind of "messages" from the "unconscious." Sometimes, they really get our attention and won't go away. Still, the prevailing notion is that if dreams do mean anything, they must be "interpreted," put into our present ways of understanding, taken out of their own way of presenting themselves.

Renée Coleman, explodes and breaks through the very notion of "interpretation" which has become an actual block, a barrier to dreaming having immediate significance in life. Dreaming, she convincingly shows through intense and dramatic demonstrations with her dream groups, presents, presences, the action of imaginally real companions. Dreams are real! They are not separate from life but rather ever-present promptings to enter further and further into the fullness of life.

How Dr. Coleman lets the characters, actions, circumstances, and the very worlds of dreaming reveal themselves constitutes the essence of this writing. There is no theory here. We are taken into a new kind of attentiveness, available to everyone. We learn a deep listening, being penetrated, coming into immediacy, intimacy, complexity with each and every character of a dream and what those characters are doing with us. We come to experience the dream presences as quite autonomous from us, visitors, not from "elsewhere," but ever-present visitors asking to be noticed.

The great secret revealed in Icons of a Dreaming Heart is that by saying "yes" to the beckoning of dream presences in our noticing, caring, and attending, we are changed to the very core of our being. We begin to have incredible, increasingly extended moments of realizing how unbelievable and persistently rich life can be.