Dream Tending is a life practice that healers, storytellers and poets have known by many different names for thousands of years. Passed on through the generations, the art of tending living dream images emerges in a culture when the call to see the inner and outer worlds in new ways becomes urgent. We find ourselves in such a time now. Vivifying images of the soul opens innate resources that sustain life’s purpose. This lecture and workshop will offer some practices of Dream Tending that amplify and animate the friendly and fascinatingly fiendish figures, landscapes, and emotions in dreams.

The heartbeat of Dream Tending is the concept of the “Living Image”. We explore ideas from archetypal dream psychology as well as my own thinking about phenomenological dream methodology. We spend time practicing phenomenological animation, an approach to tending the living dream image in the immediacy of its unfolding.

Here we recognize that dream images are alive. We experience them as embodied beings, engaged in their activity, not ours. We discover that in the landscape of the dream we are guests for a time in the living breathing ecology of psychic life. We come to acknowledge that psychic life is, by nature, alive and poetic – its language metaphorical, its rhythm musical.

CEUs available. See brochure for more details on CEUs and Fees.

Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., is the founding president of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a clinical psychologist, a Marriage and Family Therapist, and a credentialed public school teacher and counselor. For more than 35 years he has explored the power of dreams, with emphasis on depth psychology, dream research, the psyche/soma connection in dreamwork, and imaginal and archetypal psychology.

A major focus of Dr. Aizenstat’s original research is a psychodynamic process of “tending the living image”. His publications include the 2009 Dream Tending, and Imagination and Medicine: The Future of Healing in an Age of Neuroscience.

Dr. Aizenstat has collaborated with many masters in the field, including Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson and James Hillman, as well as native elders worldwide. He has conducted hundreds of dreamwork seminars throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He lives with his wife and three children in Santa Barbara, California.