DREAMWORKING
Now available on Amazon – Dreamworking–How to Listen to the Inner Guidance of Your Dreams – published by Llewellyn Books.
Click here to buy it on Amazon.
Dreamworking – How to Listen to the Inner Guidance of Your Dreams outlines Christopher Sowton’s practical, five-step method for helping you or someone else understand a dream. This dreamworking method has been learned and used by hundreds of health care practitioners, therapists and counselors. Each step of the method is illustrated and supported by real dream examples.
Drawing on Christopher’s 20 years of clinical experience and study in dreamwork, the book covers:
- Effective questions to use in dream facilitation
- Why we should pay attention to our dreams
- The language of dreams
- Spotting the metaphor or figure of speech in a dream
- The problem of fixed meanings and superstitions
- How to get oriented within a dreamscape
- How to help connect the dream to the dreamer’s life
- fourteen universal dream motifs and how to work with them
- How to differentiate negative figures in dreams
- Birth and baby dreams and what they tell us
- How to approach sexual dreams
Reviews and Testimonials
“Disregard your dreams at your peril because working with them is good for both your mental and physical health. This is the message of Christopher Sowton’s remarkable Dreamworking, which not only makes an airtight case for the importance of dreamwork, but teaches you how to follow up on what you have learned. Sowton has presented a book that is not only thoroughly original but incredibly comprehensive it both its width and its depth. If you apply the method so well articulated in Dreamworking, your life may never be the same again — and you will celebrate the change!
~ Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Saybrook University
Co-author, “Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work With Them”
“In his excellent guidebook for helping people understand dreams, their own or those of clients, Dr. Christopher Sowton provides a precious map of the territory. Although many dreamworkers have attempted to chart this still-exotic landscape, Dr. Sowton clarifies the trails, helps dreamers find their way deep inland, unearth the hidden treasure and bring it safely home.
Whether you are a professional healthcare provider or just curious about your own dreams, Dr. Sowtons five-pronged approach provides a clear, practical method for gaining insight into the connections between dreamers images and their waking lives. He helps readers understand the language of dreams and highlights the crucial importance of not only receiving dream messages but also of responding to these messages, an element often missing from books on dreams.
Those readers new to dreamwork will want to explore Dr. Sowton’s book from the beginning, with its many useful tips and basic method. Experienced dreamworkers may wish to turn directly to Part III for its rich material on common dream themes and its dream motif map. Neophyte and professional will be rewarded. Especially strong in showing ways to help dreamers make the crucial connections between dream imagery and waking life, the material provides a significant resource for all people interested in their dreams. Overall, Dr. Sowton’s book is a valuable tool for dreamworker and dreamer alike. Highly recommended.
~ Patricia Garfield, Ph.D., author of Creative Dreaming, The Healing Power of Dreams, The Universal Dream Key, The 12 Most Common Dream Themes around the World
“I have been involved with the world of dreams for nearly a half century as a researcher, clinician, teacher, and author. During those years, I have read many books on various aspects of the dreaming experience, and spent considerable time on attempting to extract helpful techniques to improve my interpretive skills from reading those books, and from attending interactive dream workshops. I am now in my mid 80’s and sometimes engage in fantasy activities that involve speculation as to how my life might have been different if I had gone down the B road instead of the A road etc. Having just reviewed this book, I have become aware that if it had been available to me through some magical time warp, I could have saved myself many decades of effort to become a successful dreamworker, by just concentrating on assimilating the rich material interwoven throughout its pages.
The book is divided into three broad groupings: Part 1: A Theory of Dreamworking, which contains eight chapters; Part 2: A Method of Dreamworking, which contains six chapters; and Part 3: Recognizing and Working with Common Dream Motifs, which contains four chapters. Sprinkled throughout the book are various tables, charts, and handouts.
To firmly anchor this diverse material, Dr. Sowton presents and discusses a total of sixty-eight illustrative dreams taken from his own practice. In addition, there are forty dreamwork tips discussed and explained, and twelve guides for delving deeper into various dream motifs. One section is devoted to the ethical considerations that need to be considered when engaging in dreamwork with others. This fascinating material is presented in a smooth, flowing style and shared in a supportive way with the reader in a warm collegial fashion.
If you are thinking about extending the parameters of your current clinical practice, or just want to better understand your own dreams, this is definitely the book that you should read, study and absorb. It is simply superb! I don’t recall ever giving an endorsement as strong as this one to any other book about dreamworking, this one is the REAL DEAL!
~ Robert L Van de Castle, Ph.D., Senior Advisor to the Board of Dreamscloud,Past President of the Association for the Study of Dreams Co – Author – ( with Calvin Hall. Ph.D.) of The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966), Author: Our Dreaming Mind (1994)
“Christopher Sowton is a naturopath who has incorporated dreamwork into his practice for more than two decades. In recent years he has focused on training other healthcare professionals to do the same. The fruits of this rich experience are evident in his Dreamworking Manual, a guide aimed at a specific audience: health care workers with a serious interest in dreams, but no training and no sense of how to bring dream work into their practices. As such, it is a valuable contribution to the field. However, there is so much good material here that the book will be of interest to anyone who works with dreams, especially in therapeutic or dream group settings.
Despite what the subtitle might seem to imply, this is not a book about prodromal dreams or the use of dreamwork to aid in medical diagnosis or treatment (though there are sections on “somatic motifs” and “illness motifs” as they appear in dreams).
True to his background in naturopathy and homeopathy, the book is aimed at the broad range of holistic health practitioners for whom the reduction of stress and the emotional and psychic wellbeing of the client is an important component of their overall physical health. Sowton shows convincingly that dreamwork can be a valuable part of these approaches.
Click here to read full review
~ Richard Russo for the DreamTime Magazine
A Publication of the International Association for the Study of Dreams
