Book Review: Dream Guidance

by Machiel KlerkHAY HOUSE
reviewed by Rochelle Bourgault

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Cultivating a practice of not just recalling but recording and understanding dreams is at the heart of dream incubation. With Machiel Klerk’s cheerful Dream Guidance, readers learn how committing to dream incubation will lead to greater self-awareness and clarity about what dogs us in our diurnal life.

Incubated dreams are coaxed and invited in, while spontaneous dreams arrive unbidden, careening into our unconscious. Dream incubation is found in just about every spiritual or religious tradition, even though it is all but “forgotten in our modern world.”

You won’t find an ambiguous, dusty dream dictionary in this concise, friendly book. Klerk writes, “You cannot make a general theory of dreams” or “assign fixed meanings to dream images.” In your dream, a snake could be a slinky predator or a nimble survivor. What is a snake to you, right now? The author encourages making friends with our dreams, establishing a relationship of trust, and using intuition to decode our own symbolic vocabulary.

Klerk’s dream incubation techniques are built upon asking questions of the dream, and openly receiving and listening to the dream’s responses. And he welcomes us all to seek our own “personal revelation: inquiry can be implemented by anyone, tonight.” Dream Guidance makes a strong case for plumbing dreams as a path to deeper engagement with life, with open-minded listening and little mysticism.


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DreamsBook Reviews

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