Archetypal Dreamwork offers the opportunity to begin a conversation with our soul – to begin an inward journey towards the truest part of ourselves. Dreams invite each of us to discover the divine light we carry – the light we may have forgotten or run from or buried but that has never been extinguished. This golden spark that is our heart, our salvation, our innocence waits for us to return.
Archetypal Dreamwork ignites this spark by inviting us to enter our dreams through the feeling experience they offer. Every dream is unique and completely specific to the dreamer, and if we surrender, bit by bit, to what they are asking us to recognize and feel, we can experience real and lasting change in our lives.
Dreams can be intense and confrontational, quirky and funny, or loving beyond anything we have felt in our waking lives. Because they come to heal, they ask us to look into the dark corners, where both the love and the terror hide. They challenge our ideas about who we are and help us explore who we are not . . . but have believed ourselves to be.
This journey of exploration requires desire, curiosity and a willingness to face into the unknown. If we let them, dreams will guide us to the home of our soul – what Carl Jung called the Self.
Archetypal Dreamwork, a form of Jungian-based dream therapy, has been developed by Marc Bregman over the past 40 years. As a young man with a deep interest in the work of Jung, Fritz Perls, and others, Marc began working with clients and their dreams while also working with his own. Over time he came to understand that dreams were asking him and his clients to go to depths that traditional psychology was not going. His surrender to the archetypes in his own dreams gave him the courage to bring his clients into the deepest places of the psyche to confront powerful feelings of pain and fear, and even trauma, which brought them through the other side to profound experiences of divine love. By never veering from the dream, by remaining always a student of the unconscious, Marc has discovered that the dreams never stop guiding us deeper and deeper into relationship with the soul self and the divine.
Christa Lancaster brought her extensive experience with group process work to the practice of Archetypal Dreamwork. An early student of Marc’s and now his life partner, she began working with dreamwork clients 20 years ago. Her profound gift of working with groups has been the foundation of the dream enactment process of String Therapy, which takes place in workshops and retreats. In 2004 Christa and Marc cofounded North of Eden, an organization devoted to Archetypal Dreamwork that offers one-on-one therapy, retreats, books, classes, an online literary and arts journal, and more. Together Christa and Marc lead individual and couples’ retreats at the North of Eden retreat center in Vermont as well as workshops and retreats throughout the United States and in Canada, Bermuda, and Europe.