Dream Workshops with Tristy Taylor
“I cannot say enough about Trismegista Taylor and the healing power of her practice! If you’ve ever been interested in exploring your dreams and connection to self, this is the sign you’ve been waiting for.” ~ Kellie Mae
“Tristy is an incredible teacher with a remarkable depth of expertise drawn from psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies, art history, and her own fascinating artwork. When working with her students, she has a delightful exuberance and a seemingly limitless well of kindness and empathy. Tristy’s class helped me collaborate with my dreams to better understand my waking life, process unresolved grief, and enrich my creative practice.”
– Virgil Wong, Artist and Digital Technologist
Morbid Anatomy Academy Classes in 2023
I am very happy to be teaching for the wonderful Morbid Academy in 2023. All the details are below!
PLEASE NOTE: If you cannot attend these classes live, that’s okay! All classes are recorded and will be shared with students within 24 hours of class time. You will also have access to the archived classes for as long as you like.
Be the Wise Navigator of Your Dream World: Discover Your Personal Archetypes and Learn How to Receive the Gifts of Your Dream Life
Saturdays, June 3, 10, and 17, 2023
11am to 1pm Pacific / 2 to 4pm Eastern / 8 to 10 pm European
Sign up here!
Our dreams are a treasure trove of information, guidance and insight that we are gifted with every single night. Everybody dreams (whether you remember your dreams or not!) and the imagery, feelings, and stories our dreams show us can be harnessed in our waking lives for healing, guidance and transformation.
Regardless of how you feel about Sigmund Freud, he was the first to bring the concept of tracking and working with dreams to the forefront of consciousness. Freud called dream interpretation the “royal road” to the unconscious, saying: “It is the ‘King’s highway’ along which everyone can travel to discover the truth of unconscious processes for themselves.” Through his initial work with Freud, Carl Jung then took dream work leaps and bounds further, saying “Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.”
Whereas Freud saw dreams as a way to analyze and diagnose psychological disorders in others, Carl Jung took the practice of dream work leaps and bounds further, seeing our dream lives as a personal world that everyone could explore on their own, with or without a professional analyst. Jung in fact, had his own creative practice around working with his dreams, which is documented beautifully in The Red Book, which was Jung’s own private dream art journal (and see a page from that very journal above!).
In this class, I will provide powerful and accessible tools you can use right now to be more present and aware of your dream life. Together with your fellow dream explorers, you will learn how dreams communicate, how you can start to track and understand your own personal archetypes, and discover the jewels that can be found in a nightmare. Through practicing the tools you learn in this class, you can become an expert in your own personal dream language, and you may be surprised to discover that through your waking life actions, your dream life will respond, thus creating an authentic “living” conversation with your dream life that will last a lifetime.
We will begin with some history of how dreams have been worked with over the centuries, and then dive into the many ways you can work with your own dreams, including keeping a dream journal, making art with your dreams, and the basics of lucid dreaming. Handouts will be provided so you have reference guides for everything taught in this class.
There will also be space in the class for students to bring their own dreams and dream imagery to explore with the group, if desired (but not required). By the end of the class, students will have a solid foundation to work with their own dreams, and be able to live a richer and wiser life through the dance of dreamwork.
“Where does a dream class begin and a witches’ circle end? Tristy is a born teacher and guide. She brings intuitive talent and an incredible body of knowledge and experience beyond her own fascinating life’s work to the art of teaching and exploring unknown realms. Tristy holds space with compassion, hilarity and realness–working with her immediately opened up new portals for me. Working with her is such a gift!”
–DBP, Founder of Spinster Design, Inc.
Working with The Shadow and Trickster in Dreamtime: Hug the Coyote, Have Tea with the Monster, & Respect the Baba Yaga: A 3-Week Online Course
Saturdays, September 9, 16 & 23, 2023
11am to 1pm Pacific / 2 to 4pm Eastern / 8 to 10 pm European
Sign up here!
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung felt that the ultimate nature and function of dreaming is to promote the basic evolutionary process of bringing consciousness and the unconscious into balance, creating wholeness and integration – a process he called “individuation.” When we work with our dreams to discover the hidden gifts our unconscious present to us every night, we can speed up and deepen the individuation process significantly.
When we consciously work with the nightmares and “monsters” of our dreams, we are doing some of the richest work possible with our dreams, which translates to stunning transformations in waking life.
Our nightmare characters show up as manifestations of what Jung called the “Shadow,” which are the parts of our personality that are relegated to the darkness of our unconscious, because we refuse to own their power in our waking, conscious lives. One way the Shadow shows up is through the Trickster archetype, which appears in the stories, mythology, and fairy tales – and yes, dreams – of cultures around the world.
However unpleasant the experience with the Trickster might be, they always force us out of our comfort zone into a new state of awareness and integration.
In this class, we will explore more deeply what Carl Jung meant by The Shadow, including revisiting some well known (and not so well-known) myths and fairy tales featuring Trickster characters. With this groundwork, we will then dive into the land of our personal nightmares, and unpack several powerful dreamwork tools that you can use tonight to befriend your Shadow selves, play with your inner Trickster, and hug your Monster, so you can receive the secret and sacred gifts they all have in their pockets, just waiting to be discovered.
Sign up for Shadow Class here!
Dreams and Death: A Three-Week Online Class
Saturdays, October 7, 14 & 21, 2023
11am to 1pm Pacific / 2 to 4pm Eastern / 8 to 10pm European
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his own death? Or that a murderer in the 1990’s changed his plea to guilty when his victim came to visit him in his dreams? Or that almost everyone has had at least one dream about the future that came true?
When we dream, it is a “small death.” We are “dead to the world,” and “check out” of our earthly realm for the night. Some traditions even believe that when we are sleeping, our soul is free to wander and travel around the spirit world without the hindrance of a human body. When our souls return in the morning, it is called a dream, and when our souls do not return, it is a death. Medical statistics have even shown that the peak time for people to die from disease and chronic illness is in the early morning, right in the middle of their longest REM phase of sleep, which is the time when most people are dreaming the most deeply.
Some scholars even believe that the very concept of religion itself was borne out of prehistoric peoples dreaming of the dead and needing to find an explanation as to why the “soul” of a loved one seems to lives on, even after the physical body has been buried, burned, or torn apart by animals.
In this class, educator, dream worker, and interfaith minister Tristy Taylor—daughter of renowned dream worker Jeremy Taylor, co-founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams — will explore the notion of linear time as an objective construction of the human mind, and how being in the dreamtime might be understood as freeing us from this construct. We will learn the signs that a dead person might be visiting us in our dreams (rather than them being just a projection of our own psyche), and tools to better communicate with them. We’ll look at about several scientifically documented past life dreams, and explore how you can tell if one of your dreams may be showing you a past life experience.
We are very lucky to be joined by dream researcher, author and scholar, Kelly Bulkeley for one of our class sessions!
There will also be space in the class for students to bring their own visitation and past life dreams to explore with the group, if desired (but not required).
By the end of the class, students will have a much more solid foundation to work with death imagery in their own dreams, and be able to invite in more communication with dead loved ones, as well as past life memories. This class will invite in a new relationship to death, potentially helping to release previous fears and anxieties about what may or may not come next, after we shuffle off this mortal coil.
