Toko-pa Turner
So this was a potentially very disastrous situation that my dreams saved me from. But how did they know? How did they know that in a time that was yet to come that a thing would happen? I mean, I suppose you could work really hard to dress it up as a coincidence, but it was so uncannily exact. In the dream space, we don’t have the same limitations of time being something that is linear, that actually perhaps the future flows into the present instead of the past. Or, you know, the past has yet to happen. This is something that the dream seems to say.
Elizabeth Rovere
So welcome to Wonderstruck. Today we have an incredible guest, Toko-pa Turner, who is such an interesting and wonderful guest. We’re so excited to have you here. Toko-pa Turner is a dreamworker, author, mystic, and founder of the Dream School. She’s also written a book on belonging, and recently, a year and a half ago, her book called The Dreaming Way was published. Both of these books have become bestsellers, so we are really thrilled to have her here in person. And also very exciting is that we are filming this in Malta, Because as I understand it, Toko-pa, you had a dream about the hypogeum, which is this Neolithic, 5,000-year-old underground kind of cave structure that we don’t really know what it was, but we have some idea that it could have been like a dream chamber. A way of birthing ideas, transcendence through the afterlife and beyond. But maybe we should start with a little bit about your dream and what it feels like to be in Malta.
Toko-pa Turner
It’s really a huge full-circle moment to be here. I did have this dream in my late 20s, and I would say it was one of the most powerful dreams of my life. And in the dream, I was being initiated in one of these body caves, body-sized caves. So the Hypogeum is like this huge set of catacombs, but there are these smaller body-sized caves within all of them. And it’s understood by some that these chambers would have been a place where you would go to incubate a dream about a solution that you needed, or maybe healing that you were praying for. And so you would probably go through some rituals and then sleep the night in these caves. And if it was anything like the Asclepieion temples, they would have been attended to by priestesses and priests who would interpret whatever dream you received having spent the night there, and then they would give you some kind of prescription, usually involving herbal medicine, but also something from the images of the dream to help you and support you on your journey. So I had this dream that I was in one of these caves, and in the dream— shall I share it?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, please share it.
Toko-pa Turner
Okay, so in the dream, it was very visceral. I could feel the cold, wet darkness of— and complete darkness of this cave. And suddenly in the cave, I saw this spider, a large spider. And somehow intuitively, I just knew that I had to reach out and grab this spider between my fingers. And so I did that, even though it was frightening. The whole experience was frightening. I think I also felt brave. And so I reached out and I grabbed this spider and when I did, it became illuminated, and the whole cave became light. And I understood, in a kind of transmission in that moment, that I had successfully completed my initiation, and that I was meant to retrieve this light for people who might need it above ground. And so I had never heard of the hypogeum at this point. And so I remember it was in the early days of the internet, and I remember Googling, you know, caves and dreaming, and I discovered the Hypogeum, and there were images of it, and I realized that I had dreamed this literal place. So now that was many decades ago, but fast forward to now, I received this invitation from you to come to Malta for this symposium, and that we would be visiting the Hypogeum. I mean, it’s the fact that such a synchronicity would take 20 years, you know, 20-plus years to resolve itself is quite miraculous.
Elizabeth Rovere
Have you been there before, except in the dreams?
Toko-pa Turner
This will be my first time.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh my gosh. I almost feel like we need to do a follow-up after you go there and see what your experience was like being there.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
So fascinating. So did that dream in the hypogeum of touching the spider— there’s so many things, the bravery and the fear and feeling unsettled or afraid while you were in the cave, but then, and also seeing a spider, right? You were afraid to reach out, but you knew that you— it was meant to— that you were meant to do that. Yes. Can you tell us, like, how did you reconcile that fear? And just, did your arm just reach out for it, knowing?
Toko-pa Turner
Yes, it was very instinctual. There wasn’t a thought process. It was just sort of an innate knowing that it was what had to be done. And so, it was very instant. And then the transmissions of what I was doing and why came afterwards and have had to unpack themselves over decades as well. Wow. Because this whole image of reaching into the darkness to find light, and that that light could be a source of healing for others, would take me a very long time to understand what that meant symbolically. And now I think of it as the work of dream work, that actually we do have to enter into a kind of darkness— not literal darkness, although we do mostly dream at night— but also that we’re stepping into the unknown with every dream. And that there, there is a kind of instinctual trust that you have to have when you’re stepping into such territory, that there will be some kind of healing element or redemption in that place and from that process. And this is the, you know, I would say after 25 years of attending to people’s dreams and to my own as well, I still have that nervousness of meeting the unknown and having no idea what I’ll discover in that darkness. The only difference is now I think I’m comfortable with being uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that dream was sort of speaking to a kind of process or work that I would be engaging in for the rest of my life. I have thought, looking back on it, maybe I didn’t know this at the time, but I’ve thought that I was being initiated by the dreams themselves, or perhaps by the attendant priestesses or priests that worked in the Hypogeum, that perhaps exist in a different plane of existence now. But it did feel as if I was being initiated onto this path. And it wasn’t the only initiation, but it was an important one, a threshold moment. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely. It’s— I’m curious too about the, you know, you talk about the dreams as though the dreams are calling you. Like, what is it? It’s not like what you, you know, what you decide it is, but what the dream is calling forth. And I think of the symbolism of the spider and what that might have been. I mean, it’s been calling about the dreamwork, and we understand that, what you’ve just said, but I’m curious about the symbolism of the spider and the web. Yeah. I think it’s fascinating, ’cause I think of the web of life. I mean, we, you know, I’ve been trained a little bit in, you know, Freudian analysis and, you know, the associations one makes to the dreams, and I’m just curious.
Toko-pa Turner
Absolutely, yeah. I think there are a lot of ancient cultures that look to the spider as being the weaver of dreams. And so of course that makes sense because there is this kind of mycelial network, this almost invisible branching thread system in which psyches are connected. And Jung talked about this in terms of the collective unconsciousness and the ways that psyche isn’t just isolated within the cranium or housed in the scaffolding of our bodies, but actually that, my psyche is connected to your psyche, is connected to all psyches throughout space and time. So for me, that image of the spider makes a lot of sense. But I think also we have a strange fascination with the darkness of spiders, the dark element of spiders. And so we have a lot of phobias that we think about with regards to spiders in films and that sort of thing. So there’s something important there, I think, in this dream that I had about the fear of what lies in the dark and the creepy crawly feeling that I had in that cave. Because I think when we are making even a personal encounter with our own unconscious that we do have that trepidation. We do have that fear about what we might find there. In fact, it’s a huge reason why people avoid paying attention to their dreams. Or if they have difficult dreams, they might be repulsed by them or push them away or try to get rid of those images as soon as possible. So there’s something about that barrier that we need to penetrate if we are to retrieve its healing properties. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I love the way that you talk about that and the way you talk about spiders. And, you know, I think of— I thought of too, like, there’s the scary spiders in horror movies, and then there’s Spider-Man, and then there’s Charlotte’s Web, and there’s like the cool, good spiders, and then there’s the spiders that take away the mosquitoes and things like that. And the— that way in which you were just described is like going forth to— through the fear or the things that you want to dismiss, the gold on the other side or the deeper meaning on the other side that’s positive. And I was kind of curious about that because people do talk about, you know, what about bad dreams or what about nightmares and how do we deal with that? And, you know, when I was reading your work, you talk about it’s not like you wanna just go and like embrace it and integrate it, but like you wanna— It’s like you want to look at it, you want to engage it.
Toko-pa Turner
You want to wonder about it.
Elizabeth Rovere
You want to wonder about it, yes.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, I think, you know, if you really do want to find that gold, that light, that you do have to meet with your inhibitions, your fears, your hindrances, your blocks, your shortcomings, all of those things are part and parcel with discovering your— what gold you have to bring to the world, your particular medicine or calling. So there’s no way of avoiding that. And in fact, those dark dreams are really the most powerful dreams of all. I like to think of the energy of dark dreams as in and of itself kind of neutral in the sense that those dreams are the most potent, right? We wake up from them and our hearts are pounding and our breath is short. We’re maybe sweating and they wake us from sleep, they’re startling. And so in that sense, if we think about just the energy in a neutral sense, there’s a lot of it. And it’s just that it happens to be the so-called negative cluster in the sense that it has gathered around a particular issue or topic for you. And if we want to release that cluster of energy, we have to wonder about it. We have to get curious about it and make an encounter with it and try to understand, well, what is it that’s tangled up in this cluster, and how can I begin to understand its value for me? So I think a bad dream or a nightmare is actually a validation in and of itself, because it means that something is ready to come to consciousness. We’re having this nightmare because on some level we’re waking up to that thing. We’re ready to look at it squarely and perhaps begin to untangle and release it from that negative cluster so that we can free up that energy for more creative purposes.
Elizabeth Rovere
So just to go back to the dream for a second, when you said that you had the light, the experience of the light, and that it meant you were aware that it was healing and that it was healing to others, so I think of that as metaphorical in the way that you come to do the dream work? And then I was also wondering if there was a moment that was more literal where that particular dream was healing someone or a group of people or something in the process of that?
Toko-pa Turner
As far as a specific healing process, I mean, I experience that every day in my work. I feel so grateful to have dreamers come come to me in my private practice and they bring these dreams and they’re, you know, some of them are very difficult and some of them are incredibly beautiful. Often what happens is people come to a session and they say, I had a little dream, but it’s not much. There’s nothing to it. It’s just this fragment. And then they tell me this thing and we begin to talk about it and using wonder, which is really a key in the process of dreamwork, of being curious about the dream and unknowing, coming to it with a sort of beginner’s mind. The most amazing things come out of this dreamwork that I really have nothing to do with and I’m just sort of midwifing that process. Yeah. But in that sense, being able to midwife the dreams of others is really, again and again, to experience people feeling supported by this magic that’s coming through their own bodies is endlessly humbling and inspiring.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely. In that way, you just mentioned coming through their own bodies, it makes me think, or I associate to how you’ve described Sophia and wisdom. and how you’ve described nature. And you say that, or you’ve said that Sophia and wisdom, like, we ascend to Sophia in our dreams and she comes to us, you know, wisdom personified, right, through synchronicities. And I think that’s just so poetic and beautiful and, like, spot on. Like, oh, I get that. That makes sense. That’s so integrating and cool. And then the way you talk about nature as nature— dreams are like nature nurturing us. So could you talk about both of those things a little bit?
Toko-pa Turner
Definitely. You know, it’s easy for us to think about the human body as having its own potential to heal. Because we cut ourselves, and if we cut ourselves, there’s a natural process that takes place. Hmm. There may be some pus that comes to the surface to push out any toxins, and then there is a kind of stitching back together of, you know, regenerative materials, and eventually you know, our skin becomes completely healed, just to give you a small example. But our bodies have these autonomic processes where we heal very naturally. So why shouldn’t psyche be exactly the same way? We are nature. We are continuous with nature, which is some—
Elizabeth Rovere
Can we remind, we are nature. We seem to forget that.
Toko-pa Turner
We do forget that because we’ve constructed this elaborate drama and we think of nature as a backdrop to that drama. But the truth is we are continuous with nature. I mean, we’re made up of, what is it, 80%, 70% water?
Elizabeth Rovere
I think it’s, yeah, 70%.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, and our bones contain the same minerals as the stones and the earth. So we are nature. And so why shouldn’t psyche, which is very much a somatic process of dreaming and having an imagination, also have this ability to regenerate and to heal. And so we have these dreams, and I think in modernity we tend to feel as if they’re nonsense because we’ve spent so many hundreds of years steeped in the culture of rationalism that we don’t understand symbolic language anymore. But if you learn how to understand symbols and your own symbols and how to have a symbolic perspective, then there’s a different kind of sense, a different way of knowing that is very obvious when you start paying attention to dreams, that it actually is our mother tongue. And it’s not necessarily something you have to learn. It’s more something you have to remember. Yeah. It’s inherent. I mean, it’s always been that way, that people around the world throughout time have gathered to pay attention to their dreams, and that dreams were treated as normal and important and even central to the operation of daily life. It’s only in our culture, unfortunately, the monoculture of modernism, that somehow we’ve become disconnected and misunderstanding of dreams, which is very unfortunate. But it doesn’t take that much to relearn it, to get back into the habit of paying attention to that. But I would say it’s the language of the body. Metaphor is the vocabulary of the body. We are image-producing organisms. And I find this absolutely exciting and fascinating, that we produce images as a matter of necessity, in the same way that we have to breathe and our heart beats and we have circulation running through our veins. Yeah. So do— so too do we have images being produced through us. And now we have to wonder, why? Why is that? And how is it in relationship with nature is the bigger question.
Elizabeth Rovere
So I think it’s super important the way that you describe that and how it needs to be valued and how we can learn and heal from dreaming and the dreamwork and what it explores and unfolds and integrates. I mean, it’s funny, I was talking to my producer, Nasta, we were talking about how when I was in grad school, and to what extent neuroscience still does it, is curious. I feel like there might be that window of openness towards it more now where we’ve been exploring consciousness being outside of the brain, the theory of consciousness as outside is becoming more and more valid. But that dreams were like, oh, it’s just the way your body is just processing the daily residue or the things that have come through. It’s not that important, you know, but you do need your REM sleep and you need to sleep to restore yourself. But, you know, the dreams are just kind of tangential. And where for centuries, like you’ve said, or even the Hypogeum is like having these dream capsules for like birthing and interpretation, you know, have been around forever. So I guess it circles back to this one question I had. It was like, why did— how did we… How did it come? How did it— how and why, I wonder, did it unfold that we dismissed it for these hundreds of years and that now we’re kind of circling back to it? We’re coming— it’s coming more to the fore. I mean, I feel like your work is more powerful now than— people are listening to it more now than they would have, say, even 20 years ago.
Toko-pa Turner
I can confirm that because when I first started The Dream School, which was about 25 years ago, maybe a little more actually, I would— when I told people what I do, they often looked at me quite blankly as if, you know, I was speaking an alien language. And now it’s much more— I see it much more frequently in the field and people aren’t as confused about it. So yes, it’s wonderful to think that there’s some improvement there. But I think science has always focused on the physical aspect of dreams. Like, you know, I think one of the prevailing theories is that we dream because we’re consolidating information or we’re sorting short-term memories from long-term ones and discarding what’s unnecessary. And that’s the farthest science has really gotten when it comes to the images. The images are often dismissed as just random firing of nonsense. But of course, for me, as somebody who has spent my lifetime paying attention to the images, I can absolutely tell you that that’s untrue. Because we’ve seen some remarkable— I see remarkable things every day that come out of the wisdom of understanding that language. And so, you know, your question is why? How did we become so divorced from that? And I think, you know, rationalism really is the reason, because we have focused so much on the literality of existence, that symbolism, the symbolic world, the symbolic dimension, and even, you know, myth and stories and narrative unfolding are kind of considered, what, like disposable or fringe, like— fluff. Fluff, right? But actually, there’s incredible intelligence that is contained within— you know, we have dreams, seem to be a kind of connective tissue to something that knows so much more than we do. And the word that I use for that something greater is wisdom because it connects to some of the mystical traditions of Sophia and this idea that nature has an inborn intelligence that we don’t seem to have difficulty comprehending when we look at, say, a tree, and we say, well, it’s amazing that contained within a single acorn is the blueprint of the potential oak tree if given the right conditions. Well, so do we come with an inborn story that we, if we engage with it, have the potential to come to bring into actuality. But in order to do that, I think we really do have to participate with it. Yes. So now, I mean, maybe we’re moving out of this period of extreme rationalism. And it’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with rationality. It’s very necessary. We need it for functioning. And of course, great technological advancements have come out of those scientific developments. But at the same time, there’s this other half of life which has been ignored. And which I think is actually meant to guide collective consciousness. And it’s meant to be the first thing, not the secondary thing. Mm-hmm. And so even though we need our rationality, I think it’s meant to be a kind of— well, as Dr. Iain McGilchrist would say, a servant to the real master, and that master is what I would call this nature, psyche, you know, the field that joins us all.
Elizabeth Rovere
I’ve just realized too, you’re using the word psyche that might be a little bit unfamiliar to people. Do you mean it slightly interchangeably with consciousness? I know it’s a Jungian term. How do you explain what psyche is?
Toko-pa Turner
Psyche, in the Greek means soul. And so we think of psyche, unfortunately, in modern times as, um, being the mind, and that the mind is contained within the body. But this is just one paradigm of thinking. And as you say, there are many people who believe that consciousness is something that we share and that maybe we are inside of instead of the other way around. And so I actually love playing with the word eco-psyche because I like this idea that not only is our psyche not necessarily ending at the perimeters of our own body, but that actually there is an ecosystem with which it is a part, and that we have an influence upon that larger ecosystem, but also that ecosystem has a lot to transmit to us. So that’s kind of my cosmology, is thinking of psyche as maybe like a node in a larger network. So dreaming is our private gateway into that network.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I love that. That’s great because I was thinking about this too, that I wanted to kind of unpack even more, was about dreams being foundational or more foundational. I don’t like to say foundation ’cause it sounds concrete, but I mean it more of like this kind of original way you were talking about, like that that comes first or that it was the original language. Because of course when we’re born, we are seeing with our eyes, we’re having images, But we don’t have language, we don’t have words, we are certainly not logical particularly. I mean, I don’t— well, I don’t know, I don’t think so as babies. But that the world is imagistic and interconnected and that dreams are our way of coming to know. And that it’s almost like then when we develop logic and reason and rationalism that we use so heavily, it’s great, but it’s almost like one branch out of this larger tree of knowledge. And it makes me think of, you know, psyche as this kind of connective way in which we have to our own, to our dreams that are coming through this greater kind of original language that we have to integrate with our— or we need— it’s helpful to integrate in our day-to-day life. And that we’ve been kind of dismissing or missing as we’ve talked about. But then when— and then kind of going to science, and it makes me think of Einstein had these dreams about the theory of relativity, or Niels Bohr in physics, or mathematicians dream the theorems, and they will talk about it. They will absolutely talk about it, and you can read about it. But then it somehow then it doesn’t get picked up in the mainstream. But it’s where these things are coming from and the way that we’re connected. So I do think that we’re headed back in that direction. It’s more and more happening. So I don’t know, I was just like associating to what you’re thinking. And now I know where my question was going. Having been in this world of symbol for so long in your work, I just think it would be fascinating to engage how you see the world and how you perceive, because you’re so open in that way. You know, you’re seeing more than probably most people see when they’re like picking up a glass of water to drink. You know, you’re probably seeing all these associative networks to it, or, you know, the metaphor of water. I don’t know, are you? Do you see a difference?
Toko-pa Turner
Sometimes. Sometimes. I think when you do a lot of dreaming and a lot of dreamwork, you definitely begin to have a kind of second attention. And they can— it can be disorienting for some when you’re sort of maybe first introduced to that or even through periods where there’s an enormous amount of synchronicity and symbolic events happening in waking life. But eventually, I think perhaps you can begin to hold both attentions at once, where there is this literal physical reality, but then there’s also this second attention, which is being able to consider things in a symbolic perspective. As an example, you inviting me here to Malta is such a powerful synchronicity. I can’t even, you know, properly put words to it because over the course of 2 and a half decades, the image of this place and the Hypogeum has been informing me from the inside out. And now I’m arriving here in a physical way. What are the odds of this happening, of our paths crossing, of this moment in time? And it’ll probably take me another couple decades to unpack it completely, but I do think that it’s possible to live with both that first attention and that second attention. And maybe to answer your question, I think it’s always unfolding for me, but the threshold that I find myself on now is how to live more permanently with a second attention being awake, without falling asleep to the illusion of the human drama again and again and again, which we always do, but to somehow keep a porousness and sensitivity alive to the symbolic nature of reality.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that you call it the second attention because it is a way of paying attention that we get pulled into the drama or distracted away from. And that opening up to that attention, my experience too, is that it makes you feel more alive in the world. There’s a greater sense of joy even when there’s tragedy. So, um, I’m wondering about in your work with people how you help people understand, uh, or work with precognitive dreams, things that they’ve experienced in a dream that come to be, come to happen, you know, kind of like your own experience too, and also ancestral dreams. How do we work with those and integrate them in our lives?
Toko-pa Turner
Two really amazing and big topics. The funny thing about precognitive dreams is that they’re very common. And also, they’re impossible to know until the thing happens. And then you can look back on it and say, oh, that was a precognitive dream. However, it does happen. You know, I had an amazing experience about 20 years ago. I was living right in the heart of downtown. I called it the corner of drinking and fighting because that was— I was in Toronto. And I had this dream that woke me from sleep. And the dream was that there were these men who were climbing the fire escape right outside my window and going up onto the roof of the building. And in the dream, they were dangerous figures. I woke up, my heart pounding at the time from this dream because it was very scary, and I woke my partner up. And about 10 minutes later, we heard some sounds on the fire escape. And knowing that I had just had this dream, we had the wherewithal, and we were awake, to go and close the windows from our loft that gave access from the rooftop to our flat and call the cops. And they came and they found these 2 men on the roof with weapons, actually. They had a gun. Oh my God. So this was a potentially very disastrous situation that my dreams saved me from. But how did they know? How did they know that in a time that was yet to come that a thing would happen? I mean, I suppose you could work really hard to dress it up as a coincidence, but it was so uncannily exact that there is a sense that in the second attention, in the imaginal world, in the dream space, that— we don’t have the same limitations of time being something that is linear, that actually perhaps the future flows into the present instead of the past, or the past has yet to happen. Yeah, totally. This is something that the dream seems to say. And so we can have memories of the future, and we can also have the opportunity to change the past in the dream space.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s fantastic. That is so full of possibility. And it’s like you said, nonlinear, changing the past. That’s exciting.
Toko-pa Turner
And I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, but you can heal an event from your past by how you structure your narrative around it. Like, as an example, I wrote a lot of memoirs in my first book, Belonging, and it was very, very hard to do because I had a really rough young adulthood and also childhood. And writing it was the most challenging aspect of writing that particular book. But as I wrote about it, I received dreams. And those dreams offered me different perspectives on things that had happened to me in the past. And so I was able to capture in writing that new narrative perspective. And now those events don’t hold the same tragic potency as they once did. And so in that sense, the permanence of what had happened to me has shifted. Maybe just a little bit, but it has shifted. I had a dream when I was writing Belonging that the tattoo that I got when I was 15 years old, which was the age that I went into the system, that the tattoo had moved on my body. Wow. And that’s how I began to understand this idea of that which we feel is inked with a kind of permanence can be shifted and reconstituted, and the image itself had changed too.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, that’s fantastic symbolism. I love that, that you dreamed that it moved, that the history moved, that it shifted. You know, when you were talking, it made me think that, like, you know, when we get entrenched in our drama or whatever, or something that happened in the past and we’re kind of stuck in it and we double down, or even if we have a hardened perspective, right, and it just gets narrower and narrower. And even in a troubled historical pattern, right, the dreams are the opposite. They open it up. They create the possibility. And that’s the healing thing. It moves your tattoo.
Toko-pa Turner
Exactly. It’s like it’s there to help us in a layered way, and one of those layers is the ability to move or grow consciousness, what we might call psychic evolution. Yeah. And so whatever dream we’re having in present time is that brave edge that we are presently transcending or have the possibility to transcend. And so that’s why dreams have this recursive nature, right? Mm-hmm. Where we can see recurring dreams or repeating motifs and repeating symbols. That’s because we’re in a repetitive pattern of some kind, and the dreams show us that so that we can begin to change perhaps our attitude around that particular hardened perspective so that we can see what’s next on the outer, you know, outer spiral edge. And if we take an even broader perspective on that, it’s not just for personal psychic evolution, but I believe collective consciousness is trying to change through through our dreams, that it is inclined to grow and to come into a better wholeness and equilibrium and harmony. And each of us has a private responsibility to do that work at the level of self.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m glad that you said that. And this way in which that we’re You know, nature has a self-healing property. The body has a self-healing property. The collective inherently would then have a self-healing property if we’re entering, if we allow ourselves to enter into that trajectory. And it’s kind of funny too, because I like the way in which, like, even if you don’t want to, you still have to sleep and you’re gonna have a dream. So like, somebody’s gonna be knocking at the door anyway to try to get you there, which is kind of my way. I mean, I describe myself sometimes as being like utterly cynical, and very optimistic and full of possibility, ’cause I’m always questioning everything and like, eh, I don’t know. But at the same time, things keep opening and I feel like possibility is there. And I do feel that way about the world, even though there’s a lot of problems. And I guess that’s part of what I’m curious about with your work of dreaming in the collective consciousness and collective unconscious, like finding this kind of healing path and this openness increasingly to dreams and this kind of other ways of thinking, right? Because it’s like, why just double down on the rationalism when there’s all this other possibility? And what you just said too, one last thing, makes me think of my mentor in Buddhism always said that, you know, people are like, meditation, it’s like so self-involved, staring at your navel. It’s like, no, it’s a social service. Because the better that I am in being engaged and connected and integrated, then I am engaging you that way. And it just has a ripple effect. And I think that way about the dreaming as well.
Toko-pa Turner
Absolutely. It does sort of ruin you for small talk, though. I will say that. Because it’s so addictive to be in that state of depth, to know what questions are living in the heart of another person, or to share at that level from your own self. And it’s so deeply relational, dreamwork, actually. And one of the most amazing things we see when I bring groups of people together to do dreamwork is that we start to see that it isn’t a metaphor, actually, that we are a psychic ecosystem. And that there are, you know, sometimes at a dream retreat, we’ll have 40 people there or something, and many people will report having dreamt a similar image the night before, as if we’re trying to work something out collectively. And so in terms of service, certainly when we are paying attention to our own interiority, whether it’s through meditation and self-examination or whether it’s by participating with the dreaming, that, that is a form of service, like you said, because it is making us more conscious and more present and more aware. But it’s also nourishing us with these images, and these images have the potential to change consciousness. You were pointing out earlier that, you know, these many great scientists have discovered their theories in dreams, but the same is true for artists and other innovators and authors. Some of the greatest songs in the world, like, Yesterday was written from a dream. Wow. And so I— but I think, you know, you don’t have to be a famous person to have this capacity. You can just be every single person on Earth has this ability to tap into this wonderful, inexhaustible wellspring of fresh images that have the chance to not only heal us as individuals, but to be part of that larger ecosystem that is trying to figure something out together. And when we come together to share our dreams, we see that at work. We see that we’re like— the image that I have is of a forest or a pond, that there is very little distinction between elements in a pond. You can’t quite separate them because they’re all joined by this mycelial network, right? And if one person in the pond is suffering, it affects us all. And if one person has a breakthrough, it benefits us all. And we’ve lost that in a very sort of individualistic society, I think. But we see it come alive in dream circles.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s pretty exciting when you have the dream circles and people are sharing the similar dreams. I mean, that’s fascinating. I mean, that seems like something science would be really interested in. Like, how is that even happening? You know, that doesn’t— I mean, no one’s making that up. That’s a present experience. It’s fascinating. I wanted to ask you about this dream realm. Is the dream realm how you would describe the imaginal? Mm-hmm. Is that— I mean, I guess it’s interesting. I think it’s— I mean, we talk about the imagination and we talk about the imaginal. And I think it would be cool and helpful to our listeners to understand what exactly is this realm and how do we understand it? Because I know it comes from Sufism and it comes from Carl Jung as well. And I think poets have talked about it in different ways.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah. So in the Sufi cosmology, it’s a very different concept of reality than the one that we have. So the Sufis think of reality as being threefold, like a layered concept of cosmos. So you have the physical reality, which is the one we’re very familiar with, and then you have the divine realm, which is one we can’t really access because we are in bodies, and it is insubstantial. And in between those realms is the imaginal world, which is the term that came from Henri Corbin, who was translating the work of Ibn Arabi. So it came from Ibn Arabi? Yes, yes. And it’s a very— Alam al-Mithal, is the imaginal world, but it could also be sometimes called the country of nowhere, because it can’t be reached with the physical senses. But one can reach it through, if you’ve seen Sufis whirling. Yeah. And entering into altered states of consciousness, it can be reached through drumming, movement, meditation, dreaming, song. And so in the Sufi tradition, singing is very important. And so we have the tradition of zikr, which is devotional chanting, right? So you’re chanting all the names of God, of which there are many. Yes. And it’s understood that if you do that ecstatically enough, that you can open up some kind of portal for a transmission and beauty to come through. And so this idea of a layered cosmology is only to help us understand it intellectually, but they’re not separate. They’re actually all part and parcel. When we bring our awareness to it, we see that it exists all the time. So it is with the imaginal. It just happens to be easier to access when we’re not distracted by our physical senses. And so we can do that through dreaming, obviously. And so, you know, there are many different traditions that language it in different ways. I think for Henri Corbin, he wanted to dispense with the word imagination because it is so negatively associated with in the English language, we think, oh, it’s just in your imagination, meaning you made it up, it doesn’t actually exist. But in the Sufi, from the Sufi perspective, the imaginal realm is more real, more real than the world of our senses. Why? Because it precedes this world. If you think about it, in— Oh, I love that. If you think about it, everything around us that has once been— that has been invented first took form in the imagination. You had to have an image first before you made a thing. You had to have an image before you even put something into words. And so it is this original place, this original language.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that. That’s so helpful. I mean, that’s actually opening something up for me too, as you just described it that way. That’s really— I think people are going to really appreciate that. So, 2 things. The first one is that I wanted to ask you when you were talking about chanting, in the Hypogeum there’s something called an oracle room. And it’s where they talk about archaeoacoustics, and it’s where the chanting, or I don’t know if they were singing or chanting, but the sound reverberates throughout the entire structure. And it’s like this, you know, how did they know that space was there? I don’t know, maybe someone dreamt it, right? But that space is supposed to be very phenomenal and fascinating, and we don’t know exactly what that was all about. But maybe it was opening up that into the imaginal space through a collective group. Anyway, I wanted to just say that because I think it’s cool.
Toko-pa Turner
Amazing. Well, that makes sense to me because an acoustical chamber means that you’re going to be suffused with vibration. And vibration is— we know has physical effects in the world and on our own bodies. So it’s a very powerful technology, and I think that’s why many of the ancient cultures use vibration as a way of changing forms.
Elizabeth Rovere
Of changing forms?
Toko-pa Turner
Changing forms in the sense of, well, for instance, you know, have you ever seen one of those one of those contraptions where they put sand on a platform and then they hit it with certain vibration and forms begin to— Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I mean, that’s an incredible phenomenon. As you change the vibration, the form changes. But we could think of forms also in the sense of psychic constructs and that there are certain images that are so deeply held in our own perspectives that they become the lens of perception through which we see the world. There’s a German word for it, Umwelt. Umwelt is the form or perspective that every single organism sees through. So it’s possible possible to shift your perspective, and I think singing and chanting and other acoustical phenomenon have— can aid in changing that. If you’ve ever been to an ayahuasca ceremony, there the ayahuasquero, who is a medicine person, uses sound to help to shape the form of the visions that you receive to make them more challenging or to make them more harmonious or to make them healing.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s really interesting. I did not know that. I mean, it makes me think of shamanic drums and the drumbeat. Yeah, that too. That’s so curious. It’s so curious. And I think it was something that I read in an interview with you that I had never— I was just like, wait, what? Do you know if this is accurate? Like, if you’re playing a guitar, and you strum something, that if there’s a guitar sitting there, that it will vibrate? The strings vibrate?
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, it’s called sympathetic resonance. And you can do it with your voice, too. So if there’s a guitar leaning up on a wall in the room and you speak in a certain tone of voice, it will reverberate the instrument. And that sympathetic resonance is, I think, also felt between people. There’s moments where something you say resonates so strongly with me that it strikes a chord and it maybe creates physical sensation in my body. So we are the instrument that can be resonated with.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s why we say, oh, that strikes a chord.
Toko-pa Turner
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s what it— I didn’t even know that. That’s so cool.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah. And so our language is filled with these metaphors, but we don’t pay attention to them because they’re so old. And the term dead metaphor is used when— you get a dead metaphor when it’s used so often and it’s so habitual that you no longer can see the image. So you just say, oh, that strikes a chord, and everybody knows what that means. But then when you bring back the image and say, no, it strikes a chord, meaning it’s real. Yes, it plucked a string in my heart and created a music. It created a—
Elizabeth Rovere
It plucked a string in my heart and created music. I mean, wow, that’s so beautiful, right? And that’s a way in which we’re engaging with people in the world that maybe we’ve forgotten the story. It’s so great to hear it again. Yeah. So the other question, and then maybe we can come back to more on metaphor, is, so the imaginal realm and then dreams and then visions, for example, during ayahuasca or psilocybin, or dreams, or sorry, visions in meditation, or people that just kind of have an open portal and kind of have visions. Is that— would you say that’s kind of all in the same realm, or that’s kind of a similar language that’s being spoken through?
Toko-pa Turner
That’s such an interesting and unknowable question. But my sense— I’ve only done ayahuasca once. It was all that I needed. I’m still unpacking it decades later. But, um, but I, um, my experience was this, that— and it’s the same with mushrooms— there’s a sense for me that when we receive those visions, that we’re seeing through the eyes of the plant. That there’s something of the plant’s consciousness that joins with our own. Simultaneously, our consciousness is also there. It’s not like we become entirely divorced from reality. We can still see the objects around us. We still have our interpretation of events that are present, depending on how big your dose is. Yeah. So there’s a sense of, maybe we could say, a collaboration between those two consciousnesses. However, it has also been pointed out that people who have psychedelic experiences often see the same things. For instance, the psychonaut Terence McKenna, who I love so much, would talk about— he called it the machine elves to describe the many little bouncing characters that can sometimes appear on DMT. And I thought that was such an apt description of what I could see, that there was a kind of a grid and there were all of these machine elves that were part of this world. So how do we explain that? How do we explain that there may be a objective beings that exist on this plane of reality. And I don’t have any good answers for you, but I do think that they’re real. And I do think the imaginal world is real also. And, you know, as the Sufis say, that it’s more real than the world of our senses. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay, okay. And what about like the visions during meditation?
Toko-pa Turner
Absolutely. In fact, Jung talked about active imagination, which is a process of while being awake, being able to have conversations with some of your imaginal figures, figures from your dreams. So you can ask them questions and then pay attention to what they answer, and that that can be a really profound way to get to a deeper layer of understanding some of your dream images. So yeah, we can engage with the imaginal in a lot of different ways while awake. It’s maybe just not the— what we might call prima materia, which is that raw, varnished material from the eco-psyche, from the imaginal world, because we have a hand in it, right? So we’re bringing our consciousness into that world at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that those things are not significant. Certainly, they can be incredibly significant to receive a vision. In fact, there are many indigenous cultures that take certain steps to receive a vision that will guide their life or their work in the world. That could look like fasting or dancing or praying or even taking plant medicine or just through drumming. So, yeah, I think we can work with them in much the same way as we do dreams. Which I, you know, my method for working with dreams I call courtship, a courtship process, which is really this idea that you can become curious about the dreams that you’re having. You know, our tendency is to go to a dream dictionary and to kind of wanna look up a quick answer, but unfortunately, that’s never going to truly satisfy you at a soul level because we can’t make a pat definition for our dreams. It has a way of deadening the image. But we can engage with them through a courtship process, which is to be curious about them and try to understand why they came to visit us in this particular moment in time.
Elizabeth Rovere
So there’s, you know, we were talking about courting dreams and there’s a way in which, you know, the images of course manifest as metaphors. And metaphors, as you’ve talked about, which it’s so funny because I really like etymology as well, but I never looked up what metaphor meant. But you talk about how it means bridge. And I was like, oh, that explains so much. Of course, it is what it says it is.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, it’s an amazing word. So the first part, meta, means over, and the second part, phor, means to carry. So like a bridge, it’s something that carries between two things. And those 2 things, I think, are The head and the heart. Or in the larger sense, a bridge between the inner and outer life, between the first and second attention. And that is what metaphor does. It brings two contexts together and lays them side by side to see, look, they mean in the same way. They mean in a similar way. And the resonances between those two things help to catalyze the imagination, to help it move into new realms. And so metaphor has this function, yes, to bridge, but also to catalyze growth and movement in psyche.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it’s so funny, just in understanding. I mean, I’m sure people understand things differently in different ways, so I don’t want to speak universally, even though it feels like maybe it’s helpful to a lot of people. But I feel like, you know, if you’re explaining something to me, like, can you give me a metaphor because I’m not understanding? And then you give me a metaphor and I’m like, oh, now I get it. Because it’s just, it’s sort of like, for me at least, and I think a lot of other people, as well, that it just deepens it. You get an image. It’s like you’re talking— maybe it’s people that think more imagistically as well. You’re telling me something, but I have an image of it, and then I can understand.
Toko-pa Turner
Yes. But it also contains technologies. So, for instance, let’s say you dream of your boat crashing on a rocky shore, and you and your partner are scaling these sharp, jagged cliffs to try and get to safety. Maybe you received that dream because your relationship is on the rocks in some way. Mm-hmm. And so the technology of that image provides not only a way of looking at your situation as, well, this is really precarious. Maybe I need to soften the edges of my communication ground. Or maybe, you know, there’s a question of, is our craft reparable? Can we become seaworthy, relationship-worthy again? So there are clues contained within the metaphor that can help you to move beyond whatever position you happen to be in in that particular moment.
Elizabeth Rovere
That there’s keys.
Toko-pa Turner
That’s why it’s helpful, because it gives us a different context to look at the same thing in a new way.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, you know, that’s really great that you just said that, because I had this immediate association to, um, wisdom, something that I was reading about when we were gonna— to prepare for the interview, and it was a— I can’t even— I think it might be from Hafez, who’s a Sufi poet. Something about, like, the unwise person, or the unwise man puts himself in a cage, and wisdom is constantly dropping keys. You know, it’s like, and it’s not like, hey, I’m gonna go unlock it for you. You have to like find the key. And it’s just like in these images of the ship. Yes. There’s a key, there’s keys in these metaphors and these symbols.
Toko-pa Turner
I love that you said that because you’re also bringing attention to the fact that it’s participatory and that is so important. so essential that you pick up the key and that you try out the lock and see what it does. And because many dreams can, you know, you could just have dreams and not pay attention to them for the rest of your life, and most people live that way. However, if you do pick up the keys and become curious and turn them over and see what locks they fit, Yeah. you could find yourself in undiscovered rooms in the house.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right, right. And there’s something that’s really empowering about that, you know. And is there a way in which wonder or wondering participates in that process and in the process in your work with dreams?
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, well, wonder in and of itself has sort of a dual definition because on one hand we think about wonder as in wonderstruck, being confronted by an event or a moment that causes a breakthrough in our consciousness. But we can also think of wonder as an active verb, and that we participate with life wondrously, with wonder. And so wonder is the central key in the courtship method that I use to work with dreams. Because as we move through the dream, we wonder about what we see there. And the image that I have is of being in a foreign place and not knowing the language and not knowing anything about the culture. Well, if I make assumptions about this place I could get into real trouble with the native inhabitants of this place, right? But if I approach everything with wonder, it actually creates a humility which causes the world, I think, to open up to us. The same is true with dreams, that when we’re curious about things that maybe even seem familiar or we assume certain things about them, but instead bring curiosity to bear, the image begins to open up and reveal its depths to us. And that’s why I think of it as a kind of a courtship, you know, in that we think— we don’t really use that word anymore, but in the old days when you would court somebody, you would sort of circ— you would circulate them or circumambulate them and try discover things about them, try to discover what they loved and what they longed for. And then ultimately the hope is that it results in some kind of marriage and union if they allow you to get close enough to them. And so I think we should think of dreams in this sense, not that we’re trying to acquire something from them, which is sort of a transactional attitude I call this the acquisitional approach to dream work, where we’re trying to figure out what it means for us and how can it help me. But instead, with a courtship approach, with wonder, we are actually trying to discover what it longs for and what it wants and then try to live our lives in response to that longing that we discover within the dream. So wonder is really key in that it creates— it brings a countenance to the dream, to the dream work, where we’re discovering things that perhaps ultimately can make us wonderstruck, which is to be worthy of the revelation.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is it like when you’re saying what it’s wanting or what the dream is, wanting, isn’t there a way that it’s wanting often something for us, for us to live up to something or live or expand? I don’t know. Is that accurate?
Toko-pa Turner
I think so. I think our well-being serves the well-being of the collective, and the same is true true of, let’s say, a flowering bush, you know, that as it thrives, it creates fruits which serve the bees, and then the bees pollinate, which serves, you know, agriculture, which serves, you know, everything. Yeah. But it also serves us through beauty and, you know, scent. So there is a way, I think, that even as we’re pursuing our ultimate well-being and to come into coherence with that inborn story that we came into the world to inhabit, that it also serves the collective.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love thinking about this idea and experience of reality as being participatory, because it just opens up so many doors of participation and connection. And I guess I was thinking maybe that’s a way to leave people wondering and courting and participating. And then even if you would share— I think we’ve sort of touched upon it in the interview— but the way in which you talk about noticing beauty.
Toko-pa Turner
Yeah, it’s a very powerful and simple practice, just opening your attention to beauty in the world in all the complex forms that it arrives in attunes you to more beauty. And so as you start that habit, now things try to reach you through that frequency or portal. And so it has a way of multiplying in consciousness.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is it the sympathetic resonance too?
Toko-pa Turner
Yes, exactly.
Elizabeth Rovere
All right, that’s fantastic. So noticing things of beauty, that’s just a gift to give and to receive. So thank you. Thank you so much for being here with us today. It’s just so beautiful and wonderful to have you here and in person and in Malta. So thank you so much.
Toko-pa Turner
Thank you so much for inviting me into this magical experience. We could speak for 17 hours, I’m sure, to start.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. Great. So we just finished recording with Toko-pa Turner, and as I said to her, sometimes, of course, when you’re speaking and talking to somebody for a couple of hours, you can be tired after. And I am a little bit tired, but I also feel extremely energized by the information and the topics and the ideas and the images that we covered. I loved hearing about Toko-pa’s dreamwork, and I loved particularly hearing about how we participate and reality is participatory, and that dreams basically are calling to us and are asking, you know, what is— she asks, what does the dream want, or what is the dream calling for, as opposed to what does it just mean to you. So there’s like a relationship with the dream that you’re having. She also talks about wisdom, and she talks about collective dreaming and how a lot of times people will share a similar dream. So it’s very curious to me what you all thought about that. If you guys have dreams that recur to you that you feel have impact meaning. We’d love to hear about your dreams. We’d love to hear— I mean, I’d love to hear too what you think about as participating in reality. What does that mean to you? What is it? What do you associate to that? Please do share with us and let us know, and we’ll respond. We’re so curious about what this is all about, and I think there’s an importance to paying attention to the imaginal realm or the dreamwork realm in our lives individually and collectively, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on that. So please, please do. Please do share with us.
