Dreams are more than just dreams. They can take you to places, allow you to create life, and even change your reality. Get ready to explore the mysteries of the mind and the power of our dreams. In this episode, Machiel Klerk, an expert and international speaker on dreams, explores the mysteries of the mind and the power of our dreams. He discusses the power of dream incubation, how to use dreams to unlock our full potential, and how to interpret and apply the messages we receive in our dreams. Machiel also discusses important insights from his book, “Dream Guidance: Connecting to the Soul through Dream Incubation,“. He explains how dreams can help us in all areas of our daily lives, from personal growth and development to professional success. Tune in as we explore the world of dream guidance and learn how to connect with our inner wisdom through the power of our dreams.
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Dream Guidance: The Path To Self-Discovery Through Dream Incubation With Machiel Klerk
We’re very excited to have a conversation with our guest in this episode, Machiel Klerk, who is an expert and international speaker on dreams. He has traveled the world studying various cultures, their healing traditions and their dream practices. In his book Dream Guidance: Connecting to the Soul Through Dream Incubation, he explains dream incubation, an ancient practice that has been used by cultures throughout history. He also provides practical and valuable information on how dreams can help us in all areas of our daily lives for professional and personal development. Machiel is also a licensed therapist in private practice. He is also the Founder of the online organization Jung Platform.
Machiel, welcome.
Thank you.
I want to start so that our readers can get to know you a little bit. You write about in both the Jung Platform and in your book Dream Guidance, having a very seminal dream that led you to start the Jung Platform. Can you recount that dream for our readers and then I’ll follow that with a question?
Years ago, I had this dream. In the dream, I am floating above the Lake of Zurich, probably 50 or 100 yards. I see the house of Carl Jung who has a house also in this reality at the lake. There is a yard and a dock. I look at it and he’s building a square concrete platform in the water attached to his yard. He’s working on it and rearranging some beams as if he makes it a little bit more comfortable. He then sits on a chair reading a book.
At that moment, the whole scene comes to a standstill and it turns black and white and grayish. Jung and the platform disappeared. Behind me is the voice that says, “You have to draw it identically to how it was.” I think, “I can draw.” I find myself with a pencil in my hand making a line. It’s a little bit more straight than I thought I could and then I woke up. That was the dream that led me to this idea of building a platform for Jung and the Jungian type of psychology.
For someone who’s not a dreamer, who doesn’t quite have that relationship with their dreams, I hear you repeat the word platform but I’m not sure that people who aren’t used to dreaming would’ve necessarily said, “I can connect the dots between that dream and needing to respond in waking way by building a Jung Platform,” which is an online and in-person distribution of dream education. How did you connect those dots?
First of all, I also listened to this voice that said, “You have to draw it.” In this waking world, even taking a little piece of paper and drawing it only to see what else emerges from it. At that moment in time, the feelings and ideas that popped up were to create a place where Jung was and provided Jungian psychology to people that could also come on that platform.
It’s because Jung was working on that platform with those beams in a way as if he was creating some space for the community to come together. Even initially, I started with a nonprofit in Utah where instead of doing a couple of friends, are you up for creating a society for Jungian psychology? To our surprise, we resonated well with the local culture and hundreds of people showed up. Years later, I took it also online.
I have two things coming up but the first is how did you know that it was a platform or how did you know what to follow? As you described in the dream you were drawing, did you draw something when you woke up? What was that? What moved you?
Very often when in a dream, a voice comes in, which I probably know it’s relatively rare that there is a direct suggestion, I’ll pay additional attention to it. I took this character that was invisible to me but was behind me that gave a suggestion to draw what was there. I don’t have that skill so I took it a little bit more metaphorically to create something similar to what you saw. The similarity was a place that could host a community but it was also very important for me after reflecting on it that it was building further on Jung territory.
It was not in Jung’s yard but it built on Jung’s forwards that I took as don’t become dogmatic. Don’t take this as the only thing. It is like Jung was exploring the world of dreams, the world of shamanism, spirituality and any psychology that has to do with these themes. Create a place for people where they could come together.
That is where it brought me. It’s both a bit of a combination of listening to the dream and it is also letting in the moment your feelings speak, thoughts and fantasies of what could this be. It then came to me that probably this could be it and then you still have to test it because maybe it was the wrong assumption but somehow it worked.
However, you took whatever was coming and tested it. It sounds like the people in the community responded. You listened and tested and then there was the response. You also speak to how you took the message from the dream and expanded it, including other perspectives that were Jungian but also other elements that you’ve been bringing to the work to make it your own. How do you define dreaming? What is your sense of dreaming?
I love the question because I know that sometimes people think that a dream is an on-and-off experience you have during sleep. You get to see a movie or some message to you that happens at night. If we stay close to the experience of dreaming, we know that when we close our eyes and fall asleep, a new world gets created around us. A dream is not a letter but it’s a world in which we find ourselves and this world is created by our soul, mind or brain. I would go more to the soul but wherever people want to place it and that creates a world around us in which we engage with these characters and figures that are manifestations of consciousness.
When we open our eyes, this world doesn’t disappear. It continues to coexist. Whether we see that as a stream of consciousness that coexist or imagine a world that is accessible from this reality through imagination or fantasy or dreaming. The dreaming consciousness is present 24/7 and we are always engaging with it. In dreams, we’re fully falling into that world and then have that experience that we call a dream.
I want to come back to this experience that you mentioned of waking up from the dream and beginning to interact with the dream in waking time by starting to draw. What you said is all of these ideas and resonances came up. This piece of taking what is in this idea place and putting it in manifestation but that internal movement of knowing where to go, what I’m setting up here is your book is Dream Guidance and you work with people to do things in their life using their dreams. Can you speak to that a little bit because it’s not only dreams as you’re explaining? It’s dreams and then what happens upon waking.
It is indeed when we wake up and this other world of dream disappears from our vision but it still coexists including the voice that was saying something to me, the state of consciousness. It is not that at once, it’s all up to me. There’s an ongoing collaboration taking place with the world of dreams. It has a lot to do with building a relationship with dreaming and its inhabitants. When you start and you don’t know what the dream means or could indicate even, “I heard you say to draw this and I’m not sure where to take it.”
When we wake up and this other world of dream disappears from our vision, it still coexists. Including the voice that was saying something to you, the state of consciousness.
First of all, take it. I’m going to draw this. Please, give me some intuitions. Provide some thoughts or images that could be helpful. That collaboration continues to exist. We continue to work with the unconscious or the world of dreams. Our intuitions could also be this dream world giving us images and thoughts. That is where anyone could create some form of a ritual that sets up a relationship.
This makes me think a lot about a recorded talk that I saw on your Jung platform of Malidoma Somé who taught you for some time in dreaming. I was very moved by that talk and one of the things he talks about is he puts those voices in the voice of the ancestors and how he advocates having a very engaged relationship with the ancestors. Yelling at them even, “Why, what, where and show.” There’s something very alive about being very active and engaged in the creative process, the dreaming process and the living process of being focused and conscious of creating life. Bonnie and Ina’s lives as opposed to the passive recipient, which I find important.
It’s beautifully said, indeed. Whether you look through a Jungian lens where you have the ego as only a little piece of the psychic system, the wave on the ocean and the ocean is so much larger and the current moves you in a certain direction. There are these animals in the ocean that do things but we’re a small piece. In my upbringing, very often it’s up to me. Even my religious upbringing was I need to work hard. Otherwise, you don’t deserve paradise. You need to perform. If you don’t do it well, you get punished.
It’s a lot of pressure on this little self to do it all on your own. Psychologically, it’s not correct. As you noticed with Malidoma Somé, it is so enlivening once you discover, “There are all these characters that are on standby and sometimes proactively chipping in. They’re real.” They’re not real like the chair here but they’re real in the imaginable world. They can help and guide their interest in supporting and educating.
We can have a conversation with them. It’s not like, “Please, do this for me. I will pay you back in this way.” It’s more like, “I’m stuck in this issue. This is troublesome. Can you show up and figure something out? Give me an intuition.” It’s a worldview that feels much more connected and warm. It’s more accurate. I’m happy that you brought it in because I love that part.
We’re speaking about how it happens and some distinctions. I’m curious, Machiel. With the people you are working with, how does it happen to them? Why do they show up to work this way? Why is this important?
There are many ways that you can find support and guidance in life. Dreaming is very accessible. We all dream multiple hours each night. One of the things I’m also curious to hear is how you see it but dreaming to me and many other traditions seems not only a response to yesterday but also an anticipation of tomorrow. It’s like a river that flows. It’s not like, “The water is here because it was there,” but it’s also trying to move around the rock in a certain way and it moves towards something.
Also, our psychological energy tries to move towards something and it’s to the realization of our potential. Our potential at night tries to sneak in and bring the energy that would expand our habitual state, our more limited little self. Characters show up that have different states of consciousness that are maybe flexible, assertive or some form.
When you start connecting to those characters, your habitual state during the day becomes more porous, open and adaptable to engage with the place you are in life. In my experience, dreaming is a great way of engaging with those states of consciousness and characters that help you navigate more optimally through your day-to-day life but I wonder how you see that.
I speak to it similarly but differently in the tradition I come from, where dreams are the visual language of our experience. It’s putting into form what we’re experiencing. There are some kinds of dreams. In my tradition, there are seven kinds of dreams. That’s a very easy way of looking at the appearance of different energies in the way they play out in different dreams.
The nightmare for example is quite acute and narrowly specific to an energy that is very blocked. To unblock that is going to release potential. It’s mirroring back what I’m experiencing in my daytime and inner self. There are multiple bodies we can speak of or experiences in the mental, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual but then there are other kinds of dreams. In our language, the clear dream is showing both blocks as well as potential.
As you speak to it, these different characters or animals that appear, it’s those aspects of me that have arisen in form. This means that they’re vibrating in a way that’s accessible to manifest but they’re latent aspects of the self that maybe I have set aside because accepting that more expanded aspect of me will ruffle the waters, create waves and carry responsibility. If I’m truly as creative as I can be, that has a ripple effect and it might create some changes in my waking life.
I might find suddenly my work is too narrow and I need to shift that. There are many reasons why we set aside these potentials within ourselves. It’s in a clear dream that we see these latent potentials. We also have the block there that we can work with to unblock so that it can become manifest. That’s a little taste as your tradition is very deep and long.
I hear the multiplicity of dream manifestations. It’s not one type of dream. Some dreams show you something about the future. Other dreams do something else. They tell you what goes on.
In a way, they’re all showing the future in a sense because if I have a nightmare that I’m frozen in place and can’t run, my future, if I don’t deal with that nightmare, is I’m going to go tomorrow to work and be frozen in place and not run. If I interact with it, I change my future.
That’s a great point. By interacting with the dream, you can change the stuckness. As you know, you’ve been chased by the monster. What happens if you turn towards the monster? Something else will happen. You are running for your classroom. You can’t find it. Even by connecting to the stable wall, something will shift. The nice thing about it is you don’t have to do it all yourself. Engaging with dream states will break a certain fixed position or back to a collaboration with the world of dreams. Life becomes a little bit easier because life is difficult enough by itself.
I love what you said about we all have access to it because we all dream at night. When you think of human beings, wherever they are, in the workplace or the world, they all have access to it. It’s a universal language. It’s an interesting access point because the way I see it is that it brings back that sense of wholeness into our lives. We go in our days overthinking. Cognition is often a way of knowing that we are attuned to more naturally.
There is also this more experiential way. Bonnie spoke about the experience as a language or voice of experience. The perspective I wanted to bring is that you don’t only close your eyes at night to have a dream, have the dream and work with it during the day but it’s also tracking the dream or whatever is in the moment. It means you could close your eyes and ask for that guidance or tune into that field. It might be very different from what you experience at night.
You also have access to a spontaneous way of engaging with your wholeness in this way. If you have a dream, then you’re engaging. You said you engage with the characters. You engage with the way of the dream and it becomes a form of inquiry. In your relationship, you have that curiosity, “What is this? How does this show up? What may it mean for me?” Maybe you even can speak to how you form the question and the importance of question and inquiry in dreamwork.
The question I hear you first formulate is the question after the dream. You have to dream and then the different questions from what does it mean to how do I work with it? Sometimes you can shift the question. Instead of, “What does it mean who is visiting?” You then get a different way of engaging with the dream. It all starts as we probably all noticed, write down the dream, otherwise they evaporate. It’s essential and it still happens to me.
“I’ll remember this,” and an hour later, it is gone. Write it down. I had a dream that I wrote down. I could not place it. I was in an airplane. It was large. I was walking in the back. There was almost a lounge place and some turbulence. I fell. I went back to my chair. I buckled up and then I saw Donald Trump with two bodyguards sitting in the plane. We then nosedived and only hundreds of meters before the ground pulled up, it made a smooth landing and then we were safe. It still puzzles me.
You have a dream that may be this or that. I’m not sure. Hold the images like this or share them and someone else says something back because it’s a collaboration. We are this way from the ocean so the ocean is constantly present. Dreamworld is constantly present. Maybe there’s synchronicity. Maybe I open a book in the right place. Maybe you have something to say that has got you like, “I hadn’t thought about that.”
That is one way to continue to allow ourselves to be present without immediately forcing ourselves to know what it means because it continues to work on us. The energies will do something and the dream knows that I’m interested. My interest in triggers and seeking support from the dream for us. You’ve seen it as well. If you write down your dreams, you get more and better dreams. If you don’t write down your dreams, they seem to go back a little bit.
The world of dreams mirrors our interests almost like with free will. If we tell, “We need more guidance,” it gives guidance. If you don’t say it, it lets you figure it out a little bit more on your own. Technically, you’re never on your own but you get more leeway. The intention sets, “Please be with me.” Those are a couple of little things that people could also apply.
If I don’t understand my dream. I write it down. I let it simmer. I make a little drawing. I feel into the energy. You can use your body to see what synchronicities happen. By that, you get into a collaborative engagement that if it’s not tonight and tomorrow comes, something or the next dream will do something. You’ll get better and more intuitions and support.
That’s nice that you give that little practice to our readers. I like that a lot. Thank you. As a follow-up on that, a big part of your book is about incubating your dreams. Can you talk about that a little bit because that’s even more intentionality?
It’s a very old technique that people all over the world have done throughout history and still do. Dream incubation suggests that you ask your dream a question before you go to bat to have a helpful dream response to your question. People have asked questions such as, “How can I be kinder to myself? What’s going on between me and this person? What’s one type of food that would be helpful for me to eat,” or anything that’s in their mind or heart that’s relevant to their life.
At Harvard, they did a study on this and what they noticed is that people would ask a question of medical nature. Something that’s emotionally relevant to them does trigger highly likely understandable dreams. If the question becomes too abstract, the dream seems not to engage. In a nutshell, you can ask your dream proactively for support. If you interestingly do that with a good question, a little ritual, dreaming very often helps.
What I was hearing from Machiel is the right question but also the specificity matters. It does. Who are the people that you’re working with? Bonnie mentioned the Jungian platform, which is an educational platform but who mostly is doing this work with you?
I’ve thought about that as well. What I noticed is it is more qualities that people bring in, people that have some reflective quality that is interested in deepening their engagement with life. They’re surging for the delivery of their gift and purpose or meaning. Usually, they’re somewhat imaginative. Those are qualities that I seem to attract in my work and that can be all over the place.
That can be from people in business to artists to the regular person if such a person exists but it comes across the whole spectrum. Those are a little higher group of artists that come to me and people in business that want to figure out how to be better leaders and more effective in their work. Those two groups seem to come the most.
I would love an example if you have any of maybe a leader or whoever came through the process and what happened as they engaged in this process.
A person from a very big company, a woman was interested in how to be a better manager. One thing I’ve noticed in my work and workshops that I do with companies is that very often they bring me in because they want to have a new product. They want some creative breakthroughs but then half of the people are not so much interested directly in the creative product. It’s how can they be better managers or be more kind to themselves.
That seems to be a foundation for their functioning in the company. This woman asks the question, “How can I be a better manager?” She then has a dream in which she is playing the guitar. First, she looks at someone else who she thinks is much better but then she starts playing and she’s surprised by how well she plays. The dream goes a little further but that’s the main part of the dream. I asked you to share the dream but also to write down the feelings in the dream and your experiences. It’s not only a rational description.
This woman described how she was listening to the way she was playing and how in tune emotionally she could be when she did lean into that. She had an embodied experience of listening well with her whole body and being attuned, which she couldn’t practice and bring into the way she was engaging with people that worked for her. She reported a couple of months later that she felt that her rapport with the people was much better because of that dream and the practice of bringing that energy into her life.
I wonder too. Did the idea of a sense of play come up? That’s the first thing that jumps into my mind as I’m playing. I’m finding I can play.
That’s a great another element. This was a very high achiever woman, super-rational and always trying to strive for perfection. That part of her mind was very well-developed but it’s this element of being more playful and your emotions. Your emotions are functioning well. You’re not paying much attention to it and being a little bit more playful instead of striving for perfection will help you engage with people around you. It’s a nice part that you picked up there.
Being a little bit more playful instead of striving for perfection will help you engage with people around you.
If you can have that sense of that quality, she had it in her body so she could go back and know exactly that this is where I lean in. This is how I feel and how it feels. You could engage with that practice more intentionally. It’s a very pragmatic way to continue to collaborate and co-create with your dreams.
Both of you also work sometimes with a more embodied style with dreams.
Not only sometimes. I would say it figures into all the work we do at the coaching program. I don’t know how to leave the body out of the experience and out of cognition because all of our cognition begins with a physical experience. Ina was talking about the mental space and Machiel, you were talking about this perfection space. Nature doesn’t work for perfection. It works for experience and harmony.
For me, the physical experience, perception and our subjective experiencing of the world have to be brought into balance within the meaning-making that I do around that, the application and choosing aspect that leads from that. But, it all starts with tuning into what I am experiencing first and that space of cognition because it’s its own cognition.
Yeah, the same way I worked with that woman first. I go back to that experience and know what it is because if your mind hijacks it before you do that, it’s even more difficult to get into that experience. The other part is probably because she knew that she could be better in touch with her feelings but to say that, you should be more in touch with your feelings.
It’s like telling someone, “Don’t be angry.” “Great. I don’t want to be.”
“Have more confidence.” “Sure. How?” The great thing about these embodied experiences is, “This is how you do that.” “Now I can practice.” That is why I’m also such a fan of the embodied imagination framework.
That’s the purpose of why we’re also having these conversations, Machiel. It is because the work we’re doing in the leadership coaching space and beyond that is to bring this sense of wholeness embodied and multiple ways of knowing so we’re not limited to going, “How do I become more confident,” and think your way through it. It doesn’t work. There’s much more to that potential that we can offer. This is the beauty of it. You both said it. Access is such a low-hanging fruit and it takes a shift of mindset to be intentional and enter the space and to keep practicing and doing that.
Thank you for sharing with us everything you’ve brought, Machiel.
Thank you for being so engaged and asking great questions because the question is so important.
It is. Thank you again, Machiel.
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About Machiel Klerk
Machiel Klerk is an expert and international speaker on dreams. He has traveled the world, studying various cultures, their healing traditions, and dream practices. In his book, DREAM GUIDANCE Connecting to the Soul Through Dream Incubation, he explains dream incubation, an ancient practice that has been used by cultures throughout history and provides practical and valuable information on how dreams can help us in all areas of our daily lives – for professional and personal development. Machiel, who is also a licensed therapist in private practice, is also the founder of the online organization Jung Platform. His websites are:MachielKlerk.com and JungPlatform.com