Welcome
If you have ever awakened from a dream with a sense that it mattered – because it was beautiful, frightening, intriguing, instructive, funny, profoundly real, recurrent, prophetic, or absolutely indescribable – this website is for you.  I’m Laura Huff Hileman,  a certified Spiritual Director and Dream Consultant.   I live in Nashville, where I offer group and individual dreamwork as well as workshops and retreats.  The DreamPrayLive website is a way to share some basic ideas and resources about dreamwork as a spiritual practice.   I would enjoy hearing from you: write me at info@dreampraylive.com.  Thank you for visiting.

Why Explore Dreamwork?

• Dreams offer night wisdom for daily living – discernment, relationships, creativity, and problem solving
• Group dreamwork fosters a trusting community for personal and spiritual growth
• Dreams become a portal to prayer and to deeper relationship with the Holy

How is Dream-Pray-Live a Spiritual Practice?

DREAM
“An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter from God.”
- The Talmud

In the spiritual practice of dreamwork, the first work is to open the letter. We do this by intentionally remembering as much of our dreams as we can, and recording them as soon as possible in a notebook. It’s helpful to write down a title, date, and note about recent happenings in waking life.

This “letter” isn’t written in straightforward English. Rather, it employs the soul’s language of images, feelings, and intuition. Set it down in words and pictures as best you can, even if all you have is a fragment.

The dream-letter is addressed to you – and to the part of your life that most needs the news it contains. We dream primarily about ourselves – not only the self that we mean when we say “I,” but also the deeper, truer, less predictable self that is continually evolving with the help of the Holy. Dreams show us pictures about how that deeper self is experiencing life, through

• Images from yesterday’s events, including relationships, feelings, and memories
• Images and emotions from our past that we’ve forgotten or submerged
• Deep stories from the library of human experience – characters, images, and feelings whose power seems mythic or religious . Dreams embody important aspects of the human story that help us understand what it means to be whole, alive, and in relationship with the depths.

Dreams do not usually predict the future or tell us what to do. Rather, they indicate, like a marked map, “You are here.” They help us recognize the deep narrative we currently inhabit, what is truly important in our lives, and how we feel about these things.

The Question of the Dream’s Source:
In my own dreaming, praying, and living, I trust that the dreamgiver is ultimately God – and I trust that God is ultimately Mystery. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have other names for this Mystery that is both within us and beyond us.  Relating to this Source is more important than naming it precisely.

PRAY
Your dream-letter invites us to relationship with the Holy. When we pray with a dream, we respond to the Writer of the letter. The dreams’ “You are here” invites us to respond with “Here I am,” which means, “I’m listening. I’m open. I’m available to the wisdom, challenge, love, and growth that the dream-giver is inviting me to see.” This reflection and inquiry is a form of prayer.

To pray with a dream is to be open to its Source with all we have. Intellect, emotion, senses, and intuition move into dialogue with the dream. We are neither swept away nor closed down by the experience of it.

We engage imaginatively with the images, feelings, associations, and questions that spring from the dream. There are many specific practices and exercises that help us gain clarity about the dream’s message. These practices also help us see that engaging with the source of the dream is more important than getting a clean, precise interpretation of it.

The Question of Prayer
Pray is a loaded term. I invite you to hear “pray” as a very open, flexible way of saying that as we explore our dreams, we are willing to acknowledge a Mystery beyond our knowing that is purposefully involved with our life and growth. So praying with and through a dream means honoring the Composer of the letter, in whatever way seems most true to the dreamer’s growing sense of that relationship

LIVE
We respond to the dream and its Source – then what?
We dream because we need to integrate the dreams’ perspective and wisdom into our soul’s growth. Thinking about it is a start, but it’s not enough!  To live into a dream is to give ourselves to the transformative process it offers us.   Just the fact that we can dream about an issue assures us that we have the resources to engage with it in a conscious and creative way.

It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen alone. We need people who can listen with us to the dreams. And we find as we listen to others’ dreams, that we are more attuned to the wider vision for all of us.

Also, we find we are companioned in our growing by other helpers who surprise us: by people, events, books and articles, phone calls, snatches of songs or overheard conversations; natural events, interruptions, mishaps, discontentments, opportunities, coincidences. Name these helpers grace,  synchronicity, providence, or any of the strange, lovely words we call them. Mostly, trust that you are known; you are being drawn forth.
Educated. Challenged. Loved.

The practice of dreamwork should help us become noticeably more compassionate, courageous, creative, humble, and willing to grow.

About Religious Language: There is no definitive way to talk about the living Mystery that moves through our dreams. I am continually finding language that is helpful for me, and I invite you to explore language that bridges your known experience with the new depths that dreaming introduces. The inadequacy of all language in the face of great Mystery is one more reason to open ourselves to each others’ ways of speaking, and to the resources of poetry, art, science, religion, psychology, mythology, music – whatever is helpful in the ongoing relationship with truth. I trust that our dreams, when received with courage and humility, lead us to whatever resources we need for the journey, and equip us for dialogue about that journey.