The Menstruality Podcast - 196. How to Connect to the Cyclical Wisdom of Your Dreams (Toko-Pa Turner)

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

When Toko-pa Turner first started to experience signs of perimenopause, she was simultaneously diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis, and the combination led to severe insomnia. Sleep deprivation is challenging for all of us, but in Toko-pa’s case it was especially disorientating because for over twenty-five years she has been working with dreams in a mythopoetic way to answer life’s deep soul questions.Sometimes called a Midwife of the Psyche, Toko-pa is the author of The Dreaming Way, and her work focuses on belonging, restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, elevating grief, and facilitating ritual. She founded the Dream School in 2001 and has now grown a network of more than a hundred thousand dreamers worldwide.Toko-pa’s journey with her dreams as her guide began when she was orphaned in her teens and entered the care system, and in our conversation today we track Toko-pa’s personal dreaming journey, as well as how we can all take an intimate, deep-dive into the magical world of our dreams as a gateway to a different kind of intelligence.We explore:Why our cultures often dismiss the power of our dreams and how to reclaim your dreaming capacities in a world that has been stuck in a centuries-long patriarchal phase of worshipping rationality and materialism. How to ‘court’ our dreams, and why we don’t need to hire an expert to help us interpret our dreams, but rather to follow the wisdom of indigenous cultures and reclaim our dreaming as our mother tongue. How to keep a dream journal, and the key practice to do when you wake up after a big dream to ensure you remember it and can connect to the power of the symbols and wisdom within it. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyToko-pa Turner: @tokopa - https://www.instagram.com/tokopa

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey there, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for being with us today. So when my guest, Toko Parterna, the amazing Toko Parterna, first started to experience signs of perimenopause, she was simultaneously diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis

and the combination led to severe insomnia. Now sleep deprivation is challenging for all of us but in Tokopar's case it was especially disorientating because for over 25 years she's been working with dreams in this beautiful mytho poetic way to answer life's deep soul questions. Sometimes she's called a midwife of the psyche. Toko Paterna is the author of The Dreaming Way. Her work focuses on belonging, restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, now that is something that is so deeply needed in our world, elevating grief and facilitating ritual. She founded the Dream School in 2001 and has now grown a network of more than 100,000 dreamers worldwide. Her journey with her dreams as her guide began when she was orphaned in her teens and entered

the care system. And in our conversation today, we track Tokopar's personal dreaming journey, as well as how we can all take an intimate deep dive into the magical world of our dreams as a gateway to a different kind of intelligence. And I actually got to ask Tokopar about one of my recent dreams about reclaiming my voice and my story as a woman. And it was amazing what she shared with me. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Toko Pa Turner. Hi, Toko Pa. Thank you so much for joining us on the Menstruality Podcast. It's wonderful to be with you. It's a joy to be here. You and I have had this lovely long history where our paths have entwined many times. So it's nice to find ourselves meeting again. Yeah, like it's probably eight years ago

that we talked last time, I reckon something like that. So I'm actually surprised it's been that short, because it feels like longer even, I guess a lot has happened. Yes, a lot has happened. a lot has happened a new book two new books have happened and yeah so much to speak about um yeah I'm excited to to feel where you are in your life and hey maybe maybe that's a good way to lead us into our cycle check-in how we always begin this podcast um I'm curious uh if you do track your menstrual cycle where you're at and how that's influencing you or like the cycles that you're connecting to in your life at the moment? Yes. Well, I was always extremely regular and I always knew where my cycle was until I hit perimenopause and then

things started to get crazy. And so right now it's completely unpredictable. Usually I would have bled on the new moon, which is around the corner, but it's anybody's guess what will happen. So, so yeah, I've been in that process right now, just going through perimenopause and, you know, looking forward to the actual pause because there's a lot of stopping and starting going on. Yeah. How's that going for you emotionally? actual pause because there's a lot of stopping and starting going on. Yeah. How's that going for you emotionally? Are you noticing like different new emotions coming up or emotional processes? We talk about it a lot on the podcast. Yeah, I'm 52 years old now. So when paramotor menopause first hit, I would say I was closer to my late 40s, maybe 47, 46, 47, maybe even earlier, actually, now that I think about it. And at that time, I became incredibly ill. And I developed an autoimmune disease, which I think I had had all my life, but it became full blown, which is very common, actually, for those two things to happen at the same time, although doctors don't understand why it is. And so I became

very, very, very ill for a number of years, right when my first book came out, and its star was sort of rising, my body was massively declining and we were struggling to find treatment that would work. I have a condition called rheumatoid arthritis or rheumatoid disease. And so in that process of trying to find medication that would work, I also experienced extreme insomnia to the point where, I mean, I really wouldn't sleep at all. And it's very hard to say how much of that was due to the extreme anxiety of having this illness that was eating my body from the inside out and how much had to do with perimenopause. It's kind of indecipherable. And of course, when you don't sleep, everything gets

worse. Anxiety, irritability, all of those things. And so since going on to hormone replacement therapy and finding treatment for my disease, my life has improved a lot. And so I wouldn't say that I'm having as many emotional ups and downs. I actually feel a greater sense of groundedness and clarity at this point. But you know, we're also going through a chaotic time on earth, with lots of upheaval on every front. And that, of course, consumes my thoughts and my soul process and my emotions. So, yeah, it's a jumble, isn't it? It's a jumble. Hey, I had a dream that was very much caused by the shakeup that's happening in the world. And I'd love us to speak about it later, but not yet, because I want to hear about

your story first. Yeah, it's a jumble. It a jumble and I mean sleep deprivation is difficult for everyone but with you being a dream worker and you know how you've always connected so deeply and intimately with your dreams as your guiding source I can imagine that was even more disruptive than it would be for others to be without your dream life. Thank you for acknowledging and thinking of that because it was very disorienting because I was asking a lot of, you know, deep soul questions about why what was happening to me was happening. And I wanted to understand it in a mythopoetic sort of way, in terms of my own evolution as a human on earth. And also from that very physiological perspective, I wanted to understand, you know, what was happening in my body. And if there was something I could gain from my dreams,

any kind of guidance to help me through it. I would say that I had enough dreams during that time to give me breadcrumbs along my journey and actually some of the most powerful dreams that I did have, even though I may have only had a handful of them, continued to support and guide me even today, you know, even many years later. Amazing. And this is what I really am so excited to talk to you about is like how to work with our dreams as guidance, guidance you know and the community that's gathered around this podcast we're working with our cycles whether that's the menstrual cycle or the lunar cycle or the different cycles that we're tracking as guidance in our lives and I think pairing these two things together is so potent but before we get into it I'd love to track back a little bit to, there were parts of your first book, Belonging, at the beginning that just really you describe, I hope it's okay to stir up

these memories, but this is what we do when we put them in books, right? And then they're out there in the world. Yes, everybody knows. I have no secrets. There was this moment where you said you left home in unsocked feet because your mother had hidden all your shoes and the police picked you up and said, do you want to go home go home and you said with all the certainty in the world no so you ended up in this um detention center but you describe in the book so beautifully how this was your both your books in different ways how this was your entryway into into dreams as your guidance because you were you were so looking for guidance in your life and the dream your dream life was where you went to, right? Yes. Yes. Just so people have some context.

I was 14 going on, 15 years old at the time. So I was also, you know, making decisions from that level of maturity. So when I said no, I didn't want to go home, I really just came out of knowing that I didn't feel safe and that there had to be something better. And so as much as I was running away from home, I was running towards something. And I didn't know what that was. And it turned out, you know, living in the system for a while. And the years that followed after I was emancipated were extremely hard, and a hardship that I definitely don't want to valorize, you know, because there was a good, you know, five to 10 years that were kind of unbearable and very lonely and full of trauma.

So, but that being said, I think there was something already inborn in me that knew that there was a destiny that was also pulling me towards it. And I couldn't take those steps into who I was becoming. If I didn't take that risk, if I didn't live, leave that obstructive and volatile environment. And so, yes, I remember the day that I was committed into the system. It was 1988, I think. And I started one of those, you remember those, the tiny little books that you would, you know, use for schoolwork and such. I started one of those. It was my first dream journal. And, you know, I also shared my experiences with myself, you know, just trying to externalize what was happening for me internally.

And I started paying attention to my dreams. And at that age, I didn't really know how to understand them. But I did have these incredible experiences where images that I was having in my dreams would appear in the outside world in the form of synchronicities. And I knew and recognized those things as magical. And that there was a higher intelligence that was both speaking to me in my dreams and speaking to me in the world. And that's what kept me curious about dreaming and about following those breadcrumbs as best I could. And to this date, I still keep a dream journal, except now I have a slightly more sturdy writing book. And, you know, my journals take up

several shelves on the bookshelf. I don't know why I'm keeping them. I suppose at some point I might like to look, reflect back on them. Certainly I do use them for writing. But I may just have to, you know, as I get older, make a giant bonfire and, you know, burn it all back into the ether from which it came yeah wow big moment I also have boxes of journals and I don't know why either but it just feels important it's these yeah tracking our journey and you had grown up in a Sufi environment do you sense that growing up in that kind of mystical surrounding had also sparked something in you around the mystery that can be revealed to us through our dreams? I do, absolutely. Sufism is such a magical

practice. It is a mystical path and it has a lot of similarities with other forms of mysticism, like hereticism or Gnosticism. So mysticism, you know, Sufis are actually a mystical branch of Islam. And so it comes out of the Middle East. And it went through many different iterations, and it has a lot of different forms. The form that I was raised with is now called the Inayati order, Inayati, named after Hazrat Inayat Khan. So he was actually Indian by birth, but he studied at Oxford in England, and then he brought Sufism to the West. And so he himself was kind of a mix of many different cultures. And he brought Sufism to the West in the early 1900s. And it really lost a lot of its connection to Islam over that time and became something more, well, Hazrat Tanayat Khan used to say that he believed there was really only one holy book, and that is the book of nature.

And that there was really only one truth, and that truth is love. And that there was only one thing to praise, and that is beauty. That, you know, gives rise to kindness in the heart. And so you see, he was looking for the underlying principles that joined all the world's religions and practices. And so to come back to your question, absolutely being raised in that environment was hugely shaping for me because we were, one of the things that I loved most about being raised Sufi was that we lived in community. So what's called these Sufi concha, which is

another word for a place of gathering and living. And so we lived many people in the same house and we practiced together and practice looked like sometimes it looked like meditation but often it looked like music so we would sing and we would dance and the type of singing is not very common to people nowadays but really it's called a zikir and zikir is a kind of singing where you are trying to connect with God, with the holy, with the invisible source of everything, the unifying fields behind the physical world. And so the hope is in singing and chanting and layering our voices together and even moving our bodies together as we sing that we're reaching these states of rapture and transcendence. And so I did that when I was a little kid. And I had these mystical experiences of, you know,

seeing visions and of having awarenesses and wisdom just arrive into me and channeling ideas, I guess you could say, and even dreaming while I was awake. So these are kinds of experiences I had when I was a little kid. So you can imagine, by the time I was in the system and sort of fighting for my life, those years were very characterized by the practical demands of survival. But when I found relative safety in my life, that was the first place I returned was to the question of mysticism and my natural inclination to living a spiritual life. And the place where I found it was with the Jungians, with the Jungian world, with Carl Jung and the people that descended from his body of work. And I realized, oh my gosh, here is this huge subculture of people who are interested in all the weird stuff I'm interested in, in dreams, in mythology, in stories, in those underlying archetypes that make up life and nature.

It's so good to hear you speak about Zikia. I'm thinking of this moment that I'd forgotten about until now, where I was at the WOMAD Festival, which is a world music festival, huge. And there were Sufi musicians that somehow set up a stage where there were like three layers of musicians, like three floors of a building and so there were 12 all together singing this most incredible devotional music and I was completely taken into a different state of consciousness it was wonderful thank you for bringing that memory back

yeah okay so then you yeah you journeyed with the Jungians and you've landed where you are now and I I'm curious to hear how you would describe what your calling is now or what your work is with dreams how would you describe what it is that you're doing with dreams and in dream school and with your your students and your community that's a good focusing question I think what has always driven me is a passion that dreaming should be brought back to the people. And this, of course, is very normal for most surviving indigenous cultures on the earth, that it's a matter of course that we wake up in the morning or sometimes in the middle of the night, we gather around a fire and we share our dreams

and we wonder about them together. And we try to understand how they want us to move, not just as individuals, but together, collectively, and through our shared dreaming, what decisions we should be making as tribes, as communities, as families, and as a culture at large. And so this has always been a matter, of course, for the older cultures, but somehow in Western civilization, we've developed this idea, probably through rationalism, that we need a middleman, an expert, somebody who is learned in the ways of other rationalistic approaches, such as psychology and medicine, to tell us what our dreams mean. And we've relied on this seeking of an expert outside of ourselves for so many centuries, that we have forgotten that this is our mother tongue, that this is the most

natural language. And it's a language any of us can relearn. And we should, because the way that our society is structured right now is that just as we seek help from experts to tell us what our dreams mean, we seek help and guidance from the outside world to tell us how to live our lives, how to live our ethics, how to live our morals, how to build, how to structure things. society that has been built on rationalistic ideas. And I just want to clarify that there's nothing wrong with the rational function. It's very, very important. It's just that it's sort of overdeveloped, like an overdeveloped muscle. It's become sort of monstrously strong. And what happens when you overdevelop one muscle is another muscle weakens. And the weakened muscle in this metaphor is our imaginal capacity, our imagination. And this may not seem very important to most people, but when the imagination is weak, we are not cultivating fresh

ideas. We are not looking for emergent solutions. We are not coalescing from collective intelligence. Instead, we're just doing the same things that have never worked, that are getting us into more trouble and causing more damage. And so what we really need is a harmony between these two ways of, let's say, thinking or being. And I think that we need to reverse them, actually, that we need to be taking guidance from our dreams, from our imagination, and then using the rational mind or the logical thinking to put that vision into actuality, into steps that we can follow. I'll always remember the poet philosopher John O'Donogue who died several years ago now but he said dreams are the evidence that we're all infinitely creative beings because we have these huge imaginal landscapes that we that we craft and cultivate ourselves and then we just wake up and

just get on with our day as if it didn't happen these whole you know movies full movies or you know whole full stories that play out in our minds and yeah why would we not turn to that intelligence there it really makes me think of menstrual cycle awareness too because the the idea with everything that red school is exploring is that we have this unfolding of nature's cyclical intelligence inside us every month um but the like you said the world is telling us who we should be and what we should do we can turn our take our focus from the outside and turn it in inwards listen for how we are and how we shift throughout the cycle month and understand our own strengths our own vulnerabilities and like tap into that cyclicity that's in

everything in the natural world but somehow humans we just think that we can just opt out of cyclicity and just be on all the time and be productive and be you know like our monocultured agricultural fields that we just produce all the time yeah there's there's so much synergy here you You said in the book, I loved this. You said, the production of symbols and stories is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we couldn't survive. Although it's possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of Earth itself. Could you say more about that?

Like how this is connecting us into that intelligence? Okay, so to follow on ability to share our dreams, to listen to our dreams and to understand their language. And then to follow on that idea, it is just natural. It's biological. Dreaming is like any other self-regulating function in the body, right? We naturally breathe without thinking about it. Our heart beats autonomously. Our, you know, blood flows. Our circulation circulates. All of these things. So too does psyche produce dreams. And it is a form of healing, just like any other self-regulating process. It keeps us alive.

It keeps us well. And it's part of nature, just like every other part of our biology. It's funny that we don't think it is. In fact, the more that I wonder about that question, I think, well, of course, why? So the question then becomes, why do we think that it isn't? You know, why do we not see it as biology? And I think part of the problem, one of the things we really need to dismantle is this myth that dreams happen in the brain, that dreams are somehow contained within the scaffolding of our craniums, and that it's just our mind, that it doesn't involve, and somehow the mind is separate from

the body, which is somehow separate from the rest of nature, right? So this is just an illusion that we're working at, we're chipping away at it to try and dismantle that idea. But ultimately, we are connected to the rest of nature. Of course, we are. Why wouldn't we be? And so we have to rely on metaphors like trees in a forest, for instance. And we think, well, you know, are those trees individuals? Well, they may look like individuals on the outside, but ultimately they're all connected by this mycelial network, which runs underneath the forest floor. And this network shoots back and forth with nutrients, with medicine, with oxygen, with

intelligence that helps the health of the entire forest thrive. Well, the same is true for humans, except that mycelial network is what we call psyche. It's invisible, we can't see it, it runs under the so called soil of our bodies. But it we are contained within this larger network. And so the image that I have started to use is a made up word. And the word is eco-psyche. Because if we have an ecosystem, why can't we also have an eco-psyche? It is what makes most sense to me. I know you've had the experience where someone you love, someone you're close to, you know what they're thinking before they think it. You almost like hear it appear on your own

psychic landscape. Why is that? It's, you know, we could call it psychic, you know, maybe you're psychic. You could also say, well, we're part of the same network, you know, and honestly, it's hard to say sometimes whether it's your idea or whether it's my idea, because it occurred maybe spontaneously, possibly at the same time or in such a quantumly sort of connected way that it occurred to us both. Who knows? So this is what dreaming is. We are seeing the images that are there certainly to guide our own mytho-psychological, psycho-spiritual unfolding, but also we are connected to the psycho-spiritual unfolding of the collective, which is why we have dreams, like you mentioned earlier, about what's going on in the world, what's going on in the pleas of nature, but also what's going on beyond this current place and space in time. So we dream about things that are what we call archetypal, and we never came into physical contact with those things because they happened thousands of years ago in a culture we're not connected to,

and yet we dream them. And many people dream them all around the world. So I think it's a very complex system and we have to stop. We have to sort of dismantle this idea that dreams happeniting body of a larger intent, which is the intent of nature trying to help us grow not only as individuals, but as a collective forest of beings, an eco-psyche. I'm going to pause this conversation with Tokoar just for a moment to share an invitation with you if you'd like to add another layer to your work to track and court and receive the wisdom of your dreams or if you'd like to deepen your menstrual cycle awareness practice you might like to start tracking your dreams as they shift and change throughout the menstrual month or the lunar month if you don't currently have a menstrual cycle. And if so, the Red School cycle tracking chart could really help you to do that. You can access

it for free at redschool.net forward slash chart. That's redschool.net forward slash chart. That's redschool.net forward slash chart. Okay, back to the conversation with Tokopa. The fruiting body of a larger intent is so beautiful. And like you mentioned earlier, indigenous peoples have known this, have worked with this for forever. And I was actually had an incredible conversation recently with a woman called Dr. Cynthia Ingar, who has studied and now teaches Andean woman medicine so from the Andes the Quechua people and she talked about how her grandmothers spoke about their grandmothers and how they would all gather together particularly when they were bleeding when they were menstruating and they would all share their dreams

for the community and I know that my dreams are different when I'm bleeding and perhaps even more so since I've been noticing how my state of consciousness shifts how my capacity to be the fruiting tree more consciously of this larger intent it happens more when I'm bleeding and I'm curious do you notice this have you noticed a cyclical nature to your dreaming like is that absolutely yeah yeah um certainly it's most noticeable on the new moon and on the full moon um i often have dreams of blood uh as i am about to bleed and it takes many different forms but there is that image connection there. But yeah, I relate to a lot of what you said. I feel like when I'm bleeding, I, in a way, I'm not able to operate

at the same intellectual capacity that I might in other parts of my cycle. And what I am able to do is drop deeper into my body's intelligence, things kind of slow down. I am much more psychically attuned. And I think the dreams do reflect that as well. I also have big ovulation dreams too where I'm often really celebrating myself I had one I had one where I was standing on stage in front of hundreds of people in my underwear which is like in most situations would be absolutely terrifying and I just opened my throat and I sang the most full-throated song I've ever sung. You know, I couldn't actually sing like that. Only in my dream life can I sing like that but the dream says you can and you do and

it may not take that same form of you know singing in the way that we think of it but singing in your other forms of expression at that level of connectedness and to great reception yeah like the free the freedom I felt could be expressed in other ways okay that does link to the dream that I want to talk to you about in a bit but we won't get there yet that can we talk a bit about the how like the the how how do we track our dreams how do we connect to our dreams one of the things you shared I think I think actually it was in a conversation with Lucy Pierce from Womancraft and you said you know often there can be this acquisitional way of working with dreams like buy a dream book and there are certain symbols and this symbol means this and you're talking

about a totally different approach like a one where you're like building a relationship with the dream or courting the dream yes yes exactly yes, exactly. So I use that language, the acquisitional approach, because we really do have sort of, I think, in the context of capitalism, this pervasive notion that we need to get something out of everything. And so we think about our dreams in that same way. We're like, but what does it mean for me? You know, what can I get from this dream in terms of like a payoff? And we treat it a little bit like an ATM machine, you know, like, okay, I'm going to do like an incubation and it's going to give me an answer to the question that I have. And I think this

is all wrong. And so I came up with this language, courting the dream, because I love this old timey approach to courtship. And so in the old ways, when you loved somebody, or when you liked them, when you felt affectionate towards them, you would, you know, in the olden days, wouldn't just swipe right and be like you're done you'd have to like you know it I don't know if it's left or right because I've never actually I'm just like pretending I know about something but uh but anyway so is it do you know is left the right way or right the right way I haven't ever been on tinder don't know either okay good right means no goodbye I'm

on to the next I'm thinking but yes anyway listeners write in and tell us no we don't really care um it's too late for that now so um so yeah with courtship what you do is you would slowly respectfully approach the object of your attention. And then you would, like, you know, circle them from a respectful distance. And in the circling, you might do a special dance or you might offer them some gifts or you might eavesdrop to find out what do they love? What do they long for? What are they like? What brings them alive? In the hopes of gleaning enough information that you could maybe inch closer and maybe give them something that they want. And this is how I think we should approach

dreams. It's a very feminine sort of attitude that rather than trying to get something from our dreams, we want to find out what they want, what they are longing for, what they are trying to say. And in receiving that well, both of us are enhanced. The dream becomes enhanced. And then we have more magical dreams, we have more mystical dreams, we have more fruitful dreams, but also we are enhanced by their wisdom, by the friendship and relationship we have with our dreams, and by those, you know, the bottomless, inexhaustible well of ideas and images and creativity that come out of that place of nature. And so courtship, you sort of started this question of like, what, so what do we do? What, what is the process? For me, there are some very simple tips to have a relationship with your dreams. And the first one is to give them room to just make some space and time in your life to value them. And that may seem really obvious. But like you said,

most of us know we have these amazing dreams. And then we say like, okay, what do I have to do today? And then off you go and you forget your dream eventually. Or maybe it comes back to you in fragments. But for the most part, it has evaporated. Life doesn't feel magical. I thought life would be more beautiful than this. But in fact, last night, it was more beautiful than this, or at least more interesting or wild or passionate. But we've lost it because we forget them so quickly.

We do. We do. We do. And I think a big part of that is because we do have such, we have this overdeveloped muscle, which is the rational mind, right? We think it doesn't matter. We think that was just nonsense. We think, oh, that was just debris from something that happened to me yesterday. We think, oh, I ate too much cheese before bed. We have many, many different ways to dismiss our dreams. And we're very good at it. It's so automatic. It's like a knee-jerk reaction. But if we can just take a pause and make some space, some intentional space to try to recall the dream, to try to

bring its images into this world, to allow it to be remembered. I do have this kind of strong mirror for people. And it's this. Forgetting is a choice. We say, oh, I just, I forget my dreams. I just don't remember my dreams. Forgetting is a choice. It's a passive choice, meaning it's not conscious, but it is a choice nonetheless. And I like to give that strong piece of medicine to people because it's hard to hear, but it helps because then you realize, oh, I can make a different choice. And so this is the most foundational thing is when you wake up in the morning, you want to try, first of all, staying in the physical position you wake up in and to keep your eyes closed. And that can be really hard to do. But it seems like when you move your body, the dream gets dislodged. It does.

It does. It's like you'll remember really clearly when you're lying in that same position. But if you turn left or turn right, suddenly you can't remember it as much. However, sometimes if you get back into the original position, you can remember it again. So there's something about staying in that as much as your body sort of wants to stretch and be, you know, more comfortable, try to stay in that position. And the first thing you should do is just gently without too much probing and conscious intent, just remember the dream. Just go through it in a sort of mental rehearsal, three, four times from beginning to end in as much detail as you can. And you'll find by the time that you are naturally more awake, the memory will have solidified in your mind.

And then you can get up and get your cup of tea or coffee in my case, and go get your sturdy journal and write your dream down and make sure that you write it down. And this is absolutely essential. You have to record it. And let that just be enough. You know, if you do nothing else, do these steps, and that will be huge. And then, you know, in my book, the book you've been referencing is called The Dreaming Way. And The Dreaming Way just came out in September. So it's a brand new baby out in the world. But in that book, I go into much greater detail about how to work with your dreams

from that point and do this courtship process that I briefly described. Beautiful. Okay. I took notes because I want to start practicing this now. So step one, why see, look at my logical mind, rational mind, trying to turn it into steps. Okay. No, but I put those steps in the book so you can just you have the book you can just go look at the steps everyone get the book it's so beautiful I really recommend it yes make room stay in the same physical position gently remember and then write it down yeah and another piece about this, this urge to dismiss dreams, this kind of knee jerk reaction, you have to sort of move through that dismissal. And so as much as you may want

to dismiss your dreams and say, Oh, it's this, it's nonsense, it's whatever. Oh, and here's another one. It's not a real dream. It's just a fragment. That one is a killer because fragment dreams are the most powerful dreams at all because they have a lot less detail they have a lot less to think about a lot less symbols they're just giving you this one powerful single image you should treasure those fragment dreams and the nature of dreams is that if you treasure the fragment, the next time you'll get many images, more images, they'll only continue to flourish and grow. And how would you treasure the fragment? Well, just don't dismiss it and write it down. And as you're writing it down,

make sure you're getting all the detail that you can out of it. What was the setting you were in? What feelings did you have? What color was the object you were handling? How did you feel when you encountered this other person? What vibe were they giving off? What did this remind you of? There's all kinds of questions you can ask yourself to get more, as much detail out of it as you can. And here's the kicker. Once you start writing the dream down, this crazy thing happens is more details start to emerge. You start, you're like, oh, I just remembered a part. And then you're starting to write down those details.

It's a very magical thing to write down your dreams. So just make sure that even if all you have is a fragment, that you don't dismiss it as not enough or not a good enough dream, and that you actually continue to go through the process of writing it down. Wow. And I share my dream that I had. Of course, people must just do this all day to you you but if there's one person I can share my dream with it's you Toko so so I was on day 10 and I woke up feeling so heavy and so like dark and and sluggish and kind of haunted and it was that that made me recount my dream so I sort of followed that feeling um and I've a recurring symbol in my dreams as it is I imagine for many women is that I'm being hunted by a sexual predator of some kind I'm being hunted and um I always managed to out to escape them but I'm always

the feeling is terror that comes up um so I had that happening but then the dream shifted but it was still the same symbols and threads that were being worked but the situation shifted and I was auditioning to be the lead in a play that was all about women's bodies it was like the vagina monologues but but in another parallel realm, like some other play that's like that kind of vibe. But instead of the role being given to me, it was given to a white, middle-aged 50-something male, even though it was a play about women's bodies. And as I lay there feeling so just sick and angry and heavy, well, I felt sluggish. And then I realized I felt angry. And what arose in me was this, no one can take my stories. No male, I love,

I love men. This isn't an anti-men situation, but no, no male can take my stories. Patriarchy can't claim me and claim my body and claim my truth. It's mine to share and speak. And then my whole day was different. You know, I could have like woken up and just felt a bit like awful day. But instead, I was now like lit up from the inside with my own knowing of who I am. And it all came from this from this dream, from me sitting with the dream or lying as I was lying with the dream. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that.

I really felt that from the heaviness, the breaking through into that empowered awareness of that. that, you know, it's almost as if what you were evading, what you were running from was confronted somehow in the midst of your sitting with this dream, that even as much as whatever that is that chases you and tries to take something from you. That it's untakable. That it's inherent. And there's a word I'm looking for.

Unimpeachable. It will always belong to you and that will never change it's yours to do with what you will when you will i love that because i think you know there's so much there's a rise of authoritarianism all over the world right now and actual reproductive rights and and women's bodies are under threat in many different places. And still again, you know. And so there's this very real thing that's happening in the world. And also, I think we live with that internally. We live with those kind of patriarchal admonishments internally, those tyrannies within us that say, you don't have anything important to say. You should be less loud. You should just be nicer and not so angry. You should give your energy to everybody else around you and take nothing for yourself.

You should be more generous. You should, you know, whatever the stuff is. Like even though those are voices that are deeply familiar to us, so familiar to us sometimes that we don't even know the difference between our own thoughts and those thoughts. Those are actual inherited tyrannies that exist in the psyche. And until we as individual women, let's say, because there are those of us who are listening that identify as women, until we can dismantle those internal tyrannies, we are never going to be able to dismantle them externally. And so that's why we're having those dreams. That's why we're being chased. That's why we have Nazis and police states and authoritarianism in our dreams, is because we are somehow living under the oppression of those influences internally.

And we have to do battle with them. We have to do as you did in your ovulation dream and get up in your underwear and just sing from the freedom of your expression in whatever form it takes. Totally. I've realized actually that wasn't an ovulation dream. That was like a menstrual renewal dream. It was in that very sacred, sweet moment where I just feel like I'm hugged back into life and then I'm shown who I am again. I'm just remembering it was there. Yeah. And as what I'm noticing with the dream for me is as I'm seeing figures rising in prominence, like particularly far right figures

or real embodiments of the patriarchy, those voices in me are being strengthened too. And the dream was showing me, don't let them, they can play their game out there, but no one gets to rule inside you, exactly as you're saying. But it was a, even though I didn't do the reclaiming moment in the dream,

the dream was guiding me home to that reclaiming moment. Yes. Yes. Beautiful. Dreams are also a powerful way to gently work with trauma. You know, you share about this. I think this was in Belonging, actually. Like Snow White's poisoned apple jumping out of her throat with the prince's kiss. Dreams can take the poison of trauma out of us psychic and emotional life and puts it into the form of images so we can see it. You know, your dream did this amazing thing where it showed a man sort of performing a kind of vagina monologue. So you could see how ridiculous it was to accept the voice of feminine authority to come from a male body. It makes no sense.

So the dream provided this image that you could see on the outside that could help you have that breakthrough moment of, oh, this is a very poisonous way of thinking. And I'm not going to keep swallowing that poison. If people listening are loving what you're saying, what's the best way to connect with you or to work with you and explore your work more? Oh, thank you for that question. Well, so if people want to connect with me, they can just go to my website, tokopa.com, which is T-O-K-O-P-A.com, Tokopa. And I have a mailing list that they can sign up for. And on my mailing list, I always announce new courses and events. Sometimes I do stuff out in the world as well as online.

I also have a self study course, which you can register for on my website. It's called Dream Drops. And that's like a 30-day course. If you're just starting to have a relationship with your dreams and you want to learn more about how to approach them, it's 30 days long. And every day I drop a bit of wisdom and a practice into your inbox to help you connect to your dreams. And then mostly I have been writing on Substack lately. I have found that social media has become, I don't know, a very hostile environment in the last few years. So I'm starting to put most of my writing on my Substack these days. So I'm at tokopa.substack.com except there's no hyphen in my name there. It's just T-O-K-O-P-A. But I'm pretty easy to find

because I think I'm the only tokopa on earth. It's, I think. That's helpful. And how has it been to have Dreaming Way Out in the world? How has that birthing process been? You know, it was a long labor because I really wanted this book to contain

all the juicy tidbits that I want to share with people all between its pages. So it took me about three years to write, maybe a little more. And then I released it in September of 2024. So, uh, that was a very volatile time on earth for a lot of people. So it felt, honestly, it felt like releasing a butterfly into a hurricane is the image that I have right now. It's a very gentle book. It's very introspective and philosophical. And right now, it doesn't seem that that's where people are at. Some people are at that place, but hopefully when people are ready for butterflies, it will be there waiting for them a lit on a flower well and it's certainly guiding my activism you know so even though I want to be up and active in the face of this happening like the way that you helped me contact that dream and the power within it gave me so much more strength and resilience to to keep going so it's there's

such a clear connection isn't there okay I'm I'm glad it it provided that for you that was my hope really well thank you so much for writing the book thank you so much for all you do and thank you for this gorgeous conversation I'm leaving really inspired and I imagine our listeners are too so thank you so much to a good part thank you for having me take care love bye thanks for listening thank you so much for being part of the community gathered around this podcast please forward this episode to a friend who you sense will love it and um i'll be with you again next time so until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm