Book Description

At each life stage you have the power to imagine what comes next. Later there’s time to reflect on how your imagination fared. Was it powerful enough, or had it fallen into a sorry plight? When Bonna Jones joined a dream-sharing group run by Melbourne psychologist Peter O’Connor, she was on the cusp of menopause. In group conversations she took part in a process of sharing night-time dreams, which were imagined, re-imagined, and befriended. Dreams are an easy and accessible way to engage with the world of image and imagination. If you record your dreams and share with others, you begin a process that invites an imaginative response. You grow your mental power to imagine. Dream images beget other images and through that, give life to more. The dreams Bonna shared, now revealed in her memoir, show how she reimagined her life and where she was headed. For Bonna, dream group seeded new experiences. Beginning in 2003, she joined small group odysseys to Greece. On visits to sacred sites, ancient landscapes, and archaeological museums, she listened to talks on Greek mythology and took part in dream sharing. The odysseys had separation, initiation, and return as their theme. They prompted her to picture her own wild place and its attractions, and she saw how a dreamer has an inner wild she goes to at night. In that place, while her other mental powers sleep, her imagination is awake; later, she returns. This process initiates her into new ways of seeing her day-life. On the heels of a decade of dream sharing and odysseys to Greece, in 2012, Bonna went to art school. Encouraged to revive childlike imaginings as part of a process of making art, she discovered more ways to see. Shared dreams, travels to Greece, and art school are the main threads in her story, but mothering is also woven in. Feminine figures appeared in Bonna’s dreams, and she learnt about the gods of Greek mythology, who are feminine or masculine, but sometimes ambiguous. Over time, with plenty to reflect on, she grew to see her own mother in a new, softer light. The Mother, seen as mythical mother, gave her a fresh way to see mother-daughter relationships, and released her into a new time.