Dream Circle
Exactly What You Need
Welcome
Hi, and thank you for visiting the Dream Circle. If you are here it might be pure coincidence that led you here, or you heard about it from a friend. No matter how you came to be here today, I welcome you, and I hope you find what you are looking for. I am a lifelong learner, an educator, psychotherapist, writer, self-taught mixed media and digital collage artist, and creative dreamer, using dreams as my inspiration for my artwork, collages, stories, and poems, and of course my life. Here in the pages of this site are all of my dream inspired digital collages.
Dreams have always been a significant part of my life. When I was an adolescent, my dreams helped me understand my life, but most importantly they guided me through high school, college, and my doctoral dissertation. Many times, through coincidences, they have given me decisive clues as to what lies ahead, and I have followed. Dreams are not just images in the night without meaning or purpose. Dream images are metaphors, symbols full of meaning. Dreams have been my inner compass, they have been my guide. My dreams are my creative sacred space, and they are embedded in my digital collages, they decorate the pages of this site and remind me of their gifts. The Virtual Museum below is in honor of World Collage Day 2020 on May 9th and have all of my dream-inspired digital collages.
This is what I wish for you, for dreams to be your guide, for coincidences to remind you that you are on the right path and for your imagination to open to the creative forces within you. Dreams and our understanding of them are free to all of us, no one theory can dictate what our dreams mean. Although I may work with one model or another, I want you to know that there is no better or good model to work with your dreams. Be free. Find out for yourself which model works for you. You will see. Honor your dreams and learn to work with them in the ways that best suit you. You are welcome to come to our dream group with your theories and beliefs all the parts of you are welcome here.
As a Zen Buddhist practitioner, I am committed to studying the self and dreams are my guide, Seido's article "Dreaming Mind: the Eyes in Sleep" stated:
"To forget the self is to study the act of creating the self, that is, dreaming. Our identities, the stories we weave together from fragments cobbled together over time, are truly great dreams. To awaken, we awaken to the nature of the dream within the dream."
Wishing you the sweetest dreams,
Palms together,
Annecy Baez
In Japanese, the word for dream is yume, meaning “the eyes in sleep.” We could also say this is what we aspire to in Zen, the see in the dark, to have insight. For several years now I have been working with students and groups to help us develop a dharma eye for our nightly dreams – to enter into their secret language, a language that is at once very personal to each of us and at the same time, universal. Jung said a dream was “speech that is not yet ripe.” How familiar to us in practice, this wordless “felt sense” of change along the path.
My Dream Journey
I have been working with dreams for as long as I remember. As a child, a dream of la Virgencita de la Altagracia, the Patron saint of the Dominican Republic was to be a reminder that I was loved by her, my guardian angels, and my loved ones on the other side... Whenever I had a dream with her, I felt protected.
When I was eighteen years old, I was introduced to Jung and Freud in a psychology course. I read Carl Jung’s Dreams and Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”. I started my dream journal then, keeping notes to understand my dreams and my life further. It was in 1979 when I discovered the work of Tony Crisp, and his book “Do You Dream?” that I developed a new connection to my dreams, which was then strengthened by my dream reading the work of Fritz Perls, "every part of the dream is a part of you" and his book "Suenos y Existencia", and the work of Calvin Hall. and his book The Meaning of Dreams helped me gain more insight into the power of my dreams. When I was 21 years old, a dream about birds led me (by coincidence of course) to the Theosophical Society in New York City, there a local magazine with birds on the cover advertised a weekly dream workshop led by Dr. William R. Stimson author of Dreams for Self Discovery. His weekly Friday Dream Workshop in Chelsea, and the teachings of his mentor, Montague Ullman, author of Appreciating Dreams: A Group Approach, and Working with Dreams, led to a fruitful period in my own dreamlife which continues until this day. Now, working as an Associate Professor at Touro College Graduate School of Social Work where I teach clinical social work practice, I am fortunate to teach Expressive Arts in Social Work Practice and I share with students the power of dreamwork in their practice and in their lives.
In the early 1980s, every Friday night, I was fortunate to participate in Dr. Stimson's dream group. I was impressed by Dr. Stimson's knowledge of dreams, and his commitment to teaching others about dreams. I was privileged to have met many well know dream leaders from Dr. Ullman to Patricia Garfield, and other notable dream leaders who influenced how I work with dreams. At the time, Bill edited a little dream newsletter, The Dream Network, which he created in his home during a time when there was no World Wide Web. I have saved every one of those newsletters. It was then that I began to write every one of my dreams, and I had so many of them then. I had a loose-leaf notebook with an alphabetical index to keep track of all of my images and create my own dream dictionary. I will share this technique in my workshops. I still have this notebook, dusty with time and memory. I am a focusing oriented psychotherapist and trainer, and I have been deeply influenced by the work Eugene Gendlin’s author of “Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams”, and Arnold Mindel’s “Dream body” both are body-oriented integrative approaches that have taught me to let my body is my guide in furthering my understanding of dreams. Other influential writers also shaped my knowledge of dreams, Stanley Krippner, author of "Dreamtime and Dream Work: Decoding the Language of the Night”, as well, I loved the work of Anne Faraday, author of Dream Power, and Justina Lasley Honoring the Dream: A Handbook for Dream Group Leaders and her book, Wake Up!: which teaches us to wake up to the wisdom of our dreams
In 2008, I coincidentally bumped into the work of Robert Moss author of "The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination". which led me to train in his Active Dream method which integrates Ullman's technique. This merging of Ullman's technique is upsetting for many of the Ullman followers who want to maintain faithful to Ullman's method pure. I shall be hosting a workshop on Montague Ullman's book to review with all of you what this model looks like and the controversy around its use. It is understandable for his followers to protect his methodology, kind of like Freud getting angry at Jung for moving away from his Psychoanalysis and creating his own Jungian Psychoanalysis. I have to admit that I run Active Dream Circles, I find them so much fun, they deliver tangible takeaways, and like Robert Moss says, "they embody guidance, energy for healing and creation from stories we share." I incorporate my dream life experience in the work I do, from my Zen meditation practice and the spiritual beliefs I grew up with, to Gendlin's Focusing, the body as a guide, and all of me integrated into my dream practice, and I wish that for you too.
I hope "all of you" feel welcome here too. I am inclusive. All of you is welcome here. I value all dream methods, and no one method is better than another. We are all in the process of self-discovery. Every dream method will bring new insights. In the end, only you know what your dream means to you and your dreams will guide you to where you need to be. And do not let anyone tell you that dreams hold no meaning, that they are insignificant. Follow your heart it will lead you to where you need to go, so if you are here reading this words it is because it was meant to be. In our Dream Book Club, we will feature the work of other dream leaders in the community starting with Robert Moss "The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination" to Montague Ullman and later William R. Stimson, author of Dreams for Self Discovery and so much more. Every day a new discovery, a new dream book. Please stay in touch with our Dream club to know what book we are reviewing.
Below you will see Digital Story, the Path of Wisdom, created at the Digital Story Center (Now the Story Center). It starts with a dream. This digital story was created in 2007 in honor of my job as a Director of Counseling at Lehman College/CUNY. I am no longer at Lehman College, but my work there was a reminder that work can be healing, that it can be a joy, there was not a day that I did not wake up happy to go to work. Thank you Lehman College/CUNY and the people I have met there, the jewels in my life. The Story Center
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“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Gustav Jung
Virtual Museum
Orhan Pamuk
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
The Museum of Innocence
The Virtual Museum
World Collage Day - My Virtual Museum
May 9th, 2020
Welcome to World Collage Day. Please come on in and visit m my virtual museum, "Visual Poetics" a series of intuitive collages inspired by my dreams and the power of intuition. This is in celebration of the World Collage Day.
World Collage Day is an international celebration of collage on Saturday, May 9, 2020. Kolaj Magazine invites you to submit events taking place on that day that celebrate collage. WORLD COLLAGE DAY WEBSITE
Visual Poetics
Intuitive Digital Collage
World Collage Day 2020
Although my intuitive digital collages are visual, they are wordless, but in this space, they speak. I feel that there is a narrative that can be created by each image, either poetically or in creative writing. Willard Bohn defined Visual Poetry as the “poetry that is meant to be seen – Poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as the reader.” In my case, it can incorporate a writer, who can view the images, engage with it, and create their own stories or poems, or art in response to it. I find that art is interactive, another form of narrative practice, another way of dreaming, connecting, and healing.
My intuitive digital collage holds space for dreams, for coincidences and the unconscious. I believe in synchronicity, that each image holds together something that was meant to be. I trust my body’s felt sense in the choice of an image, and how they eventually come together to make a whole. If I trust my intuition, I trust myself and allow images to represent what needs to take form. Art is about faith; it is about trust.
THE VIRTUAL GALLERY
WORLD COLLAGE DAY 2020
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About Me
I am a psychotherapist, educator, poet, and writer, author of My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories (2007) and winner of the Curbstone Press Marmol Prize for First Latina Fiction. My most recent fiction is anthologized in Viajeros del Rocio: 25 Narradores Dominicanos de la Diaspora and in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers. Presently, I am an Associate Professor at Touro College Graduate School of Social Work where I am extremely lucky to not only teach clinical practice courses, but I also teach expressive arts in social work practice. This allows me to be my true self, a creative soul who is also a social worker, professor, and therapist.
I am a self- taught mixed media paper collage and digital collage artist who uses images to represent a dream-like magical world of multiple realities where images speak in the silence. I use images intuitively to reflect a world that lies between the surreal and the magical, between the reality and the imagination. I call these images Visual Poetics, as the dream world of images is poetic, and my work is intuitive and dream-inspired.
I find that art is interactive, another form of narrative practice, another way of dreaming, connecting, and healing. My intuitive digital collage holds space for dreams, for coincidences and the unconscious. I believe in synchronicity, that each image holds together something that was meant to be. I trust my body’s felt sense in the choice of an image, and how they eventually come together to make a whole. If I trust my intuition, I trust myself and allow images to represent what needs to take form. Art is about faith; it is about trusting the process., it is healing. I lead expressive arts workshops focusing on dreams, writing as a healing modality, collage making, visual art journaling, and book art.
I have led dream groups at Lehman College when I was a Director of their Counseling Center. Once I left Lehman College and went to Bronx Community College/CUNY, I participated in a dream group led by an adjunct psychology professor Roger Cunningham. At Bronx Community Colleg/CUNY, I met the most amazing group of students who knew how to harness the power and wisdom of their dreams. I have been very privileged to have dreams in my life, they have guided my life, and supported my creativity. In addition, I am deeply grateful to the creative dreamers who have taught me to never give up on understanding the depth of my dreams. Dreams have been my guide, they have helped me understand my life, but most importantly they have guided my every step. This is what I wish for you, for dreams to be your guide, for coincidences to remind you that you are on the right path and for your imagination to open to the creative forces within you.
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The Dream Circle
Join my monthly online Dream Circle to learn more about nighttime and daytime dreams and how their wisdom helps us in our daily lives. In our dream circle, we engage with someone’s dream as if it were our own, liberating the dreamer from our interpretation of their dream. In this method, only the dreamer has a true understanding of his or her dream. Please come with your life experience, with your dream experience. We welcome all of you, as you will all come with various life experiences and training, and your knowledge will enhance our understanding of our dreams, so you are all welcome. Individual one to one sessions are also available, but also in our Dream Book Club, we will share the knowledge embedded in various dream books from dream leaders past and present.
