☆THE DREAMER☆ is a totally free newsletter and online space at the intersection of creativity, therapeutic arts, ecology, magic, and neurodiversity. If you enjoy THE DREAMER or know someone who will, share it with your friends and social networks! Thank you for reading and dream on.
“Dreams” are funny things. To some, they’re the absurd spinning laundry of our brain’s subconscious, wrung out while we sleep. To others, dreams are spiritual signposts; messages from higher realms. To First Nations people where I’m from, “dreaming” is a word that conjures entire cosmologies and sacred knowledge systems since time immemorial. To others in the Western world, the concept of dreaming, or being a “dreamer”, implies escapism and irresponsibility at best and delusions of grandeur at worst.
Surely, dreams hold very little weight in our rationalist materialist industrial modern culture. Even great visionaries and leaders are dismissed, punished, even killed for daring to have a dream.
At the former Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, the site of MLK’s assassination, reads a plaque quoting Genesis 37:19: “Behold here comes the dreamer. Let us slay him, and we shall see what becomes of his dream.”
Dreaming is socially shunned. Immature. Unrealistic. Transgressive. Dangerous. What kids do. In your own life (as most of you no doubt already know) you will not be rewarded by those around you for being a dreamer. In fact, you might be dismissed. Laughed at. Cringed at. Labelled a weirdo.
But as any change-maker, creative, witch, mystic, or spirit worker will tell you, dreaming is an essential (I would say the essential) act in both changing your personal reality and helping to imagine and create a better world for all. To dream is to believe in the seen and unseen; the space between current reality and future potentiality and our role in shaping it.
Neville Goddard saw the story of Joseph (the dreamer of Genesis whose dreams always came true) as the story of the imaginative power of each of us. As in, he believed our limitless imagination, our thoughts, our consciousness, are both the portal to, and a piece of, God.
In the same way a witch might believe that every thought we think or intention we set is a spell, our dreams weave our world; helping to co-create our lives and the way we view them.
“Real are the dreams of gods
And smoothly pass their pleasure
In the long, immortal dream.”
— Lamia, Keats
Our imaginative faculties, our dreams, may be powerful. But they are also neutral. It’s my belief that as innately creative beings, humans have the capacity to “dream” anything into existence. Anything we might label as good or bad. Creative or destructive. Dream you are small and powerless for long enough, and your whole life story will be one of smallness and powerlessness.
This is not to imply any moral failing on the part of people suffering at the hands of other people or forces. Far from it. It’s to say that we are all dreaming very different dreams. And when enough people dream the same dream—say of greed and power-over and exploitation—it becomes a living myth. A system and an egregore. An oppressive ideology scaffolded by material structures that only a great collective dream, brought into manifest reality over and over again through actions big and small, could hope to bring down.
That’s why I called this newsletter, The Dreamer. Because I believe your imagination is magical and transformative. And that your creative expression is future-shifting and world-changing. And that your unique ways of seeing and being (looking at you, my autistic and ADHD neurokin) are liberatory. Not just for you, but for all.
I’m here to help you dream it, then be it.
By “it” I mean your full and feral potentiality as an individual. And our reimagined interdependent sur-thrival (to quote artist Edgar Fabian Frias) as an anthropocene.
My life has been shaped by love letters
Revolutionary and exposed and tender and brave all at once, love letters light my heart on fire. And I believe all letters (mixtapes included) are love letters, because it takes love to share your own—and devote attention to someone else’s—dreams from a distance. Writing gives our dreams wings. Reading about someone else’s elevates our own.
“Even if I dream, even if I cry, even if I get hurt
Reality just keeps coming, recklessly
I wanna find out where I am, the value of being me
Gonna take who I've been up till now
And find the strength to throw it all away
Strip down to nothing at all
Become like a rose petal, flying free
Even if the two of us are ever torn apart
I swear to you, I will change the world.”
— 輪舞-Revolution, Masami Okui
In the last few years, I’ve felt my deepest personal values and loftiest dreams rolled under the wheels of marketing speak, thanks to leaping into the world of magic and creative guidance off the back of a successful media career. And thanks to the norms of storytelling and selling on Instagram that I (understandably yet unfortunately) internalised.
I saw “successful” creatives, tarot readers, and facilitators/coaches speak a certain way. I had an intimate knowledge of what kind of content “worked” on social media. And I was in my pre-autism diagnosis high-masking era. All of which led me to dream a smaller dream. To templatise my work. To resist sharing my full complexity in favour of snacky soundbites. Even to spend as much time as I did inside the energy-sapping pinball machine of social media to begin with.
As I said on a recent post, I know my people (made up of creatives, magical weirdos, and queer and/or neurodivergent dreamers) don’t want or deserve this from me. And neither do I. I want to develop ideas and art and healing and experiences that can’t be neatly categorised. I want to respect my own ever-shifting capacity, resting to revive with no deadline. And I want to support my people (you) more deeply. With more generosity and openness. That’s why I made this newsletter, which you can learn more about here.
Because I’m recommitting not just to dreaming. But dreaming big. I’m meeting myself at the growing edges of my comfort zone and stretching into the next layer of sharing; vulnerably, generously, and imperfectly as I help my clients do.
Next year, I will begin a Masters program focussing on therapeutic arts practice. I’ll be working relationally and exploring multi-modal expression in ways I’ve only ever dreamed of. I know this will challenge me. I want to be challenged. And I want to challenge you. That’s my love language.
I hope this weekly dispatch offers me an opportunity to practice writing something every week and *actually* sharing it. No matter how sloppy I might feel or sound. And I hope that as a gentle reader, I can continue to deserve space in your inbox by offering you some rich and honest conversation from the heart and sources of inspiration relating to creativity, magic and the occult, neurodivergence, and mental health—along with practical actions to take or prompts to consider.
The Dreamer is a FREE resource, so I’d be so grateful if you share it with any family, friends, or social networks you think would enjoy it. New subscribers will immediately be sent a welcome email containing a PDF of my download Fuck Perfect: A Creative Unlearning Workbook, plus a 10-min somatic centering practice, and 10-min guided visualisation for meeting your inner creative guide.
Thank you again for being here. Here’s to love letters. Here’s to dreaming a life of expression, radical joy, and play into reality. Here’s to making dreaming a way towards sur-thrival for all.
Xo Jerico