An abstract painting with a large golden area, a red curved shape at the bottom, and multicolored speckles along a circular band within the red shape. The background features a mix of dark and light colors, suggesting a textured or cosmic scene.

Meet your imagination

Your imagination is already active.
Waking dreaming gives you a way to encounter it.

You stay awake and aware while entering a receptive, dreamlike state. Images, scenes, sensations, characters and atmospheres can arise much as they do in sleeping dreams. We follow what emerges together, allowing you to experience the story as it unfolds.

You might encounter a place, a person, an animal, a landscape, a feeling. You don't need to make anything happen. You don't need to know what it means.

You simply notice what arrives.

Developed by Allan Frater and influenced by Jungian active imagination, waking dreaming is a facilitated imaginal dreaming practice.

For those with a theatre background, you might think of it as an imaginal echo of Jacques Lecoq’s embodied neutral mask work: in the doing is the knowing.

The experience itself comes first.

Practice meets life

Receive.
Let images, places and feelings into your awareness. Let yourself encounter what emerges.

Respond.
Let it course through you. Stay with the experience and discover where it leads. Rather than standing at a distance, analysing your experience, you can have an experience that can be transformative in itself.

Integrate.
You can reflect on what you experienced. As one story comes into view, another story becomes possible.

Repeat.
Recognise that imagination is always at work. Life is a waking dream.

Over time, you may become more familiar with the palette your imagination uses, and more able to notice what is happening in your life while it is happening.

It is a way of exercising imagination not by producing something, but by entering into encounter.

And from encounter, something may emerge.

Experience the story.
Notice what it reveals.
Discover what might become possible.

What happens is up to you…

An abstract painting of a still life with vibrant colors, depicting a large orange pumpkin or gourds, a bouquet of flowers with white, purple, and yellow blooms, a butterfly, and a blue flower, all rendered with thick, expressive brushstrokes on a dark and textured background.

Discover Reconnect in 5

Common Questions:

  • Waking dreaming is a facilitated imaginal practice inviting you to experience your inner landscapes in real time. In a relaxed, lightly meditative, hypnogogic state—eyes open or closed—you speak aloud the images, sensations, and symbols that arise. Your facilitator mirrors, gently inquires, and helps you stay present to whatever emerges. Together, we follow the thread of imagination without forcing direction or meaning.

    Think of it as immersive story‑making where the story writes itself as you tell it.

    Key Features:

    • Sense‑Based – engages visual, sensory, auditory and somatic embodiment as opposed to analysis.

    • Somatic – honours body cues (breath, tension, warmth) as part of the narrative.

    • Non‑Directional – inner imagery is followed rather than directed.

    • Relational – the facilitator’s presence provides a safe container and reflective lens.

  • Yes. In groups, this work takes the form of co-dreaming sharing imagery and experience in first person somatic storytelling. The group dream as one exploring a singular first person narrative as a group. Surrendering to the group’s imagination we travel together to different worlds.


    This can foster connection, creativity, and a sense of collective meaning making.

  • This is not a problem. I have worked with a number of people who find it difficult to hold images in the minds eye. Sometimes other senses are an easier ‘way in’ to this dimension that can then be explored with more of the senses. Clients report a strengthening of imagery outside of the sessions both in waking and dreaming states.