The Dreaming Way

Winner of the 2025 Gold Nautilus Award

A revelatory new book about dreams and dreaming from Toko-pa Turner, award-winning author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

You don't need an expert to decipher your dreams. Understanding the language of dreams is as natural as grasping the moral of a story or finding beauty in art. In The Dreaming Way, Toko-pa Turner revives an ancient yet revolutionary idea: that dreaming belongs to everyone. She invites us to reclaim our dreaming authority from a psychology rooted in rationalism and return to dreams as a living relationship with Wisdom—the guiding intelligence within and around us. Blending animism, Sufism, and Jungian psychology, Toko-pa introduces Courting the Dream, a relational approach to dreamwork that shifts the central question from What does this dream mean? to What does the dream long for? Through vivid dream examples and real-life stories, she reminds us that we already possess the capacity to remember, understand, and embody the wisdom of our dreams. Drawing on ancient mysticism, she reveals how the same animating intelligence that patterns the natural world also shapes our dreams. As we learn to recognize its language of metaphor, we discover that our lives are being called toward a unique purpose—one that is nested within the greater unfolding of nature.

As instructive as it is enchanting, this book offers practical and soulful guidance on how to:

Improve dream recall Understand metaphor and symbolism Work with archetypes Engage in shadow work Practice dream incubation Use active imagination Cultivate synchronicity Facilitate dream groups