The First Public Unveiling of Project Dream Span: A Pilgrimage into Collective Dreaming
By Lanie Bergin, Founder, Expressive Arts Institute of Oregon and The Center for Dreaming Arts
The Wise Women Forum, founded by Janet Kane, hosted the first-ever public appearance of Project Dream Span (PDS)—a milestone not only in my work, but in my lifelong relationship with dreaming. For over four decades I have been quietly tending a vast archive of dreams, drawings, journaling, and life-context reflections. Today, that archive spans more than 3,000 pages and thousands of images: a living, evolving record of the psyche speaking in symbols over time.
The Wise Women Forum was the right place for this unveiling. It is a community rooted in safety, nurturance, and the deep feminine. This is exactly what PDS needed—a compassionate witnessing field rather than a scholarly critique or analytical dissection.
A Different Kind of Beginning
Rather than starting with a biography, credentials, or theories, I began with the dream world itself—allowing the psyche, not the ego, to take first position.
The opening of the workshop was a collective meet-and-greet through dreams.
No introductions.
No relational staging.
No ego-based presentations.
Instead, we arrived through imagery.
The environment of the Wise Women Forum supported this naturally—an already-formed container of intuition, sacred feminine intelligence, and communal holding.
The Questions Beneath the Questions
Very quickly, familiar inquiries emerged from participants:
What does this image mean?
What does this dream mean?
Yet beneath these questions was something much deeper:
a collective yearning to name a shift in how we relate to dreaming itself.
The ego wants certainty.
The psyche is already knowing, already evolving.
In that moment, the group-psyche began speaking to itself, not through explanations, but through shared presence. This act of speaking dreams aloud—in their raw, unprocessed form—is itself a way of dreaming awake.
To share a dream publicly is a symbolic act:
a planting of seeds in the collective field.
Dreaming Forward: A Living Practice
Rather than treat dreams as artifacts to decode, I invited a practice I call dreaming forward:
Dreaming forward means taking the symbolic seeds of a dream and planting them into waking life—without forcing meaning too soon. Like seeds, dreams require tending: time, light, attention, ritual, movement, art-making, embodiment, and relational space.
This is the dynamic between:
Dreaming Awake → bringing subconscious content into consciousness
Dreaming Forward → cultivating what the dream is becoming
This work resists deterministic analysis.
It honors the psyche as the primary intelligence, while the ego participates as a steward—not the authority.
Expressive Arts as a Vessel for the Psyche
After 45 minutes of dream-field cultivation, I finally shared the story of Project Dream Span.
Then we moved into an expressive arts activity that allowed participants to embody the dream field—using movement, imagery, and spontaneous art-making to keep the ego from seizing interpretation.
This format fosters:
imaginal participation
relational meaning-making
embodied knowing
When we outsource interpretation to external authorities, we sever our instinctual relationship to our psyche—interrupting what James Hillman called the acorn process, and what Mother Teresa modeled through her acts of embodied, relational tending.
Dreams must be lived, not merely interpreted.
Why This Space Mattered
The Wise Women Forum offered a nourishing container for PDS to emerge publicly for the first time. The community, the feminine field, the astrological roots, and the shared commitment to inner inquiry all aligned.
This gathering was not an event—it was a birth.
And from that birth, The Center for Dreaming Arts began to take form.
PDS is the pilgrimage.
The Center is the temple being built around it.
The dreams themselves are the initiators.
I hope you will join us in cultivating this garden.
WISEWOMAN FORUM: Wise Dream Tending with Lanie Bergin
Lanie Bergin will share the progress of Project Dream Span, a living digital archive comprising more than four decades of dream journals, artistic reflection, and correlation with life events. Lanie will share her evolving understanding of tending to dreams and what she's learned about the uniquely individual process that relies on one's relationship to the psyche.
"What does the image have to SAY?" This question is on the minds of every dreamer. Lanie discovered that a creative approach to dream tending is the glue in her relationship to the psyche.
“When I had a series of psychedelic-like dreams in 1993 I panicked. I shared my experience with my mom. I wanted to know the meaning and she told me to DRAW what I saw and to listen to the images! It was at this point in my life that I learned how to draw. I was desperate to hear what the dreams had to say to me and my devotion to the process of bringing them to life continues to this day. This process of dream tending helps me to stay close to the homeland of my dreamscape.”
In this experiential workshop, you will learn new ways of trusting your inner guide by manifesting images and words directly into art and back out into the world. Lanie will share profound and mysterious stories of how dream images can arise in the life we wake up to every morning, no matter how unsettling the images or uncertain the pilgrimage before us.
Spoiler alert: A resistance to attributing conclusive deterministic analysis is required!
Group Activity: Lanie will lead participants through a somatic-based expressive arts encounter. Participants will use some of the tools and methods Lanie uses in her process.
Art materials needed: paper (any size), pastels, crayons, markers, journal book, pen.
NOTE: This event is free with an option to make a donation to the Jung Society of Washington.
Lanie Bergin, M.Ed, Registered Somatic Therapist and Educator. Founder, Director, Curriculum Development. Lanie has been a teacher and learner in the interdisciplinary expressive arts field since 1986. Lanie is the founder and visionary of Expressive Arts Institute of Oregon and she is the Program Director and Master Lead Teacher for the advanced programs in EAIO. She also offers on-going supervision for academic students who are studying expressive arts therapy. Lanie is on the Board of Directors for Expressive Arts Institute of Oregon. For the past 20 years, Lanie has created curricula for all vocational training programs in somatic-based arts therapy for the school. Lanie is currently working on her personal dream archive called Project Dream Span (PDS) which is based on a repository of journals including dreams, drawings, and life context that spans over four decades. She is the founder of The Center for Dreaming Arts.