“All good teachers recognize that you can’t just do daytime practice, you have to do night-time practice. There’s no daytime practice strong enough to make this unnecessary. Night is too much what we are. So we have to have a relationship with it.” —Liu Ming

This dream series is a complete cycle of teaching, which presents the profound potential in our natural need to sleep. We systematically unmask our primordial ground through relaxation, reflection, and participation. As compound beings, we express cyclical change. We cover the physiology of dreaming (five spirits and diagnostic imagery), community dreaming, shamanic dreaming (divination and doctoring), individual and community alchemy practices, path dreaming (dreaming as a way of life, awake and asleep), and finally, dreaming through the bardo states (both ever-present and after so-called death).

I began offering the this cycle of teaching locally to experience the fruition of land and community. After sowing symbolic literacy, culture, and “view” teachings over multiple time zones and oceans, I wondered if people felt how I feel—like I was holding a language that no one around me spoke. Not just any language, but our mother tongue! We ourselves are symbols swimming in symbols, day and night. Dreaming is as communal as it is an “individual” practice. Path Dreaming is a way of life that I want to share. When we engage this cycle of teaching, symbolic fluency arises of itself, our ancestors’ indigenous ways of knowing surface, and we relax into an experiential basis of our primordial ground. Ultimately, we feel inspired, responsive, and playful.

The Butterfly Book by Liu Ming is the companion text for this cycle of teaching.