Psychreative: “Dreams, Images, and Creativity: Opening to Possibility in Uncertain Times”

Psychreative:
“Dreams, Images, and Creativity: Opening to Possibility in Uncertain Times”
With Dr. Sarah Norton

Tuesday, March 18, 2025
19:00 London Time
Via Zoom
Free Event

It is a time of great uncertainty, one where we are encountering unprecedented levels of change and disruption. This change is both personal and collective, it is environmental, political, cultural, economic, and more. There is hardly an area of life that remains unaffected if you look deeply. This is not only a time of chaos, but an opening to possibility, if we can take the time to see it. There are signs of this change all around us, especially in the realm of the climate crisis: the oceans are warming, the big ice is melting, coral is bleaching, forest fires are becoming more ferocious and frequent, the news headlines remind us of new challenges every day. Beyond the “sign” that there is ecological disruption occurring, these are all deeper symbols for the challenges we are facing today. The work of these tumultuous times seems to be one of waiting and deepening into the problems that we face.

      Rather than move fast and break things, we need to slow down and begin to heal. For Sarah, this move began to take shape as parallels were revealed through a personal experience echoed in our collective crisis.  Slowly, a relationship began to grow with an image of Earth that spoke to all aspects of our time and expanded in this recent writing. Through dreams, active imagination, and the creative process, an opening to healing and possibility took shape. In this time together, we will look at a few passages from Sarah’s new book, some enduring dream images, some of the artwork that sprang from these encounters, myths that called out, and more to discover where these expressions of deep knowing can find a place in our lives even in the most difficult times. Whether you have a creative practice, record your dreams regularly or hardly ever, there are images that are open to these in-depth relationships. We will dig into how these images, from dreams, artwork, nature, memory, current events, and/or the imagination can become an opening to possibility, healing, creativity, and comfort even in the most uncertain and chaotic moments. 

Biography: Sarah D. Norton, PhD, is an independent scholar who earned her MA and PhD in Depth Psychology with an emphasis in Jungian and archetypal psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She completed her dissertation Arctic Imaginings: Chasing Ice through Jung’s Liber Novus into the 21st Century, defending on Earth Day of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic. With a passion for intersectional environmentalism, grief work, dreams, and creativity she writes about climate and current events from an archetypal perspective. Her new book Climate Change, Environments of Uncertainty and Loss: Jung, Politics and Culture was just released from Routledge as a part of their Focus series. A longtime dream worker, Sarah is an occasional dream group facilitator certified by the Haden Institute and a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. She records her dreams as often as she can, often creates art from them, and loves sharing dreams with others.  Sarah is the online education coordinator at the Richmond based non-profit, The Foundation for Family and Community Healing (www.HealingEdu.org), editor of the publication The Rose in the World (currently on hiatus for restructuring, hoping to return soon), communications coordinator for the Natural Spirituality conference (www.NSRGathering.org), International Association for Jungian Studies member, and co-host of London Arts Based Research Centre’s Pyschreative as well as an honorary board member. You can see more, including published articles and upcoming events, at sdnortonphd.net/.

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