34: Toko-pa Turner on the Forgotten Wisdom of Dreams

Every night, you make images as surely as you breathe. Dream worker, author and mystic Toko-pa Turner believes those images are anything but random. She sees dreaming as the psyche’s way of healing itself, much as skin quietly knits back together after a cut. Even nightmares may be a sign that something is ready to come into consciousness. Modern life has taught us to dismiss dreams as nonsense. Yet across cultures and throughout history, people have turned to them for insight and guidance. For Toko-pa, dreams are our mother tongue: a language we don’t so much need to learn as remember. Born in Devon and raised in a Sufi community in Montreal, Toko-pa brings together Sufi mysticism and a Jungian approach to dreams. She founded the Dream School in 2001, has guided thousands of students, and reaches more than 100,000 readers online. Her books “Belonging” and “The Dreaming Way” explore how dreams can deepen our relationship with ourselves and the wider world. In this episode, Toko-pa invites us to ask something different of our dreams. Not simply, “What do they mean?” but “What do they want?” CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 2:04 Dreaming of the Hypogeum Before I Knew It Existed 8:42 The Symbolism of the Spider 11:58 Why Nightmares Are the Most Powerful 16:34 We Are Nature: Dreams and Self-Healing 21:21 How Rationalism Made Us Dismiss Dreams 31:18 Living With a "Second Attention" 34:31 A Precognitive Dream and Two Armed Men on the Roof 37:51 Rewriting the Past: The Moving Tattoo Dream 43:31 Dream Circles and Shared Dreams 47:00 The Imaginal Realm in Sufi Cosmology 1:02:00 Metaphor as a Bridge 1:08:12 Wonder and the Courtship of Dreams Follow Toko-pa: Website: https://toko-pa.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tokopa/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TokopaTurner Follow Wonderstruck: Website: https://wonderstruck.org Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.