How Dreams are Mushrooms of the Landscape of the Soul and Become Fruiting Bodies of Creativity

Precisely a year ago I experienced a flurry-of-dreams-week. It started with one that said:

“The dreaming time began with sacrifice.”

It ended with one where my mom presented me with a baby dragon as a gift. Instead of scales, it has green and blue feathers. Dream me was ecstatic and playful.

Mom says, “Lead a parade with it.”

I ask about what leading a parade with a baby dragon means, and I see these words: “Polypoetic Wow of the Den”

I took the dreams to the hearth fire for illumination; I drummed them; I took them out for walks and introduced them to the big and small in the landscape. These image sequences from the liminal realm helped catalyze a winter of incubation and vision, steady spring emergences, and summer/fall harvests of 6 new poetry collections.

But only now—after slipping my lichen-faced snout into the year’s fog—poking around in it with both an owl’s talons and a slug’s tender belly, do I realize that the dreams didn’t just visit me—they initiated something in me. They continue to haunt me and provoke in all the best ways, and now I’m in inquiry about how to carry its dragonfire forward in this Great Turning.

Dream Mom’s gift feels like a lineage blessing of relentless creativity. The instruction of “Lead a parade with it” isn’t about performance. Or even leadership. It’s about processional magic. A parade that practices pollination and dawn-to-dusk invitations to rejoin the animate web of life.

I see now how each resulting book created its own doorway into a different relationship to, or dimension of, life. Poems as thresholds. Poems as labyrinth turns. Poems as invitations into a different orientation. When I walk through the books barefoot, here is what sticks to my soles/soul: They are as much embodied noticing as ecological devotionals, as much monster intimacy as seasonal attunements. They invite ceremonial commitment and silliness, as well as dream gestation and desire cultivation.

I say all this to affirm a truth about the world: All Life is a fruiting body of the relentless creativity of the Cosmos. Everything is myclelial and uniquely magical. Mushrooms and humans and civilizations are dreams of Earth. And our dreams are no less Earth showing up as image or message inside our bodies. Neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro calls dreams “oracles of the night.” So coming into intentional relationship with them is not only something worth doing in order to support our creativity and our shadow work, but how this whole shebang is set up: co-creation through dreaming.

It is fundamental the architecture of existence. As Alan Watts said, “We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

Yes, humans are not separate from the rest of Life, but rather are an expression of it, like a wave is an expression of the ocean. Part of its continuous, natural flow. Or to keep with our metaphor, humans too (and their dreams) mushroom out of the vast, interconnected mycelium web we might simply call Mystery.

I’m much more of Jungian, but Sigmund Freud turned to mycelium as a metaphor for dream life. As he put it: “The dream-thoughts… branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.” A dream, in this view, is not an isolated image but a fruiting body — a visible expression of a vast, tangled unconscious world.

So in tending to, wooing, working with, playing with, praying with dream images, one helps extend that mycelial web into one’s life – often in the form of legible creative prokects. I hold as one way in which we can attune to the callings that brought each of us here to lend our unique gifts and vision in the world.

I don’t yet have all my marching orders for the next turn of my season—or rather, my spiraling and opening orders—because murmurations from dreamtime and earthtide don’t line up politely; they shapeshift, they surprise, they refuse the choreography of Modernity or any impolite demands. After many seasons through the up and the down, I know that they will move at their own pace, with their own wild grammar.

It will likely require long dark nights, deep listening, and unpredictable dreamfires. It will require sitting in Slug Council and hanging out with fungi friends. It will be subsidized with secret vows unutterable in human tongue. Purple octopus and Inchworm/Inkworm have made appearances, and some indecipherable instructions for something called Refugia. Bear as always, having no tolerance for abandonment, shows up to knock some ursine sense into me. These are allies, cairns in the labyrinth, not the primary parade path.

But I’m aware of at least three routes baby dragon is forging — metabolic pathways posing as book projects and wild nature heart programs. One is called Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, another is Unsheathe Your Swords of Unfuckery.

They are courting Life as a punk-animist abolitionism in a trickster–mycelial–post-imperial register, gesturing at an end-of-world/beginning-of-the-world pedagogy. They are refusing to sanitize themselves and declare their unapologetic allegiance to trickster and Earth, not to a publisher or an algorithm.

I trust their snarl, laugh, and limp, as they lick wounds and cast spells. As they feed wild shadowberries to the exiled parts of our psyche, as they evoke somatic shapeshifting and enchant with irreverent sacred sporulation, I remain open to co-creation.