Children meet the present moment with zero preconceptions — fresh to life, fresh to the wonder of everything around them. Can you remember what that felt like?
This is Lantern Consciousness — a radiant, expansive, wide-perception state described by psychologist Alison Gopnik. Unlike the narrow, focused beam of adult attention, the child’s mind is soft-edged and luminous. Everything glows. Everything belongs.
But over time, our brains adapt for survival. They become prediction machines. Perception tightens into Spotlight Consciousness — sharp, efficient, task-oriented, based upon the blueprint of past experiences. Useful for getting things done, hopeless for staying in touch with the sheer aliveness of the present moment.
Dreamwork has been showing me the way back.
Because in dreams, we swim again in the strange, the symbolic, the pre-verbal. The field opens — and with it, a kind of luminous awareness returns. We begin to inhabit a different intelligence — one that doesn’t need to fix or name, only to feel, to notice, to be with.
In the Dreamfield, rational consciousness softens. We move from the controlling mind (executive function) into the listening bodymind (the default mode network) — the place where the unseen becomes felt. Dreams don’t obey logic or language; they speak in symbol, texture, and mood. They return us to the state of perception we once knew as children — vast, fluid, non-dual.
Dreamwork is also shadow work — a slow retrieval of what we’ve exiled in order to stay acceptable, functional, or safe. Our dreams return these lost fragments, piece by piece, until we’re ready to take them in as ours and liberate others from our projections, judgements and fear.
My dreams have humbled me. Not for their knowing, but for their honesty. Some are wild. Others, grotesque. All are precise. Each one carries an unintegrated truth waiting to be held — not analysed, not interpreted, but welcomed.
Over time I realised that most people don’t know how to enter this conversation with the unconscious. They wake, dismiss the dream as strange, or reach for a dictionary of meanings — missing the living intelligence that’s trying to reach them.
So I created something that could meet that gap.
A gentle daily guide to reawakening your relationship with the dreamworld — through reframes, reflections, and small embodied practices that build a language of your own.
It’s called Dreams Decoded — a free 10-day email series that teaches you how to meet your dreams as living companions and understand what they’re truly asking of you.
Each day brings:
— a reframe to shift how you see dreams
— a five-minute practice to explore the day’s theme
— a short note to keep the work kind and accessible
This is not dream interpretation. It’s dream relationship — a re-education in perception.
Even if you “don’t dream,” even if they’re chaotic or uncomfortable, the language is already in you. Dreams Decoded simply helps you begin to listen.
The journey begins whenever you’re ready:
And if a dream or a question rises, reply. I read every message.
— Emma