Dr. Christopher Sowton, N.D. has been a practicing homeopath and naturopath since he graduated from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1988. His practice in Toronto is a blend of classical homeopathy and psychotherapy, with an emphasis on dreamwork and depth psychology. Since 2003 Christopher has been focusing on training health care practitioners to integrate dreamwork into their practices. He has a developed a course called the Dreamreading Method which can be used by practitioners facilitating their clients, and also by non-practitioners who are trying to get more out of their own personal dreams. He has recently published a book The Dreamworking Manual A Guide for Using Dreams in Health Care. For more information on all aspects of his work see www.dreamreading.ca
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I have just finished the transcript to this interview and was deeply impressed by the sincerity and practicality of Christopher’s approach. I can personally attest to the power of dreams in healing and as a guide on the spiritual path. I thought I would tell my own little story of how I became interested in dreams 16 years ago.
After my husband died, I friend came to help me out by doing some chores around our hobby farm. He needed some two stroke fuel for the chain saw and we couldn’t find any in the shed in spite of my husband keeping stores of everything he needed. That night I had a dream in which my doctor (who had also been my husband’s doctor) came to help me out on the property and in payment I siphoned some petrol (gas) out of my car with a hand siphon pump and gave it to him. The car was a Ford – which also just happened to be the name of our doctor.
I wasn’t in the habit of remembering my dreams but the connection with the previous day’s incident and the coincidence of the ‘Fords’ got my attention. Later that day, another friend came up who was a close friend of my husband and who had often worked on various projects with him so I asked him if he knew where my husband kept the two stroke fuel. He did – he said he used to siphon petrol out of the car and mix it with the oil he kept in the shed. We went down to the shed and he showed me where both the oil and the siphon pump were kept. The pump was the one in my dream and I then remembered that I had seen my husband using it but hadn’t known – at least consciously – the reason he did so. What so intrigued me was how my sleeping mind had created a virtual movie out of this incident and even more intriguing was how the dream was explained by another subsequent waking life experience. I knew nothing of synchronicity at the time.
It was another five years before I began to do serious dream work and this was precipitated by a life crisis from which I seriously thought I would never recover. I did however and though I have used many different healing modalities, I can say without any equivocation that dream work is the matrix in which everything else is contained. They are the link between outer and inner, customized with absolute precision accuracy to the unique individual expression that each and every one of us is.
I would like to put a couple of quotes here from the transcript of the interview that particularly impressed me about Christopher’s approach and which I heartily agree with.
“And then there’s another kind of person who really gets the idea that we have an inner guide, or an inner healer and that inner healer speaks to us in various ways and one of the ways is through our dream life and they wanted to tune in that inner voice. As Von Franz said in that film series I was talking about, what we try to do is to train people to hear their inner voice and follow it through dreams and that’s what I try to do with that second type of person.”
“Well, you know, it really comes back to this question of ‘Do you think, a) you have an unconscious and b) if you do have an unconscious, does it know more than your conscious does?’ And I think it does and I think the evidence is overwhelming to that effect but I know a lot of people don’t necessarily believe that.”
By the way the film series is The Way of the Dream and is available on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZSoym4OqKw
This was a great interview! What an interesting guest – like you, Dave, hearing Dr. Sowton speak caused me to reconsider my feelings about homeopathy and naturopathy and I now feel a need to give it all a second hearing. As a doctoral student in psychology, I will be sharing this interview with friends and classmates I know will be interested in employing Dr. Sowton’s dreamworking methods.
Thanks again!