Winner of the 2025 Gold Nautilus Award A revelatory new book from Toko-pa Turner, award-winning author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home You don’t need an expert to tell you what your dreams mean. Understanding their language is as natural as grasping the moral of a story or recognizing beauty in art. In The Dreaming Way , Toko-pa Turner revives an ancient yet radical idea: dreaming belongs to the people. Reclaiming our dreaming authority from the confines of rationalist psychology, she offers a soulful, intuitive approach rooted in animism, Sufism, and Jungian thought. At the heart of her method is the recognition of a presence—both within and around us—known as Wisdom . With eloquence and insight, Toko-pa guides us in her dreamwork method for Courting the Dream , which reverses the idea that we should try to acquire something from our dreams, and invites us instead to discover what the dream longs for. Through vivid dream examples and real-life stories, she shows that we already possess the tools to remember, understand, and embody the wisdom of our dreams. Drawing on ancient mysticism and modern depth psychology, she reveals how the same animating intelligence that moves through nature is also patterning our dreams. When we learn to follow that wisdom, we discover a calling that is uniquely our own, yet nested within the larger intent of the living world. As instructive as it is enchanting, this book offers practical and soulful guidance on how to: • Improve dream recall • Understand the language of metaphor • Work with archetypes and symbolic patterns • Engage in shadow work • Explore dream incubation • Practice active imagination • Cultivate synchronicity • Facilitate a dream group "Toko-pa Turner is a remarkable emissary building subtle bridges between the daily world and the realm of dreams and great imagination. At a time when we need both inspiration and wisdom, The Dreaming Way offers both practical and profound ways to be more visionary and more intimately connected to the living web of life." - MICHAEL MEADE, author of Awakening the Soul "The Dreaming Way is truly wonderful, exquisitely written, wisdom-filled book. I cannot recommend it more highly for its beauty, its poetry, and its many gifts." - ANNE BARING PhD, author of The Dream of the Cosmos "The Dreaming Way is a brilliant new map to animist dreamwork. With intellectual rigor and spiritual generosity, Toko-pa shows us that this new dreamwork will not be solitary; it will be ecological and profoundly relational. " - SOPHIE STRAND, author of The Body Is a Doorway "This gentle and lovely book is so necessary in our increasingly frantic culture. It offers a vision of reality that is far deeper and more enlivening than what we find in popular culture. Beautifully presented and explained as the common birthright of every person on the planet, The Dreaming Way is the groundwork for a social theory of imagination that is utterly essential for the rebirth of societies everywhere." - TOM CHEETHAM, author of Imaginal Love "Toko-pa takes us into the living landscape of our dreaming self. She reconnects us to the guidance and wisdom we so desperately need if we are to heal our broken world. Allow her words to return you to this numinous, symbolic realm and its patterns of connection that can nourish us in hidden ways." - LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE, PhD, author of Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart "This is the most profound, illuminating, and supportive book on dreaming I've ever come across. It is about restoring our belonging, connecting to unseen wisdom, and letting nature guide us so we can move through the world more awake, more alive. Toko-pa stunningly weaves her depth of understanding with her reverence for the Mystery to guide readers in cultivating a living, breathing relationship with The Dreaming Way. - LISA OLIVIERA, author of Already Enough "Toko-pa is a great gift to this beleaguered world. I'm not sure I have ever read a book with this much wisdom. I feel seen, invited and emboldened to find the bridge between worlds." - JEFF BROWN, author of Grounded Spirituality "The Dreaming Way explores the gift of dreaming in a helpful and articulate way that proves instructive toward a more thoughtful conduct of life." - JAMES HOLLIS PhD, author of The Middle Passage Toko-pa Turner is a Canadian author and internationally celebrated dreamworker. Her first book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, has been translated into ten languages and won several awards including the 2018 Gold Nautilus and the 2018 Gold Readers' Favourite. Toko-pa lives in a historic Ottawa Valley village with her husband Craig, under the wisdom of a centuries-old oak tree.