Recommended Reading on Magical Dreaming

As one of the most ancient forms of magic, a near endless amount of books have been written about dreaming, especially in the last hundred years, including on metaphysical and occult approaches to dreamwork. However, I always have a difficult time recommending many of these texts, because they all take a fairly similar approach to dreams: they talk about certain topics in dreaming such as interpretation, divination, lucidity, astral projection, creative problem-solving, healing, shared dreams, dream yoga, and/or shamanism as if these are distinct types of dreams with no underlying connection or magical theory. Their methods often boil down to: set an intention before bed and interpret it in the morning. They rely on lucid dreaming and astral projection as the primary ways of having magical dreams rather than discuss the variety of other more accessible ways of reaching similar states of dream consciousness. They ignore advancements in post-Jungian psychological research on methods for working with dreams that come closer to actual magical techniques, as well as many important ancient and occult sources on dreaming. And they neglect one of the most important elements of magical dreaming, which is how to work with and participate in the content of dreams as a lived reality.

Despite this, there have been several books and essays that have had a powerful impact on my own approach to and understanding of dreaming, that I would encourage everyone who is interested in magical dreaming practices to read. These first four I consider the most important.

James Hillman - The Dream and the Underworld

Hillman was a depth psychologist, student of Carl Jung and founder of Archetypal Psychology, and a key figure in reevaluating psychological approaches to dreamwork. This book relates dreaming back to its mythological roots and connection with the underworld or other spiritual realities. Hillman stresses the importance of experiencing dreams objectively, and takes the radical stance that rather than translating dreams into the day, we need to translate ourselves into the dream. The Dream and the Underworld was pivotal in my own work with and understanding of dreams for recognizing the need to approach dreams objectively and as a mythic reality that we enter into.

Harry T. Hunt - The Multiplicity of Dreams

Hunt is a cognitive psychologist who examines the research on dreams, hallucinations, meditation, OBEs, and other liminal states to find the ways they intersect and extend out of the human imaginative function. He offers what may be one of the most important modern theories of dreaming, the Dream Diamond model, in which dreams exist on a spectrum extending from cloudy, subjective, and memory-based dreams to vivid, objective, and archetypal dreams, which allows us to consider new ways to enhance our dreaming. I believe Hunt’s theory is pivotal for understanding how to work with dreams magically as it offers a way to both see the connections between normal dreams and magical or objective dreams, as well as how to shift our everyday dreams in a more magical direction.

Synesius - “De insomniis”

Synesius of Cyrene was a Neoplatonist and bishop whose “De insomniis” is the most important ancient text on the magical uses of dreaming. Influential on later occult theories of dreaming such as those in the work of Agrippa and Lévi, Synesius not only discusses the various ancient magical uses of dreams, but also ties dreaming into a theory of the imagination as soul. Synesius makes the claim that dreams are the best method of evoking the gods, that dreams are a superior form of magic because they are free and unsusceptible to political oppression, and contrary to all ancient and even modern dreamwork theories claims that all dreams are true dreams. Reconciling the idea that all dreams are true has been a guiding goal in my own approach to exploring and discussing magical dreaming.

Henry Corbin - “Mundus Imaginalis”

Corbin was a philosopher and theologian whose work focused on the traditions of imagination and spiritual visions in Sufism. Corbin’s essay presents the key Sufi belief that dreams and imagination are an independent and intermediating reality between the material and spiritual worlds, and that the realities experienced through the visionary imagination are not imaginary in the sense of being made up, but are instead imaginal. This idea is crucial for understanding and working with dreams as an objective and magical reality. Corbin’s theory is drawn from work on the Sufi mystic Muhyīddīn Ibn ‘Arabī, whose writings on dreams in the Al-Futūhāt al-Makkīyya or Meccan Revelations can be further found in Corbin’s Alone with the Alone, and in William C. Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge.


These next two provide some post-Jungian depth psychological dreamwork methods that align closer with magical techniques of evocation (even if they never acknowledge that):

Robert A. Johnson - Inner Work

Johnson is a depth psychologist who offers very clear descriptions of Jungian concepts and practices. Inner Work is held as one of the best books for learning to do dreamwork and active imagination in the Jungian manner, with clear methods and examples for how to work and dialogue with archetypal figures through inner visions or imagination, whether in dreams or awake.

Stephen Aizenstat - Dream Tending

Aizenstat is a depth psychologist and founding President of the Jungian psychological college Pacific Graduate Institute, whose work explores some of the new directions in post-Jungian dreamwork. This includes working with dreams as objective living images, working with the World’s Dream, working with multiple dream figures, and provides one of the better discussions on using dreams for physical healing.


These are two excellent works of occult scholarship on magical dreaming:

Peter Lamborn Wilson - Shower of Stars: Dream and Book

Wilson, otherwise known as Hakim Bey, is an Islmacist scholar who moonlights as an anarchist magician. This book is an overview of dream incubation practices in Sufism and Daoism, and considers the ways that the revelations of dreams can be manifested through the writing of dream-books.

Andrew D. Chumbley - Mysticism, Initiation and Dream

Chumbley was an occultist scholar whose personal grimoires like The Azoëtia reflected his use of magical dreaming practices. In this monograph, Chumbley present scholarly evidence for seeing dreams as a form of mystical initiation that on the one hand reify spiritual concepts and experiences into tangible and communicable forms, while on the other rarifying our physical and cognitive concerns into spiritual images. This two-way process in which dreams allow for transformation between the material and spiritual worlds is one that has become integral to my own approach to magical dreaming.


Finally, here are two books that look at the history of magical dreaming, from respectively religious and scientific perspectives:


Kelly Bulkeley - Dreaming in the World’s Religions

Bulkeley is a researcher in dreams and the psychology of religion, and former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Bulkeley provides a thorough history of dreaming in relation to religious and spiritual beliefs, including some of the ancient ways that dreams have been used magically.

Sidarta Ribeiro - The Oracle of the Night

Ribeiro is a neuroscientist and sleep researcher who provides an attempt to reconcile historical beliefs about prophetic dreaming practices with the scientific understanding of the way dreams represent memories and allow us to model predictions for future actions. Ribeiro’s writing is thorough and at times poetic, making this an excellent and thought-provoking read.




In order to give a sense of current occult and metaphysical texts on dreaming, here are a couple that I felt exemplify the trends while still being more informative reads:

Frater Acher - “A Course in Dream Magic”

Frater Acher is a Western ritual magic practitioner and author whose short online text on dreaming exemplifies many of the current occult approaches to dreamwork. Acher includes instructions for dream incubation, lucidity, dream interpretation, and dialoguing with dream beings through visualization that reaches toward a method for working with the content of dreams as an objective reality. Like many modern dream authors, Acher primarily focuses on what to do before bed and after waking up.

Rose Inserra - Inside Your Dreams

Inserra is a folk magic author and dream interpreter, whose book exemplifies the mass market metaphysical approach to dreamwork. This includes general overviews of a number of topics in dreaming including interpretation, synchronicity, lucidity and dream yoga, shamanism, and more multidimensional topics like the relation of dreams to near-death experiences, collective dreaming, and the Akashic Records. Once again, like many modern dream authors, Inserra’s method frequently comes down to what to do before bed and after waking up.

Other examples of modern occult, metaphysical, and even some psychological dreamwork books that fall into similar approaches as Acher and Inserra, while occasionally including some unique techniques, include Stephen Barnwell’s Oneirognosis, Michelle Belanger’s Psychic Dreamwalking, John J. Coughlin’s A Cthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work, Samantha Fey’s The Awake Dreamer, Serge Kahili King’s Dreaming Techniques, Stanley Krippner’s Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, Athena Laz’s The Alchemy of Your Dreams, Anousen Leonte’s Dream Magick, Asenath Mason and Edgar Kerval’s Dream Gates & Astral Paths, Mark Stavish’s Between the Gates, and Ole Vedfelt’s A Guide to the World of Dreams. The patterns set up for talking about dreams in this way seem to have been established in the 1960s American Dreamwork movement, for instance in Patricia Garfield’s Creative Dreaming, Strephon Kaplan-Williams’s The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual, or Robert Moss’s Conscious Dreaming.