Telluric dreaming is a particular way of attuning to the dreamlands we are all part of. The word telluric means “of the land,” so in these dreaming practices we invite ourselves to dream with(in) the earth. We allow ourselves to enter the dreaming borderlands as a realm of transformative metamorphosis.
Through the experience of dreaming, we come closer to the planetary metabolism, connecting with an ongoing flow of mutation that allows us to feel and participate in the shapeshifting of existence, or the motion, the matter, and the mystery. Dreaming reveals that we are all in-between beings, and that what we call reality is multilayered, constantly transforming across realms of space, time, and form. These unfolding cycles spiral through every being, weaving together day and night, past and future, earth and sky, speaking from an electromagnetic language that animates our body-lands during dreamtime. Learning to receive and listen to these dreamscapes helps us develop discernment as we attune to the visceral rhythms of this deeper metabolism.
From the perspective of the House that Modernity Built (or a narrow-boundary intelligence), dreaming is for all practical purposes a waste of time,[1] delegitimized or related to as something to extract meaning from. These approaches tend to restrict the complexity of the experience of dreaming to one that is either ignored or “understood” through reason. The disease of separability, foundational to the house of modernity, attempts to flatten the diffractive layers of affects, relations, and forms into neat boxes, muffling the metabolic shape-shifting communion that encompasses the dreamworld.
Within this context, most people within the House of Modernity tend to have short dreams or dreams about “oneself.” We dream that we’ve been to the market, that we’ve had an argument with a friend or a sibling, or that our hair fell out, etc. Although even in short dreams the in-between intelligence is operating, changing orders, borders, highlighting the wisdom of paradoxes and blurring of identities, in these self-referential dreams we tend to be somewhat trapped in a narrow circuit of understanding. The wider possibility of dreams being living encounters who can teach us about wider-boundary and quantum wisdom ways of relating, thinking and feeling, often remains overlooked.
Every dream is important when we start creating an intimate relation to the in-between, even short dreams. In our own experience of dream practicing we have realised that the more we pay attention to our dreams, the more we sense that there is a quality to the exiled capacity of “dreaming” that is familiar—strangely familiar—like something we forgot we knew, but when we start to remember… We have come to realize that it is an unknown seed germinating in a dark place very close to our deepest intuition.
If modern-colonial systems have exiled our relationality with dreaming, how can we begin to repair this relationship? How can we have the humility to relate to dreaming from somewhere other than our modern-colonial paradigms?
Take a moment to consider that there may be as many ways of dreaming as living beings that exist in the world, and even beyond the world as we know it. Dreaming is perhaps one of the ways in which we can begin opening our body-lands to the awareness that we are part of the immensity of cosmic-telluric metabolic movements, and learn how to attune ourselves towards visceral responsibility. Strengthening a relationship with the dreamworld might support us in experiencing ourselves not as an isolated body, a self-contained organism that desires, thinks, and acts independently. Recognizing this entanglement shifts our idea of action away from the modern notion of individualism.
It requires humility to see that dreaming doesn’t belong solely to the “separate” self. Instead, we might start to sense that what we call “self” is part of a vast, interconnected organism that allows us to question how we can serve this larger intelligence—one that we are intrinsically a part of, and that is shaping “my” body and “my” life.
How can I feel into the ways in which I am both dancing the world and being danced by it? How can we move in the world sensing into the entangled vitalities that are constantly dancing our bodylands in a deep fractal intimacy, as the pulsing blood in our veins, and the sap in the trees?
as Cree Elder Dr. Cash Ahenakew says:
While the modern-colonial systems tear me apart during the day, my dreams, at night, stitch me back together. In my sleep, I surrender to the wisdom of the land, asking for healing and guidance. This surrender is not a form of escape, but an act of resilience, allowing me to carry on within institutions and societies that persistently deny and ignore the fundamental entanglement of all life.
The ruins of modernity in which we are immersed are the result of our modern-colonial imaginaries, which have been materially shaping and producing these ways of life. Decolonization asks us for gestures towards hospicing the modern way of seeing, doing, and imagining.
These practices of telluric dreaming are ways to open ourselves to stay and dance with the unknown and the inapprehensible as necessary intelligences as we face intersecting collapse, and to make space for the emergence of other possible worlds to come without suffocating it with projections that stem from the ruins of this dying one.
So, how do we learn to expand our capacity to dream and allow the yet (un)imaginable to manifest? How do we relate to and through the unknown? How do we become receivers of visceral alignments who guide our responsibility towards the collective and metabolic body we are all a part of?
Inhabiting the In-between
This session of exercises is dedicated to expanding our capacity to inhabit the in-between. The fertile space of the asleep-awake liminality.
It is an invitation to relate to the world of dreams with respect and curiosity. Dreams are part of a vast world that is both unknown and familiar. They are part of our existences and at the same time gesture us towards the improbable, the unknown, the unimaginable. Taking care of bedtime and wake-up time with reverence helps us tap into the intelligence in the dimensions of dreaming and the liminal space of waking and sleeping states.
The languages of the in-between call for attention and reciprocity. Paying attention to how one enters and leaves a space is fundamental to being present to the various layers in each experience.
Being attentive to the porosity between dimensions is necessary as a gesture of humble reverence for dreaming experiences. We cannot know in advance what’s going to happen, and we can’t control the results. This is an invitation to practice letting goals and objectives go out the window to make space for presence.
If we approach these spaces from the modern paradigm of logocentrism, linearity, and utilitarianism, we run the risk of suffocating the messages from the land with our demand for coherence, truth, and self-importance. The in-between space is less about arriving at a form and more about dancing with the force between forms. This is a practice of ritualizing spaces of receptivity and presence through invitations that are simple, subtle, and profound if incorporated into your everyday life. These invitations deal with movements before going to sleep and when waking up. Give yourself time to listen to what wants to happen, to get closer and to emerge while learning to inhabit the in-between states.
7 Heart Axes
Orientation
The 7 Heart-Axes exercise[2] is designed to awaken our attention to relations that exist in-between different realms of body-time-space. It invites us to perceive the indissoluble chain that connects the intertwined cycles between the tangible and intangible, between earth-sky, life-death, past-future. In the context of dream practices, this exercise helps open us up to receiving the night and dreams from a wider perspective.
Before Beginning
Before beginning with the audio guided meditation, I invite you to let yourself be touched by some written information about the vectors and hearts we will be working with. Try to do this without wanting/needing to understand it. Remember in this work we are using language as a living, diffractive, and polysemic field of inquiry: not as an accurate description of reality, but as a technology that can move and activate dispositions and capacities within ourselves.
In this exercise we will work on three Axes, each connecting two hearts. The exercise brings our attention to the movement that happens between these six hearts and our own human heart. We will be calling these movements “vectors.”
Vector 1: The movements between the spiral relation among the hearts of the sky and earth
The earth’s heart can be sensed through the experience of the five senses, everything that is tangible, palpable, observable and alive—the myriad beings and creatures that inhabit the planet and the substantial forces that sustain life on earth. The vector of earth’s heart in this exercise pulls us towards the center of the planet, to feel the ground. Matter and movement.
In the sky’s heart lies what is impalpable to our five senses, the intangible, what cannot be experienced through reason, as this is the realm of energy, movement, and spirit. The vector of the sky’s heart in this exercise pulls us towards the vastness of the cosmos.
Both hearts, earth and sky, are intrinsically connected and part of each other; they intertwined through the movements of contraction and expansion, in an interconnected fractal chain of existences.
Vector 2: The movement between the fluxes of descending and ascending ancestry
The ascending ancestry can be felt in our back. It is sensed not only as human familiar lineages, but as different currents of time (life-death dynamics) that compose the earth’s history and keep flowing, touching our bodies through time and calling us towards ancestral accountability. The invitation is to feel this horizontal vector as a river that comes from the vast space behind us and touches our back, subtly pulling us forward. The past ancestry are our future ancestors. This vector is related to the unknown and pulls us forward from the front part of our bodies.
Both vectors of our past and future ancestors are connected: this practice invites us to sense the river of ascending ancestry touching our backs and metabolizing the teachings they bring inside our bodies, in order to become available to be pulled from the front of our bodies by the voices, songs, and prayers of our future ancestors.
Vector 3: The movement in between dualities: the cycles between form and dissolution, day and night, birth and death.
The heart of the east is announced as the axis of life with the rising of the sun, the beginning of all forms related to the encounter between matter and light. We feel the newborn lives within the spectral expressions of light, from the rising sun until the sunset.
The heart of the west is announced through the twilight senses that invite the night. It is the entrance to the realms of death and transformation. We remove the skin of everything learned and the known world to receive the unknown world. We leave the skin of the known as an offering to the earth. The heart of the west follows the dark journey of the sun: it begins at dusk and ends in a new cycle when the sun rises again from within the heart of the east.
Endnotes
[1] Krenak, Ailton; Nóbrega, Antonio. Ciclo regenerantes de gaia – regenerando a partir dos sonhos. Selvagem – Ciclo de Estudos sobre a Vida, YouTube, 7th June 2022. :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGcjWtOzIe4&t=1402s. Accessed 18 Sept 2025.
[2] The axis exercise is based on three medicines:
1 – Mesoamerican cosmogonies (specifically Zapotec and Maya, learned from master Carlos Jesus Castillejos and from the zapotec healer Alejandra Herrera).
2 – Merkavah Kabbalah, based on the lineage work of the argelian kabbalist Colette Aboulker-Muscat
3 – the ZhiNeng QiQong methodology for organizing the energy field Zu Chang Fa, created by master Dr.Pang Min
