I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. — Joel 2: 28

When I first began paying attention to my dreams, in an effort to better understand myself, my life, and the nature of reality, I had a vivid dream that seemed like a fairy tale. No doubt, it was influenced by my recent reading, for a graduate school class, of a wonderful novel by Doris Lessings, Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. In the novel, the Queen of Zone Three, a kingdom characterized by peace and mutual respect for everyone, is sent to marry the King of Zone Four, a kingdom characterized by patriarchal domination of women and constant preparations for war. Not long after reading that novel, I dreamed I was a queen, sovereign in my own estate, when I received the news that I must marry a king and go live in his castle. I made the journey carrying a baby with me, holding it close to my heart. I knew that the king would kill this child if he knew about its existence, so I went first to the lower levels of his castle to give this infant into the care of servants who would hide it and keep it safe until I was able to reclaim it.

When I considered this dream, I wondered what the child represented, since I was not a mother. I recognized that the dream was showing me how in a patriarchal society which denigrates not only women but also certain human abilities deemed feminine, such as intuition, feelings, and spiritual sensitivity, I had learned how to hide these aspects of myself—even, to some extent, from myself. The dream came at a moment in my life when I was ready to begin reclaiming some precious aspects of myself that had been hidden for safety, buried in the basement of my subconscious, undeveloped, unexpressed and barely known even to me.

Paying attention to my dreams, as well as to my emotions and fears, was part of the work of recovering what had been lost. As I paid attention to my dreams over the coming years and then decades, they provided great a great deal of insight about myself, my interactions with others, and the nature of reality. What I received from my dreams helped me become freer emotionally. Life began to have more depth and meaning, and my spiritual perception expanded. Paying attention to my dreams and learning their language, along with other practices, opened me to a deeper awareness of the nature of reality.

Although the articles, books or blog posts I’ve written have occasionally contained one of my dreams, only recently have I taken dreams as a focus of my writing. This is a part of me, now grown, that I am ready to bring up from the basement and share with the world. It is much needed in our time as we deal with a society in which the forces associated with Zone Four seem to be dominating over those associated with Zone Three.

In a February 2024 Friends Journal article, I wrote about the Quaker tradition of dreamwork. The first Quakers recognized that divine guidance is available from within and that some dreams contain messages from God. Such dreams, they found, are useful not only in guiding individual decisions but also in guiding the Quaker community to envision new ways of living more in accordance with divine love, truth, and justice. For hundreds of years, dreams were an important source of guidance for Quakers. Collective dream work could help us find our way forward in our time. https://www.friendsjournal.org/quaker-dreams/

I have interviewed Quaker dreamworker and author Tina Tau, author of the amazing memoir, Ask For Horses, in which she recounts 40 significant dreams from her life and how she was guided by them. I wrote about that memoir in this blog post Finding Guidance Through Dreams. In this short video excerpt from the interview, she speaks of Listening for Guidance in Dreams.

Today I begin teaching an online course sponsored by Pendle Hill retreat center. The course is entitled Focusing on Dreams and registration remain open for another week. https://pendlehill.org/calendar/focusing-on-dreams/.

© 2026 Marcelle Martin

Marcelle Martin’s book A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.

Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew.

Both books are available from Barclay Press in hardback and paperback.

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