Dream Alchemy: Experimenting with Creativity Through Sleep and Dreams

Dream Alchemy: Experimenting with Creativity Through Sleep and Dreams

with Leah Larwood

A 5-week course using dreams & sleep to support your creativity and inner growth

When: 5 Mondays, 3, 10, 17, 24 Nov and 1 Dec

6pm – 8pm (London Time)

Where: Online via Zoom |

Fee: £150

This 5-week journey invites you to explore the creative and transformative potential of your dreams and the liminal states of sleep. Using a gestalt lens, the course emphasises awareness, presence, and dialogue with your inner world. We will experiment with ways of contacting dreams — lucid and non-lucid — as living experiences rather than abstract symbols. By engaging with the “bookends of sleep,” poetry, and journaling, you will cultivate practices that support your wellbeing, relationships, and creative expression.

The course is not about analysing or interpreting your dreams, but about meeting them in the here-and-now, discovering how they reflect your unfinished business, polarities, and emerging possibilities. The main aim is to support you in developing a personal nocturnal practice that fosters spiritual, psychological, and creative growth.

What we will explore together:

· Awareness of sleep states and dreams: cultivating presence with different states of consciousness as resources for daily life.

· Dialoguing with dreams: contacting non-lucid dreams as living figures that carry meaning, vitality, and guidance.

· Lucid dreaming practice: exploring the history, science, and methods of lucidity, and how lucidity can deepen awareness and integration.

· Dream incubation: experimenting with intentional dreaming to illuminate questions, problems, and creative blocks.

· Bookends of sleep: discovering the creative thresholds of falling asleep and waking

· Creative expression: engaging with poetry therapy, writing, and journaling as forms of integration and dialogue with dream material.

Learning intentions

By the end of the course, you will have:

· Practical tools to develop a nightly or early-morning practice.

· Ways to integrate dream experiences into your creative projects, relationships, and inner growth.

· A deeper appreciation of dreams as co-created experiences between self and world.

· Techniques for experimenting with lucidity, incubation, and awareness in sleep.

· A lived sense of how gestalt principles — awareness, contact, experimentation, and integration — can support you both at night and in waking life.

✨ The course is experiential. Each session will include guided practices, creative exercises, and opportunities for sharing. Together we will create a safe, curious, and imaginative space to explore dreams as living experiences that can nourish growth.

What to bring

· A notebook and pen. If you like, you may wish to buy yourself a dream diary if you haven’t got one already. (Any journal or notebook – something you will enjoy writing in.)

· A cup of tea and a blanket (optional)

· A quiet, confidential space

About Leah:

Leah Larwood is a lucid dreamer and shadow worker by night, and a writer/poet, UKCP gestalt psychotherapist by day (currently in advanced stages of training / undergoing accreditation process). She is also a qualified mindfulness teacher and certified poetry therapist (CPT).

Leah is a freelance wellbeing writer and contributor to Breathe, Teen Breathe, Planet Mindful, Red mag and Female First. Her poetry collection, Oneironaut, published by Indigo Dreams is about dreams, sleep and the unconscious.

*By purchasing a ticket for this or any of the London Arts-Based Research Centre events, you acknowledge and agree to the Terms and conditions and Privacy policy