Dancing with DreamMaker
Into the NightBody
with Art and Soul
Wed, 25 Feb - Sun, 1 March 2026
This is an official Animas Valley Institute course, led by Doug Van Houten.
Using art, movement and music, this residential programme offers a unique and embodied method for working with dreams.
The retreat takes place in the stunning Baton Valley, South Island Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Enter into a divine dance where our dreaming nightbody steps into confluence with the deep source of our creativity. This dance is a powerful portal to soul work, through which we bridge from dayworld consciousness to the hidden rivers of the unconscious in ways that are unique to you as accessed through your imagination, emotions, body, and relationships. Through the interplay of these modalities, you become a mysterious dream-walker shaping soul’s longing into expressions of art and motion.
During this immersion, we’ll wander slowly in the often disturbing, often splendorous nightworld with its symbols, images, and metaphors meant only for the dreamer. We’ll courageously commit to an extended stay in soul’s mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on our ego, to root us more fully in soul just as the old Alchemists transmuted base metals into gold. Rather than trying to interpret or figure out the meaning of the dream, we will submit ourselves as we yield to the dream’s characters, landscapes, and atmospheres.
Making art helps us make meaning. Music and movement together open numinous pathways toward deep feeling and a more embodied sense of knowing. Through dance and free movement, we surrender and allow the body to express what the strategic mind cannot reach. By sidestepping everyday consciousness and allowing the unconscious to speak in its own symbols, colors, and textures, we enter a holy inner terrain that words cannot convey. Whether with oil pastels, collage, sculpture, or even spontaneous markings on the page, the act of allowing a wild conversation to flow through us — unmediated, untethered, and alive — generates a sacred gesture toward soul. As Flannery O’Conner wrote, “The artist prays by creating”.
You’ll discover what it’s like to enter dreams as living mysteries; to boldly and vulnerably interact with its denizens and dreamscapes; to be moved by the deep intelligence of vivid dream images; to open to non-ordinary ways of perceiving and knowing; and to experience the vitality found in the under-dream of your everyday waking life.
Dancing with DreamMaker moves you deeper toward your soul’s yearning, enabling you to artfully carry the dream into the world as a gift.
Details:
🗓️ Wed, 25 Feb - Sun, 1 March 2026
📍 Baton Valley, 50 mins from Motueka
✨ Dreaming, dance and art
👥 Doug van Houten, Jaime Howell
Guides
Doug Van Houten
The singular dream that has been a perennial guide for Doug’s own guiding practice is one where humans thrive in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth, know our cosmic origins, and see ourselves as integral and yet necessarily unique participants in the ongoingness of the universe.
His lineage of teachers and inspirators includes: Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, Joanna Macy, Matthew Fox, David Whyte, Mary Oliver and Brian Swimme to name a few. In co-creating wild, ceremonial and soulcentric spaces for human development, Doug draws upon the wisdom of deep imagery and dreams, somatic and embodied knowing, poetry and art-making, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering, nature-responsive practices.
Doug’s true calling manifests in a devotion to supporting others to transform themselves toward wholeness and maturation as they descend into the mystic wellspring of their imaginations, drink deeply from soul’s source, drench in their own unique grief and gifts and return to outpour their particular powers in service to what Thomas Berry called, ”The Great Work” of our time. In addition to guiding and mentoring Doug expresses his own soul’s longing as a visual artist, a wily wanderer, an intuitive dream tracker, an occasional beekeeper, a heart-centered activist, an emerging yogi and cosmic dancer.
Doug is a senior guide for Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org).
For more information about Doug visit https://www.bodyartsoul.org
Jaime Howell
Jaime is a gifted musician and facilitator in the Great Turning with a rare ability to craft immersive experiences through sound, voice, and music. His offerings resonate deeply with the soul-centered spirit of the work we held at Animas Valley Institute Through evocative soundscapes, he invites participants into rich emotional terrains that deepen the journey and open pathways for transformation. Jaime’s presence is a powerful and poetic companion to Animas-style work, subtly enriching the container in many profound and resonant ways.
