Trafford Publishing: Central Ink- A Soul's Quest Through Dream Work and Art

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Central Ink- A Soul's Quest Through Dream Work and Art

by Marcia Lewton

202 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1355; ISBN 1-4120-0986-3; US$20.50, C$24.95, EUR17.00, £12.00

This "much needed addition to dream literature"* inspires and instructs the reader into dream work by means of the author's personal soul journey through dreams, stories, pictures and poems.
*Esther Conway, Ph.D.

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about the book about the author sample excerpt catalogue info

About the Book

"Central Ink is both absorbing and challenging as it carries the reader through the author's journey of self discovery. I found myself reviewing old dreams with a new perspective as I saw with delight the marvelous interconnections Marica Lewton was able to make between her dreams, her writing, her drawing, and her life. Dream work comes alive through this personal approach which demonstrates the value of dream messages for one's life. A much needed addition to dream literature. "
Esther Conway, Ph.D.
"Marcia Lewton takes us to the fertile heartland of the dream world. These finely crafted and illustrated stories drawn from her personal work with dreams bring vibrantly alive the reality of soul and healing in the modern world."
Yvonne Jarosz, Dream Therapist
In Central Ink Marica Lewton follows a series of 68 dreams in a narrative using a number of her own poems, stories and pictures to demonstrate how dream work carried her through two deaths and several other losses. In addition to instructing the reader in ways to work with dreams, she tells her own soul story in an engaging and often humorous way. Each piece of creative work is related to a dream, showing clearly how the well of creativity can be drawn on through dreams, and how paying attention to dreams by drawing or writing about them inspires further dreams in an ever-flowing steam.
The instructions to readers are easy to follow and should provide inspiration for anyone who wants to begin this fascinating approach to soul development.

About the Author

In her church and community, Marcia Lewton has worked with others' dreams as a weekly group facilitator and participant for many years, as well as doing her own dream work as a daily spiritual practice.
As Marcia Blumenthal, she has published stories and poems in literary magazines and collections and is the author of a poetry chapbook, In the Heart of Town, Still Digging, published by Barnwood Press. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Real World, and the Other Real World, to be published by Trafford Press.
Marcia lives in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula.

Sample Excerpt
Preface
In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is said to have urged people to bring forth what is within, so that is will save them. If you do not do so, he warned, what is within will destroy you. These words speak about a necessary spiritual task, redemptive when engaged, destructive if ignored.
But what does it mean to bring forth what is within?
No doubt this passage can be interpreted in more than one way: to unburden oneself of a secret, to perceive and speak a truth, to free a suppressed emotion, to develop one's gifts, and more.
Here the text will be taken to mean all of these, and especially, in addition, to make conscious what has been hidden, to access unconscious material by various means, especially dreams. This work, as a daily spiritual practice, leads to what the poet, John Keats, considered soul-making.
There are a number of ways to work with dreams. I will demonstrate or explain the ones I use, but a reader must keep in mind that there are many. A short bibliography of resources on dream work can be found at the end of this book.
For me, in addition to the dream work itself, there was a further task that is in keeping with my own sense of purpose, the task of creating a coherent presentation of the material in order to demonstrate a way of working and to give an example of what can happen when one undertakes a process of this depth.
I have written and published a number of stories and poems since I began writing when I was in my mid-thirties but have always had to struggle with creative blocks of varying degrees of obduracy. In recent years I stopped publishing fiction and poetry and engaged all my efforts in soul work in hopes of encouraging the free flow of creative energy. Central Ink is the story of that project-in-process.
The title, Central Ink, came from the first dream I had when I began engaging in dream work. It laid bare what is perhaps the deepest issue of my life. Here it is:
The Central Ink Dream
I approach and enter an octagonal building made of cedar shakes with a conical roof. Although it is only a small hut on the outside, it is much larger inside, like a spacious pavillion. It now has central ink. Central ink, like central heating.
The ink comes from a deep well in the center like a fountain. It flows into spokes of varying lengths, which radiate outward from the center. There are places to sit all around, stone work benches, and the central ink is available to each bench. It seems as much like fuel as liquid. It burns with a black flame, and sometimes it's malleable, but shiny, like anthracite, for the sculptors. There are mailboxes at the ends of the central ink spokes.
The lights are low; it's shadowy here. The atmosphere is quiet and peaceful. No one else is present.

The task implicit in this scene is for me to sit down at one of those benches, one near the center, to use the black ink/fuel welling up from below, and to use one of the mailboxes to make my work available to those who would be interested.
When I was a little girl in school, my teacher put the following verse on the blackboard, and I learned it as I did all the other verses and ditties of childhood to remember at odd moments in later years. At the time, I thought it was just another self-improvement verse about diligence. As I grew older, however, I realized that soul-satisfying work was not an onerous chore imposed by the boss or by the desire for money or fame. I noticed what a treasure such work could be, and I understood that Henry Van Dyke wrote not an exhortation but a prayer.
Let me but do my work from day to day
In field or forest; at the desk or loom,
In roaring marketplace or tranquil room.
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work, my blessing, not my doom.
Of all who live, I am the one by whom
This work can best be done in the right way."
From WORK, By Henry Van Dyke
This book is an attempt to answer the prayer and fulfill the dream.
The project began taking shape in my imagination when I was suffering from the effects of three significant losses, beginning with the greatest loss of my life, the illness and death of my husband. His death was followed a few months later by the loss of my work in the community, due to the cancellation of the local incest survivor's support program that had provided me with challenging and rewarding work as a group facilitator. And finally I found myself struggling to recover my physical mobility in the aftermath of surgery for a knee injury. Deeply depressed, I was not fit to take part in community life, so I looked inward for rehabilitation. What resources did I have? What skills?
The obvious answer was that my greatest resource was the imaginative work I had already done, and that my greatest skill was the literary ability to write it down. I felt ready, even eager, to use the wealth of material I had been gathering these past several years, but I was afraid I would encounter the same resistance against presentation that I already knew so well. In the throes of a creative block, what has been considered a wealth of material becomes a heap of worthless trash fit only for the burn pile or the shredder. But since I couldn't know ahead what I would encounter, there was nothing to do but begin.
I did this by gathering preliminary dreams and other works of imagination in the hope that they would shed light on my readiness to do it, my readiness for what I felt deeply called to do yet found difficult to begin. Would my inspiration be hampered once again by the spirit killers who all too often undermined my efforts from within? Were there any countervailing forces that could encourage me to carry this project through to a happy ending? Would there ever be a happy ending that did not precede another difficult beginning?
Several times, before going to sleep, I asked for images that would further the process. I promised that I would treat any images as meaningful. I would tease out their relevance to my request. I would also relate them to earlier dreams and artworks in order to create not just a thread of meaning but a pattern.
I have deliberately omitted dates from the dreams and artworks presented. Inner work does not follow chronological or linear pattern. Many folks liken its progress to a spiral. I myself think it's more like the pattern you see if you watch clothes tumbling in a washing machine: up and comes the red sock;l here's the flowered pillowcase again; the raveling on one shirt catches the button on the next, etc.
Inner work does not come to an end. No matter how long you "bring forth what is within," there is always more to bring forth, and it is almost always connected to something you've already brought forth time and time again.
"You'll never finish your book," whispers the flowered pillowcase. "It will go on and on forever." I've heard that kind of talk before. I let the red sock answer: "So what?"
The first dream came immediately, but it was so obscure and nonsensical that I almost gave up without beginning. I realized that even with an interpretation for the dream, anyone reading it would need to know something of my personal history to make sense of it, but I didn't want to write an autobiography: born, grew up, did this, did that, blah blah blah. I wanted to write a book about the life of imagination.
But a promise is a promise, and breaking a promise to the source of dreams is a serious matter. Once unconscious forces are invoked, the price for not respecting them can be high. And so I begin.

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