Date & Time Details: February 26-March 1, 2026 - Start Time 1pm End Time 1pm

Location: Baton Valley, South Island Aotearoa

To Register: Please click the link below and you will be redirected to our New Zealand website to register. Please direct all questions to our partners down under!

Dancing with DreamMaker: Into the NightBody with Art and Soul – New Zealand, February 2026

February 26 - March 1, 2026

With Doug Van Houten

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.

Guide

Doug Van Houten
The singular dream that has been a perennial guide for Doug van Houten’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…
Learn more about Doug Van Houten