Into the Dreaming Dark : A story and walk into the Imaginal

About

A walk and a story. Two mundane seeming practices with weird dimensions. For a walk can alter mood, open the eye in new ways and recalibrate the soul. To walk the bounds helps us to feel a deep connection with the land we walk. The right kind of walk, as the early Romantics and the recent psychogeographers both discovered, lets our senses become a canvas. Each walk has within it echoes of pilgrimage and a labyrinth.

And a story? Well there's nothing quite like a story, for it's capacity to open the ear to our dreaming, to warm like fire, to nourish like bread. Our natural birthright is to be the dreamers of dreams. Right now we are dreamsick, overwhelmed and drunk on cheap neon dreams, that drain our attention into huge digital economies, fuelled by Anxiety and Disgust.

So, a story and walk offer very simple medicine. They remind us that life is the true artform, full of wonder and predicament. That to belong to the soul of where we live requires more than buying a flag.

Into the dreaming dark then is a guided walk at twilight that ends around a fire. The walk which takes place in and around the Great Wood at Stanmer is wrapped around an old fairy story or a myth. In a small group, we wander to our destination, taking in the story was we go. On the way, you will become a witness to the story, and it's resonances.

The walk is a wander, not a hike, and the story is a journey, not an explanation.

The walk starts an hour before twilight, and ends in the dark.