I do actually have a plan for e-courses and a program of study, which will probably include in-person workshops as well as e-courses. It’s more fleshed out in my mind now than it was a few days ago. In a nutshell, provide tools students can use to access their own creativity. This will include dreamwork, shamanic-type journeying (it’s a form of meditation or creative visualization, and dream recall and journeying work very effectively together), journalling. And once they’ve started to record their internal adventures, they create artworks based on those inner experiences. The whole point is to get people to experience reality differently so they can access creative parts of themselves that may be hidden by their rational daylight minds. I also see that the flipside may be needed, that some people’s daylight self may need help to be okay with being rational and linear in order to get stuff done. One underlying principle is from Robert Moss, who teaches dreamwork techniques, that dreams are a place, and once we know that, we can go back there. And that in itself is a creative and enriching experience.

I used exactly these tools to arrive at this concept. I had a dream and I’ve fleshed it out with several “dream re-entries” where I consciously went back into my dream to get more details.

Here are some of my brainstorming thoughts on how to create experiences for students. I think many of these would work better in person, where students can work together, but this is the kind of experience I’m aiming at, and I can revise as I go:

Creating dream journals, sharing stories, getting students to act out their own or each other’s dreams or journey experiences. Getting students to create altars, shadow boxes and spaces that spatially show what they’ve seen or experienced in their dreams and journeys. Have students research a topic from a dream and create a project that uses what they’ve learned (this can be done in stages: beginner, intermediate and advanced). Ask them to then create another artform that describes or praises what they’ve done: a song about the wooden chest they built, a poem about their painting, a dance that depicts the sculpture.
I’m also thinking about ways people can incorporate skills they already have and see them as creative expressions. Like, what can you do with woodwork or construction or cooking or word processing so you can see it as a creative tool, not just what you’ve always used it for?
Get them to map things, like their dreams or journeys, the process of creating their latest project.

I’ve also looked at a class (taught by Lynda Barry at U of Wisconsin) where she uses drawing exercises to help writing students be more creative in their writing. Her exercises are based on brain research, what we already know that we’re not aware we know.