Foreword
by Roberta Ossana
Editor, Dream Network Journal

Dream Stories: Recovering the Inner Mystic reveals a unique and ever-evolving friendship between the authors, Connie Caldes and Kellie Meisl, that spans two decades. They have known and supported one another through the best and most difficult of times: marriage, the birth and raising of their children, divorce, breast cancer, death and more.

In the beginning, theirs was a relationship born of a common challenge explored in Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much - and it flowered over the first ten years. At that juncture, they began sharing their dreams with one another and the friendship has been/is enhanced and deepened dramatically. They began living the symbolic life in earnest.

Dream Stories, chapter by chapter, contains accounts of each of their personal and often shared experience. Courageous sharing into the depths of their joy, pain and all levels of human and extraordinary experience in between.

Their sharing covers a range of limitless dream experiences - both sleeptime and waking dreams - from warning dreams and nightmares, healing, precognitive, synchronicities, shamanic dream experience, shapeshifting, reincarnation, visitations from the other side, to lucid dreaming. Authentic sharing that is often embellished with poetry and art. With each sharing is an account of what was transpiring (or about to transpire) in their lives and how their dreams assist and guide them along the way. Often, the revelation of the meaning of each of their dreams results from their mutual dreamsharing.

This wonderful book is filled with encouragement and techniques for each of us.

Forward! Come along on this powerful journey.

"…beautifully written. Both Connie and Kellie brilliantly reveal to us the powerful depth of the dreamworld and how using dreamwork and shamanism brought healing as they faced challenging moments in their lives. This book is a great inspiration for those searching for meaning or confronting illness." 

- Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval and How to Heal Toxic Thoughts.

"Dream Stories is an inspiring account of a deep friendship, one informed by dream sharing. Connie Caldes and Kellie Meisl have given their readers accounts of workshop experiences, cancer scares, and personal transformations that resulted from their intensive work with dreams. They have also provided exercises, artwork, and wisdom, all woven into a tapestry of creativity, imagination, and an openness to life's possibilities."

- Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., co-author, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them.

"Writers Connie Caldes and Kellie Meisl have spent the last decade embarked on the most sacred of journeys, deep into the stuff of dreams, and the power of inner wisdom, intuition and the subconscious to heal what ails us. Luckily for the rest of us, these two multi-talented women – who have spent years in dreamwork and shamanistic training – have invited us to accompany them on their rich and fascinating journeys.  In Dream Stories: Recovering the Inner Mystic, we follow the ways of the ancestral shaman, and learn how spiritual healing, meditative walking, artistic expression, and a deep engagement with animal spirits can rectify the soul, and restore health and authentic power to our being. This book takes us into the deepest whirlwind of discovery that emerges when two people take very seriously the lessons imparted by their extraordinary nightly visions. At a time in history when so many of us are missing ancient wisdom, we all stand to benefit from a book that shows us the way back to the dream and spirit worlds and how they unlock our innermost fears and longings, as well as the keys to healing. Follow Caldes and Meisl into the chapters of their dream worlds and soon you will be launched on your own journey of the soul."

 

 - Claudia Ricci, Ph.D., author, Dreaming Maples, & faculty instructor in English and Journalism, University at Albany, SUNY.