This week we stepped into the beautiful home of Yasmin Mobayad – author, dream worker and passionate book lover. We asked her a few questions about her space, her practice and her connection to intuition.
What does intuition mean to you?
Intuition is a guiding force. It’s the deep, unshakeable knowing. For a very long time I suppressed my intuition. And it has taken me many years to get to a place where I can trust what my body and senses are trying to tell me. I think we are told so often to be logical and that the tangible, external feedback loop of the world is the only thing we can rely on. But it just isn’t true. There is a whole other world available to us - an entire knowledge system - if we just spend some time getting to know it. Intuition is the thing that is drowned out the quickest in our society because the modern world isn’t designed to have space. To be attuned to your intuition, you need to have space and time - two things we have less and less of because that’s how we are conditioned.
Intuition is the guiding light, the pang of knowing. It’s steady, not urgent. It’s the inspired action that leads us to the right place at the right time under the right circumstances. It’s the thing that connects us to the magic of life, which is available to us all the time - we just need to be paying attention. The key to unlocking intuition is honouring your curiosity. If you allow space and time to follow your curiosity, it will always lead you to the right place.
When did you begin feeling connected to dreamwork?
I’ve always had a deep connection to dreaming. My father grew up in Heliopolis, a major city in the ancient part of Cairo. He came to Australia by boat with his family when he was 12, and with him came a deep insight to dreaming, symbolism, and our relationship to higher forces. There is an innate connection to these things in the non-Western world, and I am so grateful to feel the interconnectedness of that in my own life via my ancestors. As a child I was fascinated with dreams and I would always ask my father questions. I had many prophetic, deja vu-like experiences growing up, and that ability has never really left me - in fact it’s only become stronger as my curiosity has grown. As an adult, I wrote a thesis on lucid dreaming, I ran dream circles at my house, experimented with many sleep herbs and concoctions, and enrolled in courses that looked at dreams in relation to literature and writing. Much of my poetry is influenced by my dream landscape and I am currently writing a novel about these experiences. I have an entire section of my personal library dedicated to dreaming - books that I have collected over many years. And about two years ago I started having more and more of the prophetic dreams that have led me further down the rabbit hole. It’s a practice that has only deepened for me over time. And it’s an ability that I love to share with others. Community-building is something I have valued across all domains of my life. So as I started to become more comfortable talking about my experiences of dreaming with others, it became undeniable that this was something I was meant to pursue and share with people.
What role do dreams play in your waking life?
Dreams are so important to waking life. We all dream. We may not always remember what we dream, but it happens to all of us. It’s such a personal experience in so many ways, and yet it is also such a huge part of the collective. Collective consciousness is a very real thing - it’s why symbols and their meanings transcend time.
There are many different types of dreams. Processing dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares, visitations, psychological, prophetic - to only name a few. The key is in understanding which type it is we are experiencing, and then spending time with the imagery, feelings and insights to integrate the learnings into our waking life. It’s one of the most underrated tools in Western culture. Not only can it help with our emotional landscapes, but science is now catching up in areas such as lucid dreaming where they are proving that we can significantly improve our physical abilities in waking life via our sleep. It’s a fascinating space to be working in. And I love to experiment with all of it in my own life.
Ancient civilizations had dream doctors, shamans, and priestesses, who would walk you through these thresholds and help integrate the dreamwork into waking life. Tapping into what the subconscious is trying to communicate - using it to integrate the learnings in waking life - is a gift that was of such importance back then, but now unfortunately often remains overlooked by most. There is also such a political aspect to dreaming that most don’t consider. The fact that the subconscious brain is an ungoverned, sacred space, but we have suppressed and eradicated our connection to it in modern civilizations - there’s something definitely in that I think. I use dreamwork in the way my ancestors used it - to gain better insight into what’s going on for me and for those in my life emotionally, physically and spiritually. It is always an incredibly illuminating experience and a practice I recommend everyone become attuned to.
How does your space support your connection to your practices?
What does our Intuition blend evoke for you emotionally and energetically?
The Intuition blend is one of preparation. It grounds me enough to remember and recall - two important components of dreamwork. Scent is so tightly linked to memory, and memory helps to channel back into the dreams and symbols experienced during sleep or meditation. Using it before quiet, intentional moments prepares these channels of reception. The scent is strong, fresh, cleansing and calming. It’s a modern take on the ancestral rite of ritual, offering a passage to connect deeply and intentionally to the things we see when we create space to turn inward.