Books like Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm — picked by fans

I have often considered what spirituality meant for my ancestors of long ago, when lifeways were aligned with local subsistence patterns through gathering and hunting.

For inspiration, I turn to the Bushman (San) cultures of southern Africa, who hold one of the most ancient living spiritual traditions on the planet; this book offers a window into their enduring cosmovision, woven close to the fabric of the Earth.

The Bushman story of First and Second Creation immediately caught my attention as a primary teaching about unity consciousness (First Creation) and the mind’s tendency to trick itself into believing its own projections (Second Creation) – an important reminder to step back into the moment and not take ourselves too seriously in the midst of our spiritual life journey.

Because much of my work is about bridging connections with nature into the modern experience, as a reader, I appreciate Nabhan’s insightful reflections of participation in cultures close to the Earth; his stories show how deeply people can live into balanced connections with our local environments.

Simple, everyday activities like gathering firewood for grandma and grandpa can become openings into deeper relationships with our local ecosystems, if we gift ourselves some time to explore and become curious about the world around us along the way.

That possibility gives me inspiration for my own family’s nature connection journey and helps me think creatively when I work with clients who want to deepen their sense of place.

Reading this book in my teen years changed my life.

Instinctually, I had always known there was a deeper layer of reality beyond the veneer of modern experience, waiting for me to connect. Tom’s meditations were part of a larger awakening process that opened my eyes to the spiritual world.

These true stories inspired me to get outside and make real connections with animals and ecosystems of my place, and with the spirit-that-moves-through-all-things. Through this practice, I found renewed hope and motivation and began building my own experiential understanding of nature’s mysteries.

Ultimately, this book sent me on a journey that continues to this day, thirty years later! Thank you, Tom.

After years of practicing yogic-based meditation and qigong, I felt called to seek out spiritual Earth connection practices from my own European ancestral lineages.

This book stood out to me because it opens a path directly to the deep consciousness of the Earth, through journeys based on Celtic and pre-Celtic symbols. Each exploration has opened new insights and transformations, leaving me feeling a greater attunement with nature and with my own being.

There is a deep-time metaphysics underlying this book, connected to the ancient mysteries yet without the heavy trappings of elaborate outer ritual. This bare-bones simplicity makes the practice accessible in the midst of a full life.

Of all the dream books I have read, this one is perhaps most in line with my own thinking about how to understand and work with your dreams for personal and spiritual growth. It was also one of the first books to really push dream decoding towards the mainstream, which has also been my passion.

Ann Faraday is a British psychologist who conducted an experimental study of dreams for her Ph.D. thesis. Each chapter is easy to read and process and explores the psychology of dreams and why they matter for self-awareness.

It also offers a realistic and easy-to-apply method for dream interpretation that has helped hundreds of thousands of dreamers all over the world fall in love with the personal growth potential of their own dreams.

The world of The Changeling is strange and exhilarating. At first we are presented with what seems like a mundane NYC, but then the edges start to bleed as a more fantastical, deliciously disturbing world seeps into and disrupts the ordinary.

At the core of the story is a family and the lengths they go to protect each other. There are so many reasons this book resonated with me, but particularly for this reason—the idea that if only you pay close attention, you will see that a more fantastical world dwells at the edge of our own.

This is an idea I tackle in my own book, where myths and legends, and fairytales come to life. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. Everyone who reads The Changeling will be… changed.

I know what you’re thinking, “Freud, really?” Yes, really.

This is one of the origins of that wildly counterintuitive idea that the best way to enlarge the scope of your world is to pay attention to your dreams. But apart from specialized scholars and practicing clinicians, who can read all 700 pages of his giant tomb, The Interpretation of Dreams?

Even Freud realized he needed a shorter book for his ideas to reach the public. So, he produced this “brochure” (as he called it) aimed at a general audience. All of his big ideas are here—dream-work, day residues, the unconscious—but in a much more manageable size.

And reading it offers proof that psychoanalysis remains as vital today as it did when it was invented 125 years ago. 

Elizabeth Knox is a world-class writer with an exceptional imagination and her fantasy novel, Dreamhunter, is a great introduction to her work. Set in an alternative past, dreamhunters harvest dreams which are transmitted to the public for entertainment and therapy – or worse. Fifteen-year-old Laura Hame must enter The Place of Dreams to uncover what happened to her missing dreamhunter father and in the process reveals how the government has used dreams to control an ever-growing population of convicts and political dissenters. Those who love Philip Pullman or Garth Nix won’t be disappointed.

I am including this book for its fascinating presentation of dreamwork, a timeless state where past, present, and future meet, offering you glimpses into your future every single night in your night vision. Written by journalist and science fiction writer Eric Wargo, reading it will most certainly stretch your mind and inspire your dream work. 

In centuries past, dreams were regarded as oracles predicting future outcomes, but that approach fell out of favour with the Freud and Jung revolution firmly placing dream decoding as a psychological personal awareness and growth tool.

Wargo does not discourage dreamers from working with their dreams as self-help tools, but he does present a powerful case for all dreams being potentially precognitive, offering an insight into potential futures.

The Dream Master was originally published in Amazing (Jan/Feb 1965) titled, He Who Shapes. The novella won Roger Zelazny a Nebula Award in 1966. I have re-read this novel several times over the years, and subconsciously I think it influenced the premise for Dream Phaze. Some of the tech is a little outdated by today’s terms, but the overall idea is still fresh.