ABOUT LAURA SMITH-RIVA
Natural Dreamwork Pracitioner

"The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest, most intimate sanctum of the soul..." ~ Carl Gustav Jung
Natural Dreamwork Practitioner • Druid • Teacher & Guide of Transformative Dream Practices
I work with dreams as living experiences—not things to interpret, but something to be in relationship with.
I’m a Natural Dreamwork practitioner and practicing Druid, and my work lives at the place where deep listening, spiritual ecology, and inner transformation meet.
For over a decade, I’ve been working with people and their dreams. What matters most to me is helping people slow down enough to actually be with their dreams—not to analyze them or figure them out, but to stay with them, feel them, and begin to sense what kind of life is moving through them at night.
I was trained in the Natural Dreamwork tradition, which changed how I understand dreams completely. In this approach, dreams aren’t puzzles to solve. They’re alive. They’re experiences we enter into relationship with. When I’m working with someone, I try to stay very simple with it: gentle attention, emotional presence, and a willingness to stay close to whatever shows up—especially the parts that feel unclear, tender, or a little overwhelming.
Alongside this, I practice as a Druid, which is really just a way of staying in relationship with the natural world as something alive and communicative. That perspective naturally weaves into my work. My classes and dream circles often bring together dreamwork, nature connection, and quiet ritual—nothing elaborate, just enough to help people feel grounded and connected while they’re turning inward. People often tell me they are amazed by the resonance they feel during our explorations and that they feel a kind of calm in the space...that the dreams themselves start to feel more intimate, more meaningful, more relational.
Whether someone is brand new to dreams or has been working with them for years, I try to keep things very human. Slow down. Pay attention. Stay with what’s here. My hope is that people begin to feel more at home in their inner life, and more in relationship with the mystery that dreams open in us.
I also bring my own lived experience into this work, especially in supporting people navigating queer and trans identity, addiction recovery, adoption-related themes, and sexual trauma. I’ve seen again and again how dreams tend to meet us right at the places that feel most tender—and how much can shift and be integrated when we learn how to stay with those places instead of turning away.
I split my time between Northern Italy and the Green Mountains of Vermont, where I live with my partner of 29 years. Outside of dreamwork, I’m usually painting, writing, or outside somewhere—snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking—or just spending time with friends and family, usually laughing more than I intended to.
I also write occasionally on my dream journal In Search of Puella, where I share reflections from my own dream practice and vision work. Some of my dream-inspired writing and artwork has been published in journals and online publications over the years.
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