The Treasure Beneath: Dreams, Intuition, and the Forgotten Places

A few years ago, I took up metal detecting. It is a hobby that excites my inner child—the part of me who wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a little girl, the treasure hunter in me who was always drawn to what is hidden beneath the surface. And in that way, it connects deeply with my practices in dreamwork. Both ask me to slow down, pay attention, and develop my sensitivity to the clues that might otherwise go unnoticed. In many ways, Natural Dreamwork has been and is a process of rekindling my lost or buried intuition. I fine-tune my inner listening skills so that the signals become clearer, more distinct, and more directed toward what is calling me.

As my metal detector sweeps slowly over the ground, passing again and again across terrain that looks uniform to the naked eye, I am listening. Beneath the surface  lies a hidden world of coins, relics, and lost or forgotten objects that have a history, a story to tell. My detector’s task is to sense what cannot be seen. It doesn't do this through sight, but through subtle disturbances in an invisible field. A faint signal, a shift in tone, and suddenly the ordinary ground becomes a place of possibility. As a detectorist, I must first seek those locations where ancestors trod, lived, or worked and, when I arrive at these potential treasure sites, I must carefully tune my detector for the conditions that exist.

Human intuition operates in an interestingly similar way, though its field is not necessarily electromagnetic but rooted in the experiential, in ancestral knowledge, sensitivity, and perceptiveness. Intuition, like my metal detecting, isn’t just chance wisdom. We must seek the inner landscape that contains the memories, and the unconscious latent and emergent material of the deeper psyche that creates those faint signals that lead to the treasures of our knowing. At any given moment, we are surrounded not by soil but by layers of information: expressions, tones of voice, memories, patterns we’ve encountered before, perhaps even ancestral wisdoms handed down over millennia. Most of this passes unnoticed. Yet sometimes, without conscious reasoning, something “pings.” A feeling arises, quiet but insistent, that something matters. Just like the detector’s sudden change in tone or pitch, intuition draws attention to what lies beneath the surface of awareness.

Our intuition, when fully activated and uninhibited by reactivity or trauma, can feel almost supernatural. Just as a metal detector responds to something invisible yet real, intuition often feels like a sensitivity to currents we cannot fully map. People describe it as a “gut feeling,” a quiet inner voice, or even a kind of resonance with situations and people. It can arrive without clear evidence, pointing not just to what is, but to what might be. This is where intuition begins to take on a more mystical character. It doesn't exactly defy reality, but it can reveal how much of reality we do not consciously perceive.

One way to refine this sensitivity is through Natural Dreamwork. Working with our dreams can be understood as a process much like a detector sweeping over unseen or abandoned terrain. Just as coins and relics sink deeper and deeper below the surface over time, so too do those parts of ourselves that have been cut off or exiled. By paying attention to dreams, recording them, reflecting on recurring themes, pausing to let an image evoke feelings, perhaps working the dreams with a dreamwork practitioner, we begin to recognize patterns that are otherwise too subtle for waking awareness. As we allow the dreams to reveal our challenges and conditioning, and begin to open to new possibilities and our deeper knowing, we can gradually uncover and reactivate our buried intuition. This allows us to make choices and decisions that truly are aligned with our desire and reflect our authenticity and inner wisdom. Because intuition is often rooted in the body and heart rather than the mind, Natural Dreamwork’s primary focus, which places the experiential feeling over analytical interpretation, is a perfect medicine for repairing and enhancing our intuitive capacities. Over time, this practice strengthens our ability to “listen” inwardly.

Like any detector, intuition requires calibration. Fear can make it overly sensitive, causing false alarms; indifference can numb it, causing missed opportunities. But when it is well-tuned through experience, reflection, and a degree of inner stillness it becomes a powerful guide. It doesn't necessarily replace rational thinking/reasoning. My metal detector alone isn't going to recover the treasure. I still need to dig and I am often drawn to understand what I've found. It simply nudges me towards where to look. Neither is perfect, sometimes the detector seems to indicate a treasure but all I find is an old bottle cap or nail. Sometimes our dreams bring us the mundane too. But that doesn’t mean we give up the hunt.

At the end of the day, both my metal detector and my dreams remind me of a similar truth: the world is deeper than it appears. Beneath the surface of things, whether the earth or my psyche, there are signals waiting to be noticed. The skill lies in learning how to listen and in cultivating an excitement for the hunt.

Laura Smith-Riva is a Natural Dreamwork practitioner, teacher, and practicing Druid whose work focuses on dreams as a pathway to self discovery, creativity, and personal transformation. She guides individuals and groups in exploring dreams as meaningful experiences rather than symbols to be decoded, integrating nature-based spirituality and contemplative practices. She is also an artist and writer inspired by dreamwork and the natural world. She is an avid metal detectorist and loves to hunt the fields and forests of forgotten places just as she hunts the forgotten places of the psyche through her dreamwork practice. Start your hunt!