Tony Crisp

Tony Crisp is an internationally renowned expert on dreams and their interpretation and author of the best-selling Dream Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Understanding Your Unconscious Mind, which has been translated into seven languages worldwide. Tony has worked at the vanguard of the personal development and self-help movement for more than fifty years, co-founding in the 1970s one of the first human growth centres in the UK. He has five children and lives alone in a cottage in Wales.

"Throughout more than four decades I have been involved in a personal search for the secrets of mind and spirit. In those years I have also been involved in teaching thousands of people techniques of deep relaxation, meditation, and methods of self exploration. Wanting to dig deep I explored the use of dreams and taught individuals and groups how to use these visions of the night to explore the deepest issues in themselves, and to touch the high ground of their spiritual awareness. I worked for twenty years as a psychotherapist using several approaches, one of which was a way of honouring the body as a doorway to the mind and emotions.

During the forty years of seeking the wild wondrous beasts of the soul and spirit, I dared my own inner adventure. But I also travelled with other people, sharing their experience of fear and wonder as they unveiled and set loose their fountain of perception. I have trod countless dream pathways, traversed the timeless with those using drugs, and wrestled with the vitality of the body as it mimed and shouted its deepest intuitions through movement, dance and voice.

So I write about dreams, about daring visions, about the power of growth and creativity within a person that attempts to burst through the restrictions and fears hemming in ones transformative power. They break through because the person dares to allow their habitual response to the world to be silenced for a while, so other voices, other views can be known. I write about this voice and vision that arises out of the silence for the person who willingly faces the ferment of discovering what their life means, and what understanding they can gather from the world around them. It is for those who do not mind the discomfort of doubt and of conjecture, because they are alive in spirit and forever taking in the new and restructuring their perception of life.

Very often we treat our own native genius, our own thrusting, living and magnificent perceptions like dangerous beasts to be held at bay lest they tear apart our attempts at building a safe concept of the world. But there is a natural bond linking us with these untamed forces in us that arises from the process of our life itself. The bond is that the forces active in the unconscious constantly strive for survival, and part of that striving is in the area of feeling, of knowing, of understanding. The struggle we see in our cells to maintain their equilibrium and identity exists also in our soul and mind. In finding an alliance instead of a state of war or suppression with this process within us, our life is enhanced, perhaps transformed."