Bio

Katherine (Kas) Sartori, head shotKatherine (Kas) Sartori writes on a variety of topics including travel, creativity, and writing to publish. She is currently working on another novel called LILY and EVE as well as a collection of short stories. One is published in A Cup of Comfort Book for Single Mothers, April 2008. Her novel, The Chosen Shell, is now available through amazon.com and createspace, and is considered women’s fiction. Additionally, her articles have appeared in Planet Vermont QuarterlyFamily Motor Coaching Magazine, and The Writers News.
Katherine travels extensively. She has trekked through South America, China, France, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, the British Isles, Thailand, Eastern Europe and Russia, among other destinations.

Katherine has an extensive writing background. During her years working in the aerospace and electrical industries, she wrote numerous trade articles, corporate reports, and technical documentation. In addition, she created a unique curriculum and taught Business Writing for several years at California State University in Fullerton, California.

Deeply committed to opening young minds to the richness of creativity, Katherine has taught writing to children, teens and adults. She is a member/founder of several critique groups in California and has studied writing with published novelists and at UCLA and UCI.

Katherine is a member and past Vice President of Programs for the Mission Viejo-Saddleback Valley branch of the American Association of University Women. As Chairman of Scholarships for the AAUW, a position she held for several years, Katherine led fundraising efforts for local college women.

After graduating Magna Cum Laud from California State University, Los Angeles, with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Katherine earned her Master of Arts in Communication at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

Recent Posts

The Mystery of Dreams

Photo NaturalThoughts By Idea go ID-10020201

Photo by Idea go @freedigitalphotos.net

Have you ever had a dream you can’t forget? That startles you? That seems so odd or scary it’s hard to decipher?

I’m a Dream Traveler. I not only like to dream up my next story, adventure, trip or project but I love to keep learning! So, I said to myself, why not learn about DREAMS?

Recently, a friend talked me into going to what to me was a very unusual workshop:  “Dream Tending,” led by Stephen Aizenstat. I spent an unforgettable 4-day weekend at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. It was an amazing experience!

So what exactly is dream tending, you ask? I wasn’t sure myself, but I soon found out it was a practical approach to deciphering the meaning of our dreams. Using Carl Jung’s foundational principles and his 40+ years of psychological study and counseling, Stephen Aizenstat led us all in a step-by-step approach to try to uncover the mysteries of our unconscious.

We’ve all had dreams we can’t forget. We spend days trying to figure them out. We ask ourselves: What is our unconscious trying to say? Stephen Aizenstat says the unconscious is the voice of our soul, trying to penetrate our conscious mind through the dream figures and images we experience. Uncovering their important actions, colors, and moods is also part of solving this mysterious puzzle. “These are real inhabitants of our psychic reality,” he told us. Then he advised us to select one special dream, write it down and then freely draw pictures of it.

From there we began to “work the dream” by watching Stephen unravel the dreams of five different attendees throughout the weekend. In front of an audience of @120 people, they revealed their dream aloud and tried to relate it to details, incidents or people in their lives, prompted by Stephan’s sensitive questions. Some dreamt of white whales or flowers that turned into monsters. Others were on a journey, climbing a mountain or traversing the sea. Others wandered through a forgotten factory or witnessed a strange, enigmatic parade. By the end of Stephen’s session though, each dreamer was enlightened, relieved and even elated by their discoveries.

The dream I chose “to tend” was very odd and, because I dreamt it the first night of that weekend and it actually woke me up, I felt it was a special message from that “Other World” of my mysterious psyche. So, when we first broke into groups, I threw worry to the winds and decided to reveal it to the three other wonderful ladies in my Kiva, (the name Stephen gave to our small groups). Working together, we were told to seek out associations in the dream and in our lives, plus look for ancient story figures (archetypes) as well as animated dream figures who often visit our dreams.

Carnival-FairPhoto

photo by KasSartori

My unusual dream:   I was in a New York subway car alone. Suddenly the car swerved from the underground to a carnival place much like the county fair, and it stopped. Through the windows I could see crowds having fun. Vendors were selling cotton candy and hawking their prizes and teddy bears, asking people to try their hand at different games. I sat inside the subway car though, suddenly realizing I’d sat there for two whole days. Then I leaned over and noticed a hole in the bottom of the subway car’s floor. For some inexplicable reason, I reached down into the hole, which turned out to be a heavy black pipe full of yucky slime. I had to yank my hand to get it out, but then when I looked down at it, the diamonds in my engagement ring as well as the small one in my wedding ring were gone! I was shocked and wished I’d never done it! Continue reading

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