Alternative Ways of Knowing: Dreaming - German Chemist Kekulé and Turkish Synesthete İpek Nisa Göker 🐍🎶 - Waldorf Education
- ceydahosgor
- Jun 12, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 20, 2025
In dominant epistemologies, knowledge is often defined by rationality, objectivity, and empirical evidence. While these approaches have yielded significant advancements, they represent a narrow spectrum of the ways humans make sense of the world. Dreaming is a profound alternative epistemology, a way of knowing that transcends rationalist frameworks by embracing symbolic, spiritual, and relational dimensions of knowledge. In many indigenous cultures, dreams are not dismissed as mere fantasies but are deeply respected as vital sources of insight and ways of relating to the world.
Recognizing dreaming as a legitimate form of knowledge challenges the dominance of current epistemologies and invites a more pluralistic understanding of how truth, insight, and meaning are generated. Dreams also sustain collective memory, carrying shared histories, teachings, and cultural identity across generations. It calls for an epistemic humility, an openness to ways of knowing that are intuitive and communal.
Beyond cultural contexts, dreaming has sparked scientific and creative breakthroughs.
In Man and His Symbols (1) book, Carl Jung explores the deep significance of dreams as expressions of the unconscious mind, rich with archetypal imagery and symbolic meaning. To illustrate how dreams can yield profound insights, Jung discusses the case of chemist August Kekulé. Kekulé dreamed of a snake forming a circle by biting its own tail which led him to conceptualize the ring-shaped structure of the benzene molecule. For Jung, this example demonstrates how the symbolic language of dreams can guide individuals toward profound discoveries.
Similarly, numerous artists have tapped into their dreams as a source of inspiration and demonstrated that dreams might be a catalyst for creativity in artistic realms. Below is a short video clip featuring Karsu and synesthete İpek Nisa Göker that exemplifies this:
Dreaming as a way of Knowing and Its Implications on Pedagogy
Recognizing dreaming as a way of knowing might offer powerful implications for pedagogy by inviting educators and learners to embrace non-linear, intuitive, and symbolic ways of knowing alongside rational and empirical approaches. We can begin to reimagine knowledge as something not only to be measured and verified, but also felt, remembered, and shared. This fundamentally has a potential to transform teaching and learning, and the purpose we teach and learn for. When knowledge is seen as something that is felt, remembered, and shared, education becomes more than the transmission of facts.
Classrooms become environments where emotional intelligence and creativity are honored as much as analytical skills, encouraging students to trust their intuition, reflect on inner experiences, and engage with material through imagination and symbolism rather than solely through memorization or logic. This approach fosters deeper, more meaningful connections with content and nurtures inclusivity by recognizing diverse ways of knowing, often overlooked in mainstream education. Such attitude fosters lifelong learning, adaptability, and creative engagement with oneself, others, and the world.
Its Resonance with Waldorf Pedagogy
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, in his first teacher conference delivered in Stuttgart in 1919 (2) explained that through proper education, children could integrate their waking experiences with the soul-spirit’s work during sleep, allowing spiritual insights to return as strength in their physical lives. Rudolf Steiner also stated that dreams of the small child still reflect the creative forces that comes from the spiritual world and are active in the physical realm (3). This vision resonates with the idea of a creative breakthrough inspired by a dream, just like the melody that came to İpek Nisa Göker in a dream and later transformed into a composition in the physical world. Can we, as adults, still remain in contact with our dreams and recognize their potential to guide innovation, just as Kekulé envisioned the structure of benzene in a dream? And perhaps another question worth asking is: could this really become possible through a certain kind of education?
Waldorf education aims to foster this deep connection between the physical and spiritual by nurturing imagination, intuition, and symbolic thinking through storytelling, art, movement, and reflection. Steiner’s approach seems to resonate with a pluralistic epistemology that honors alternative ways of knowing, supporting learners in developing holistically and creatively.
If you’re interested in learning more about Waldorf education, you can soon join the course I’ll be offering. This course provides a general introduction to Waldorf pedagogy.
Life is like a box of chocolate you never know what you are going to get (4):
In March 2025, I traveled to Hereford, England, to attend the retreat for the "Creative Pedagogies and Waldorf Pedagogy" PGDip course for two days (5). A few weeks before the retreat, I participated in a womb workshop led by a midwife (6). During the workshop, small carvings called Sheela-na-gigs were introduced, including an example from Ireland.
Curious if similar carvings might exist in England, I did some research, and what did I find?
A well-preserved Sheela-na-gig at the Church of St Mary and St David in Kilpeck, Herefordshire. After the retreat, I went to see it in person.
While writing this blog post in June 2025, I was researching Kekulé’s ouroboros dream online. I came across an article about Kekulé’s dream that included a photo of an ouroboros carving at a church (7). Can you guess which church this is?
Yes, the very same Church of St Mary and St David in Kilpeck, Herefordshire.
I found this very little connection very thrilling.
Could this be a twist of fate pointing to another alternative way of knowing? Are we merely stumbling upon these places by chance, or is the wisdom of these sites like a wonderful book waiting for us to read?
References:
(1) Jung, C.G., 2012 (1964). Man and His Symbols. London: Bantam Books.
(2) Steiner, R. (1996) The Foundations of Human Experience. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press
(3) Steiner, Rudolf. Lecture on April 9, 1923.
(4) A quote from Forrest Gump movie. Forrest Gump (1994) Directed by R. Zemeckis. USA: Paramount Pictures.
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