Writing with the Unconscious
A series of hypnotic writing workshops leading you into the beautifully weird glittering dreamscapes of your unconscious mind—and the words they contain
🌀 Led by poet and hypnotist Adriana Cloud
Writing with the Unconscious is a series of mind-bending writing adventures that open the hidden doors to your imagination and let the words dance out.
Through hypnotic trance, we’ll slip past the critical gatekeeper of the conscious mind and write from the fertile shadowy places that don’t care about rules.
Each workshop is built around a theme—not a prompt to box you in, but an invitation to wander, to pull at threads, to listen. Each theme is both a compass and a mirror—an open-ended question you can turn inward to explore your relationship with your work, or outward to roam the landscapes of your characters, settings, and ideas.
Wednesday, Aug. 27 – Connection & Belonging
Where do your characters, ideas, or selves belong?
What does it mean to belong to your own voice, your history, your body, your words?
How does connection—or the lack of it—shape what you create and how you create it?
We’ll explore home and exile, inclusion and separation, the comfort of connection and the spark of standing apart.
Sunday, Sept. 28 – Becoming & Unbecoming
Who are you becoming as a writer and what past selves are you leaving behind?
How do your works-in-progress transform as you bring them into existence—and how do they transform you?
What needs to be let go in order for something else to be let in?
We’ll explore transformation, evolution, shedding skins, stepping into new creative identities.
Saturday, Oct. 25 – Freedom & Constraint
What does creative freedom mean?
How can constraints—on form, time, or subject—actually set your creativity on fire?
Where do you feel free and where do you feel bound — and what might those “limits” be teaching you?
We’ll explore freedom not just as boundlessness but as the ability to move with lightness inside any boundary.
These workshops are for you if:
✅ You feel stuck creatively and you’re wondering if you’re even allowed to call yourself a writer anymore.
✅ You’re plugging along on your draft but the spark is gone, and you want to fall back in love with it.
✅ You’ve got a wandering eye and are tempted to cheat on your WIP with a newer, hotter, Pedro Pascal of an idea.
✅ You’re excited to write from that fertile, mystical place just beyond conscious thought.
✅ You want a little fling with hypnosis—guided by a poet and hypnotist you trust—to explore the swirling secrets of your unconscious.
🌀 Imagine approaching your writing lightly and playfully, reconnecting to the pure joy of writing for writing’s sake.
🌀 Imagine feeling so LIT THE F*CK UP about your ideas that you can’t wait to open your draft—or even a blank page!
🌀 Imagine knowing in your bones that you ARE a writer, bound to every word you’ve ever written and every word yet to come.
That’s the space we’ll journey into together in Writing with the Unconscious—and once you’ve been there, you’ll always know how to find your way back.
About your guide
I’m Adriana, an award-winning poet with 25 years of writing and editing experience, and a certified hypnotist. My poetry chapbook Instructions for Building a Windchime was published by the Poetry Society of America, and my poems and essays have appeared in lots of cool places including various print and digital magazines and the window of a bookshop in New York.
I am also a sobriety coach and use hypnosis in my coaching practice to help people quit drinking or cut back on drinking. At the intersection of these two worlds lies a fierce curiosity to play with language, to be a vessel for words, to light matches in the weirdest corners of my mind and bring forth the peculiarities within—if for no other reason than to revel in the joy of self-knowledge and creation.
Workshop details:
Connection & Belonging
Wednesday, Aug. 27, 7 PM BST | 2 PM EDT | 11 AM PDT
Becoming & Unbecoming
Sunday, Sept. 28, 5 PM BST | 12 PM EDT | 9 AM PDT
Freedom & Constraint
Saturday, Oct. 25, 5 PM BST | 12 PM EDT | 9 AM PDT
These are stand-alone workshops and you can come to one or to every one—pick and mix as you please!
The workshops will be recorded, and you will get the replays if you can’t attend live.
Price:
$45 each or $90 for all three (yes, that’s THREE for the price of TWO!).
Deadline to register: Oct. 25. If you register after a particular workshop has already taken place, you will still get the recording for it.
No refunds.
What you need:
Have access to Zoom.
Be in a quiet space where you will not be disturbed.
Come with your work-in-progress or with a blank page.
You do NOT have to have your camera on, and you will NOT be asked to share any of you writing or to participate in any way.
Ok, but what is trance/hypnosis? Will you be swinging a watch in my face to make me fall asleep?
If this is your first encounter with these terms—fear not! There will be zero watches involved.
“Trance” is like meditation with an agenda. It’s a relaxed state of mind accompanied by a narrowing of the focus. We go in and out of trance every day, except we don’t call it that. You’re in trance when you’re watching a good movie or reading a book or zoned out thinking about apple pie during your evening commute. When we’re in a state of trance, we’re more suggestible because our critical thinking has taken a back seat, which makes our unconscious thoughts more easily accessible.
“Hypnosis” is a type of trance where a hypnotist uses particular techniques (counting down, visualization, etc.) to induce a state of focused attention.
Hypnosis is NOT mind control. You will not be suddenly tempted to give me your Netflix password or your PIN. (Believe me, if I could control minds, I’d be otherwise occupied! 😉)
You will be fully conscious the whole time and you will remember everything that happened.
You cannot get stuck in trance, and trance is not dangerous.