AS Katoch

Biography

AS Katoch (1989) is a British-Indian dream researcher, essayist, and mythographer whose work regards dreams as living images - sources of myth, divination, and psychological re-enchantment. Formed as a Joyce scholar at the University of Nottingham, where he studied the cognitive poetics of oneiric texts (MA Literary Linguistics, 2011), his practice, Jungian Arts-Based Research, draws on active imagination through yoga nidra, depth psychology, and the comparative study of dream imagery from ancient Mesopotamia to Mughal India, with a particular focus on the ancestral visual culture of Himachal Pradesh through Pahari painting and the wider Indian miniature tradition. Drawing on Hellenistic, Vedic, Islamicate, Italianate, and Early Modern British astrological traditions alongside tarot and the I Ching (since 2012), he has forged a syncretic understanding of dream horary, dream astrology, and oneiromancy as living epistemologies. He divides his time between Staffordshire and the Himalayan foothills, where much of this research has its roots.

He is an independent researcher at the Warburg Library, London, and a member of the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices (RENSEP). He has presented at the International Association for the Study of Dreams and with the London Arts-Based Research Centre at the University of Oxford. A Jungian analysand since 2015, he is also a Press Association-trained journalist. He is currently at work on a collection of essays on dreams and an Indian Gothic novel.

Lectured internationally on dreams, divination, and Indian visual culture:

  • June 2024 · International Association for the Study of Dreams, Netherlands - the astrological Lot of Dreams and oneiromancy in Hellenistic culture; archival research at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

  • September 2024 · Astrological Association conference - Albrecht Dürer's 1525 Dream Vision as prophecy, divination, and material culture; arts-based research in the Warburg Institute's Photographic Collection, London

  • March 2025 · IASD 'Dreams and Spirituality' conference, Bangalore - dreams and divination in the Indian miniature painting tradition

  • June 2025 · IASD annual online conference - the 18th-century Śākunāvalī and dream omen miniature paintings

  • November 2025 · London Arts-Based Research Centre 'Alchemy' conference, St Anne's College, Oxford - active imagination as yogic Indian alchemy; Ashmolean Museum archival research

  • January 2026 · LABRC 'Astrology in Focus' online conference - ancestral Pahari astrological paintings in the Kangra idiom; Ashmolean Museum archival research

Services

In the Vedic traditions of my ancestors, life itself is a dream: the cosmos dreaming itself awake. Every question is never only about the future.

I offer 90-minute oracular consultations (£200) via Google Meet, in which I witness your question through the interwoven arts of depth psychology, oneiromancy, ancient and medieval astrologies, tarot, I Ching, rhapsodomancy, and active imagination. Every session is entirely bespoke; nothing is pre-scripted. Together we allow the images, symbols, planets, cards, or lines of poetry to speak until your question answers itself.

"Dream" here is not limited to what happens at night. We may explore any of these living strands of your dream-life:

  • Nocturnal visions, recurring dream patterns, precognitive glimpses, or difficulties with dream recall

  • Spiritual encounters and visitations from ancestors or the departed

  • Lucid dreaming, déjà rêve, and the cultivation of conscious dreaming

  • Life aspirations, fantasies, career, love, sexuality, or creative projects as waking dreams

  • Nightmares, night terrors, or periods when life itself feels nightmarish

  • The soul's deepest longings - the dream you are afraid to admit you still carry

Recent commissions have included:

  • Mapping concatenating animal synchronicities with Hellenistic astrology and oneiromancy

  • Navigating complex familial karma through a series of tarot and I Ching readings using Benebell Wen's syncretic method (which she personally taught me in 2018)

  • Illuminating the next six years of health and vitality via the rare tribhagi dasha technique in Jyotish

  • Guiding erotic and sexual becoming with Jungian dreamwork combined with Wen-method tarot and I Ching

  • Activating the Lot of Dreams (klēros oneirōn) in natal charts to deepen the querent's relationship to dreaming itself

  • Rhapsodomantic bibliotherapy using sacred or poetic texts as living oracles

  • Elective astrology (Hellenistic, Bonatti, Lilly, Vedic) for the successful launch of albums, exhibitions, novels, and poetry collections

  • Oneiromancy for blocked creative projects - allowing the dream to finish the painting, the poem, or song the waking mind could not

Sessions are recorded for you. See Terms & Conditions.

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