The Dreaming, Charlotte Church's Welsh retreat, will pause in December after a drop in bookings

The Dreaming, the retreat Charlotte Church founded near Rhayader in Mid Wales, will pause its work from December 2026, the retreat announced in a newsletter reported on October 8, 2026. It ties a severe drop in bookings to the cost of living and to "the war in Iran and subsequent economic shocks". It calls the closure a "hibernation" and gives no date for reopening.

Two explanations in one announcement

The announcement carries two accounts of the same closure, and they do not sit at the same level. The first is a business one. Brit Brief and the Mirror, via AOL, both quote it in full, starting with the line "Our bookings track the deepening cost of living crisis of the last few years".

The sentence goes on: "most recently the war in Iran and subsequent economic shocks corresponds directly with a severe drop in bookings." Then comes the verdict: "We are a casualty of the massive cut in people’s discretionary spending that has been widely reported since these events."

The second account, in the newsletter posted on the retreat's own website, is a larger one. "It is a different world today than the one we started off in just a short half decade ago." The team points to "exponentially complexifying crises that have been spreading out ahead of us all like cracking ice" and says it must reassess what it should be offering.

The newsletter gives no booking figures, so the size of the fall is not known. The claim that bookings "correspond directly" with a war is the retreat's own reading, made by the party that sells the beds, and it is a strong verb for a business that hosts sixteen guests at a time. Nothing in the announcement says which of the two accounts weighs more.

The vocabulary of the newsletter is agricultural. "Through the harvest season, it is important to discern what requires attention from that which is falling away, what needs to be put to compost," it says, and the team wants to "compost, mulch, go fallow". It is a gentle way to describe a business decision, and it leaves the reader to work out which of the five years' programmes is the compost.

What five years and £1.5 million bought

The Dreaming opened five years ago in Rhydoldog House, a property that once belonged to the Welsh fashion designer Laura Ashley. The Brecon and Radnor Express reports that Church spent her life savings, £1.5 million, on a house that had fallen into disrepair, and that she documented the renovation for Discovery+.

Brit Brief describes a house of eight rooms and sprawling gardens for sixteen guests. The retreat says guests come to "reduce their chance of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes", a health claim in the retreat's own wording, reported by Brit Brief and the Mirror without a study attached.

The newsletter counts over three thousand guests in five years. Hundreds of them came through a "pay-what-you-can" scheme, "offering as little as £1 per night". NHS workers and activists had free-to-attend retreats, which the team calls "amongst our proudest achievements", and hundreds more people joined through work-exchange and artist-in-residence programmes. The list of pioneering retreats runs from Muslim women to women of African and Caribbean descent and the queer community.

That is a wide brief for sixteen beds.

Church is quoted on the site describing the place: "The Dreaming is a place for healing through experiencing beauty and wonder. It is a place for everyone: affordable and inclusive."

The numbers put a question next to the mission. A house bought for £1.5 million, sixteen beds and a sliding scale that went down to £1 a night make a hard sum, and the newsletter does not say how many guests paid the full rate. The site still advertises "300+ 5-STAR REVIEWS".

What a randomized trial found about the week away

Retreats sell two things at once: a change of scene and a practice. Pulling them apart is difficult, and one randomized trial tried. The Retreat and Relaxation Study appeared in Translational Psychiatry on August 30, 2016. It is not news, but it is a direct test of what a retreat adds to a holiday.

The researchers enrolled 102 healthy women aged 30 to 60, with an average age of 47, mostly white and college-educated. Novices were randomly assigned either to a one-week meditation and yoga retreat run by the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, or to the same resort with none of the retreat activities. A third group of regular meditators, already booked on the retreat, served as a comparison.

On the first measure, the holiday won as often as the retreat. The authors write: "After 1 week at a resort, participants felt greater vitality and decreased distress, regardless of whether they were in the resort group or in an intensive meditation/yoga retreat." Blood samples showed large gene expression changes in every group, which they call the vacation effect.

The gap opened later. One month on, the novice meditators scored higher on mindfulness than the other two groups. At 10 months they showed greater decreases in depressive symptoms and stress levels than the women who had only rested.

Read plainly, rest alone lifted everyone, and the arm that was asked to learn something unfamiliar held its gain longer. That fits a curiosity about effort and attention, but the study did not test challenge as such. Its meditation arm bundled sitting practice with yoga postures, self-reflection exercises and lectures, so no single ingredient can be credited. The authors name their limits. The sample was "relatively small and powered only to detect medium-to-large effects", participants knew which arm they were in, and the regular meditators were not randomized. Three authors had received an award from the Chopra Foundation, a disclosure the paper makes, and the retreat tested was a Chopra Center retreat.

The regular meditators produced the most hedged result. They showed a trend toward higher telomerase activity, an enzyme that elongates the ends of chromosomes, while the randomized women showed higher levels of a tumor necrosis factor, an inflammation marker, which the authors suggest could come from the blood draw or sun exposure. The authors note that no study has yet tracked these markers to see how well they predict disease or longevity in healthy people. The mood scores are the sturdier part of the paper.

The trial says nothing about a Welsh house with ceremonies, sound work and a witchcraft programme. It speaks only to the general question of whether a retreat is more than a rest.

A market that kept growing while one house shut

One closure does not describe an industry. The Global Wellness Institute ranks the United Kingdom fifth among wellness markets in 2024, at $261 billion. Over 2019 to 2024 the UK grew by 7.5% to 8.5% a year, against a global average of 6.2%, and wellness tourism is one of four sectors that the Institute credits for much of the growth in the biggest markets.

Those figures stop at 2024. They predate the economic shocks the retreat cites, so they can neither confirm nor contradict its account of 2026. Per capita spending gives another scale: the Institute puts it above $5,000 in the richest wellness economies and at $831 worldwide in 2024. A market report's growth curve and one booking calendar are different instruments, and the first cannot explain the second.

British readers will see the pattern in the retreat's own wording. A pay-what-you-can house that promised affordability met a fall in discretionary spending, and what shrank first was the paid part of a mixed model. That is a reading of the sums, not a finding, because no accounts or booking data have been published.

What stays on the calendar until December

The pause does not begin at once. The site lists a weekly signature retreat on October 9 to 12, 2026, with further weekly dates through early November. Song of the Soul, Church's own retreat on sound, story and self-expression, runs in late October.

The Samhain retreat follows from October 28 to November 1, and the five-day Witch retreat, led by Church with Tree Carr, from November 9 to 13. The newsletter says there are "a few spaces left" for the last Signature, Samhain and Witch retreats, and the Brecon and Radnor Express adds that places remain on the scheduled retreats of this year.

An eight-chapter online course with Church, Of The Earth, is on the site, and the newsletter describes its other course as "a perfect companion for the darker months ahead".

On the return, the spokesperson offers a promise without a date: "We cannot say when exactly we will be returning from the dream realm, but return we shall."

Sources

• The Dreaming, newsletter and retreat calendar, The Dreaming, October 2026
• Meditation and vacation effects have an impact on disease-associated molecular phenotypes, Translational Psychiatry, August 30, 2016
• Global Wellness Economy: Country Rankings (2019-2024 data), Global Wellness Institute