Working with Dreams: Dreaming for Healers

What are dreams?

On the simplest level, dreams are a form of communication from the subconscious to the conscious mind.

Carl Jung has written that a dream is a highly targeted message from the ancestral experience encoded in our biology and our culture. Recent American philosophers and ancient Eastern contemplatives say that a dream is a "download" to the individual mind from the annals of collective human experience. However you phrase it, dreaming is a universal human phenomenon, and one that's little understood in most of Western culture.

In Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, the distinctions between waking & dreaming are blurred as the protagonist makes his way through a graphically altered version of Austin, Texas, interacting with philosophers and (extra) ordinary people. Along with poetic rants and gentle ramblings, the film explores a certain malaise that comes with not knowing which reality is really real -- the dreaming life or the waking life.

The Hollywood film Inception takes this idea even farther. The movie's hero is chief of a mind-intervention team that operates through group dreaming. Highly trained professional dreamers invade other people's dream life to implant subconscious ideas that influence the target's behavior. Each dream within a dream represents a deeper layer of the subject's unconscious mind.  

Ancient TIbetan dreaming practices involve performing elaborate rituals and meditations within a dream, for the ultimate purposes of service to the collective unconscious and preparing the individual dreamer for a conscious dying and afterlife.

While these may be inspiring examples, you needn't aspire to such esoteric experiences to have an informative relationship with your dream life.

How do dreams help us?

Your dreams tell you about your present-time experience and where it fits with your overall life narrative. Jung evoked the dream state for several hours daily to explore archetypal narratives in his own psyche. Fritz Perls was a big proponent of intentional dreaming as a method of integrating disparate aspects of the individual personality. And traditional shamanic societies have used dreaming medicines to perform emotional and psychological healing for entire families and villages. What might we gain from dreaming practice in our own work as therapists?

Dreaming deliberately is a way of interacting directly with our subconscious. It enhances the role of the conscious will in the unconscious, and clarifies communications to the individual consciousness mind from the archetypal patterns of human experience. Tapping into the broad arcs of your life story and how they relate to the story of the human race over many generations can give tremendous insight on personality development, individual will, and other relevant elements of inner life.

Dreaming practice can have a beneficial effect on our work, as well as our personal reflections. As the conscious and unconscious minds start to communicate more freely, we can discover unexpected access to creativity in waking life. Intentional and lucid dreaming can open the path to experiencing new realities in waking. As we revisit glimpses of dream experience during waking life, we access new channels of creativity and imagination.

How do we make sense of dreams?

Interpreting our dreams is making the unconscious conscious. Most observers on dreaming begin with one central premise: Everything and everyone, every place and every sequence of events in a dream is (or represents) an aspect of the dreamer.

Here are some common dream reports:

"I'm traveling with a group of people. We're taking a plane, a train, and a bus. I'm responsible for getting everyone to the right place at the right time, but I've invariably forgotten to pack my own suitcase and am scrambling to catch up before the group leaves without me."...OR

"I'm running from a pursuer in a dark city and discover I can leap several stories of stairs or launch myself down a whole block with a single stride. Running becomes leaping, and leaping becomes flying as I carry myself above the trees to the sunlit fields and meadows outside the city."....OR

"I'm finding my way around a high school, college, or grad school campus. I finally locate my French classroom, and the professor is announcing the final exam date: It's next week. This is the first time I've been to class and I am consumed with chagrin and bewilderment."

The group of people, the bus, the city, the pursuer, the leaping, the teacher, and the exam are all aspects of the dreamer's own inner life.

How do we dream more deliberately?

To cultivate dream retention & understanding, we can "prime" the mind for more coherent and revelatory dreams. The first step is to intend to dream upon going to sleep, and then to write down any memories of your dreams immediately on waking. Even with strong intent, it may take several days in a row to get a dream that you feel is "worth" recording. Just writing down a word or two can invite the mind to deliver a clearer dream the next day. Thick white clouds. Climbing a snowy cliff. A gigantic billboard. If no dream memory comes at first, write down the first thoughts you experience on waking.

To enhance dream recall, you can also tell others about your dreams. You can set your alarm an hour early and use the snooze button for half-hour intervals to hover in the half-awake, half-asleep state known as hypnagogia. Or try taking a timed afternoon nap, for example sitting upright in a chair, as Thomas Edison was known to do when he wanted to invoke the unconscious mind's information for his inventions.

Inviting and remembering the dream is only the beginning of a dreaming practice. With consistent attention to the process, you can learn to devise reality checks to determine whether you're dreaming. One method from traditional societies is to look down at your hands, which tend to be distorted in a dream. Another, more modern, is to see if you can switch on and off the lights in a room.

Over time, you may discover entire landscapes, towns, and casts characters existing solely in your dream life. You may find, as Hindu practitioners of yoga nidra do, that you can maintain conscious awareness all the way into dream state and back out again. You may decide to join neuroscience researchers at Stanford University in communicating with others through group dreaming experiments. 

And you may determine, as did dream researcher Jennifer Dumpert in her discussions at Oneironauticum.com, that dreaming is a way of "summoning meaning, courting the sacred, and giving form to the ineffable."

To learn more, don't forget to register for our webinar on Friday, September 20, from 10 am - 11:30 am Pacific time. Register here.  

Until next month, appreciate the creativity of your dreams as well as those of others you know.

Maggie