Working with Dreams

Working with dreams means helping your waking-conscious mind understand the meaning and/or message of the dream. There are many ways to do that, and the bibliography lists many books that describe methods of dream working. This section is a brief overview of options.

Remember them. People who say they don’t remember their dreams are frustrated with dreamwork. See Aides in Dream Recall if you need some help in remembering your dreams.

Important information that you will need in addition to your dreams is your current situation: health, value/belief system, current living conditions... These are listed on the Dream Worksheet, in a format that you can adopt, or create one of your own.

Dream journals. Keeping a log of your dreams (and dreamwork) is a powerful method of working with dreams because you can then go back to dreams later, after you get some distance from them. Or you can search through for all the dreams that contain a certain symbol and see if there is any unifying thread. It provides the sense of history that can help give perspective.

Tell your dreams. There are some societies that consider their dream-lives to be extremely important. One, that impacted modern dreamworking, was the writing of studies of the Senoi people in Malaysia. The story is that they had the custom of dream sharing each morning. In addition to that when they dreamed of someone they told that person and if the person had been kind to them in the dream, then they gave that person a gift. If that person had been unkind, then the other person had to give them a gift. Upon discovery of these people they had no war - an interesting combination.

Interpreting dreams. There are many schools of thought about how to interpret dreams. Often a dreamer will take the dream to the person who has more knowledge and that person will tell the dreamer what the dream means. Currently, among many dreamworkers, that technique is considered invasive of the dreamers unconscious space and they prefer to help the dreamer discover their own interpretations by asking questions, and providing some teaching when it seems useful to the dreamer. The focus is switching to the capacity of the dreamer to establish meaning on his/her own dream.

Living with dreams. The mysticists would say that rather than only interpreting dreams that it is important to experience them in other ways.

Drawing dreams. Drawing accesses a different part of our mind/brain and insights can be gained from "experiencing" a dream in this way that is different from bouncing words around. Often there is more of an emotional reaction to the images created than is available through verbal description.

Dancing dreams. As in drawing, sometimes it is useful to get the feeling of the dream into the body in some way. To FEEL it's meaning. Usually, people are too shy to do this in public, but you may want to try it in the privacy of your own room.

Active Imagination. In an attempt to work with the conscious understanding of symbols you may want to use various associative techniques such as this. In Active Imagination you would pick a symbol that seems to be interesting and start writing all the associations you have with it, any words or phrases that come to mine. Or you may want to create a dialog between yourself and a symbol. Do not allow any thoughts of editing the conversation until you have finished. Or create a dialog between two symbols. Often these characters or symbols will have some news to tell you and you can let them do so by temporarily suspending the inner critic long enough to get the message out. Write the conversation as if you were writing a screen-play. Then you re-engage the inner judge/critic when you are trying to understand what the Active Imagination exercise results mean. You need the inner critic - after all if a symbol told you to jump in a lake and you didn't know how to swim, I would hope the inner critic would come in and say either don't do it, or take some swimming lessons first.

Re-entering the dream. If you are familiar with meditating or creative visualization techniques you could put yourself in a trance and re-enter the dream to continue the action. Or you could, while still awaking from the dream allow yourself to go back into the dream and continue it.

Dream incubation. You can request a dream. Sometimes if you have a particular problem to solve and can't come up with the solution, or if there is a difficult decision to be made you may want to ask yourself for a dream that will help you. It is helpful at night to write down with intent what you wish to know and then pay attention to any dreams that come up.

Group dreaming. Some groups even incubate dreams together for a group effort on problem solving or help with direction. Sometimes they will just sleep together, maybe heads in a circle and see what happens. See the section on Working with Dream in Groups.

Lucid dreaming. This is when you know you are awake when you are dreaming. This is becoming quite a popular subject as people are learning that they can allow themselves some freedom of choice in what their dream ego does. There is controversy over this in traditional circles because one doesn't want to muck about too much with unconscious material. Others say nonsense, this frees us from the total identification with the ego so we can soar in the clouds if we wish.

More Dream information

Jung said about dreams:

"One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature - a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess."

(Man and His Symbols, pg. 52)

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