Category: Experiential

Posted in
Posted in

Dream to remember, dream to forget, dream to feel better…

By

Dreaming after an emotional experience might help us feel better in the morning

Although dreaming has been implicated in the consolidation of memories, it seems we also dream to forget. In a similar way that sleep has been shown to clean our brains of clutter, a recent study supports the notion that dreaming helps us rid our minds of non-essential memories so we can focus on what is important to us, but only if we remember our dreams.

Zhang and colleagues (2024) recently completed a study that supports an active role for dreaming in reducing next-day reactivity associated with emotional memories. Their research also suggests there is a mechanism in which dreams enhance salient emotional experiences at the expense of less relevant, or neutral memories. In short, dreaming helps us remember and process what’s important to us, and to forget what is not. But again, only if we recall our dreams.

This is an interesting feature of the study – the results only applied to those who recall dreams. We know that just because we don’t recall dreams in the morning, this does not mean we did not dream during the night. Most of our dreams are forgotten; it has been suggested that dreams do their job even when we don’t recall them. However, this study demonstrates an important role for dreams that we remember upon waking – a possibly a reason it’s worth cultivating greater dream recall.

According to the authors: “This study asks why we dream. Building on prior work demonstrating a link between sleep and the processing of emotional memories, we examine whether dreaming alters overnight memory and emotional reactivity on an emotional picture task. We found that participants who reported dreaming exhibited an emotional memory trade-off, prioritizing retention of negative images over neutral memories, a pattern that was absent in those who did not recall their dreams. Moreover, dreaming was associated with decreased emotional reactivity to negative memories the following day, with reduced reactivity tied to more positive dream content. We provide the first empirical support for dreaming’s active involvement in sleep-dependent emotional memory processing, suggesting that dreaming after an emotional experience might help us feel better in the morning.”

This article juxtaposes the continuity hypothesis of dreaming with that of dreaming as emotional regulation. “The Emotion Regulation theory of dreaming is different from the Continuity theory of dreaming as it proposes that dreams lead to a functional change in emotion regulation during waking.” The authors note a dichotomy in the prevalent theories about dreaming – those who consider dreaming a passive activity ascribe to the continuity of dream affect before, during and after dreaming. Those who ascribe to Emotion Regulation or Simulation theories suggest dreaming plays an active role in changing one’s experience (albeit by different mechanisms: Emotion Regulation by downregulating negative emotions, and Simulation Theory by preparing for future experiences).

The current study is an attempt to test whether dreams actively support the transformation of emotional reactivity by measuring changes after a night of sleep in both those who report dreams and those who do not recall any dreams. If the dream recallers have decreased reactivity the morning after dreaming, this would support the sleep-to-forget, sleep-to-remember (SFSR) hypothesis. SFSR is supported by previous studies which show that REM sleep preferentially preserves emotional memories over neutral ones.

However, the authors note that results of research into the effect of REM sleep on emotional reactivity are decidedly mixed – some studies show increased regulation, others, increased arousal. In surveying existing literature, the authors reached the conclusion that “dreaming might play a role in both the memory consolidation and the emotional regulation aspects of emotional memory processing.”

To test the change in next-day emotional reactivity after memorable dreaming, 125 women were studied, in a mix of sleep lab and at-home settings. The authors were able to replicate prior reports of an emotional memory trade-off in which sleep preferentially enhances consolidation of negative versus neutral memories. They suggest their study “highlights the critical role of dreaming in emotional memory processing during sleep.”

The study also supported prior research showing that emotional reactivity to previous experiences decreases after a night of sleep, but again, this effect was only present in those who remembered their dreams. In participants who did not recall dreams, no significant differences were found between negative and neutral memory performance. This interesting distinction was flagged as “remarkable” and an important topic for future research.

 

Zhang J, Pena A, Delano N, Sattari N, Shuster AE, Baker FC, Simon K, Mednick SC. Evidence of an active role of dreaming in emotional memory processing shows that we dream to forget. Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 15;14(1):8722. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-58170-z. PMID: 38622204; PMCID: PMC11018802.

Posted in
Posted in

Dream Program Doubles Confidence in Working with Dreams

By

The reviews are in! Those who just completed the year-long Embodied Experiential Dreamwork program last year said their confidence in tending dreams is now at 8 out of 10 – up from a class average of 3.7 at the start of the program.

If you are considering taking this program, you may be interested in what our recent grads had to say about it. Here are some of the comments from our exit survey:

“Since taking this program, personally, I now pay more attention to my dreams because I am more fully at ease with them and  have various ways of being with them – many ways of opening the doors that can lead to possible meanings.

Professionally, I can offer clients these ways of helping them be with their dreams, particularly bad dreams and nightmares. For those considering taking this program: it is well worth the time, energy and effort. There is so much specifically and practically to learn about dreams and how to work with them.”

– Tom Larkin, Focusing Oriented Therapist and Certifying Coordinator

 

“I really liked both theoretical and experiential learning. I was needing a more structured and systematic knowledge about dreamwork, and this course really provided me with that. It’s a beautiful foundation. I also liked our group very much, so many beautiful people with different backgrounds and sensitivities, and I think that all of us being honest and engaged together really contributed to the richness of experience.”

– Ivana Kolakovic, Registered Psychotherapist

 

“My most loved aspects were witnessing Leslie working with dreams in a group setting, and the intimacy of the group itself. I also loved the spaciousness in the container and the levity Leslie brought to the group. Clinically, I loved the experiential aspects of focusing and dreamwork combined.  As a result of taking this program, I now move slower with my dreams and I feel more connected to figures and aspects that show up. I also feel more resourced in my work with dreams.

Something else I loved about this program is that it wasn’t formulaic, but process oriented, which really supported the individual finding their own way. It was a nice blend of clinical and personal exploration.

I would also say another benefit is the small group size, because you really get to be in a safe and intimate space. It also provides an opportunity to try on others’ dream images and expand figures within your own dreamscape.”

– Jaclyn Woods, LMFT

 

“If you’re interested in working with dreams this is a solid, inspiring, practical, evidence-based method that has empowered me to connect more deeply with my own dream life and work with my clients and their dreams with confidence.”

– Kate Tenni, Sensorimotor Art Therapist and Grief Counsellor

 

About the Instructor(s) – Here are a few comments, thank you so much

Leslie has so so much knowledge but also this beautiful talent for attunement and sensitivity to track the dreamer’s internal life

10+! Leslie was brilliant! She was clear, flexible, so empathic. She created a lovely virtual space in which to be and work, and held each of us preciously when we shared.

Leslie is thoroughly knowledgeable, extremely skilled and competent, open and welcoming, responsive, flexible, clear, articulate, tech savvy, approachable.

Robbyn is also incredibly gifted.  The sessions with her were such a helpful supplement and practice time. (Robbyn assists with the class and offers a bonus dream session between class meetings.)

For more information about the ‘EE’ program, here is the link.

 

 

Posted in
Posted in

Jungian Dreamwork and Focusing: Delving Deeper in the Experience of Dreaming

By

This article brings together my two favorite approaches in psychotherapy and personal growth: that of dreamwork and focusing. In my work, they are intertwined in ways that make it difficult to tease apart, so I am taking this opportunity to articulate the way they both differ and complement each other. I will highlight the work of Jungian dream workers who favor experiential processing, and will also summarize Eugene Gendlin’s ideas about how to work with dreams.

 

The Jungian approach to dreams

Although my interest in dreams is lifelong, I first formally studied dreamwork at Pacifica Graduate Institute, one of North America’s foremost schools for Jungian and depth psychology. While there are some branches of Jungian thought that can get quite theoretical, this is not the approach taken at Pacifica, where they stress the experiential aspects of depth psychology. There are strong parallels between the many dreamwork methods that I consider both Jungian and focusing-oriented. They key to both is the felt experience of the dreamer.

Carl Jung posited that there is not only a personal unconscious from which dream material arises, but also a collective unconscious common to all mankind and that truly numinous dreams have this kind of power. He called these universal forces archetypes, motifs familiar to us all: child, father, mother, lover, wise man/woman and so on.

Jung developed an extensive theory about the meaning of dreams, and believed dream workers should possess vast knowledge of myths, legends and symbols that could appear in any dream so as to amplify the personal aspect of the dream image into something more collective or archetypal. However, it is a mistake to assume that he was imposing all of this onto dreams from an academic pedestal. In fact, he was very interested in the lived experience of dreams, and developed a technique he called active imagination, suggesting that dreamers re-enter the dreamworld and continue where the dream left off, dreaming it onward in the therapy session and beyond. These experiential techniques are very like Gendlin’s focusing, an experiential method of inquiring into the body.

The beauty of dreamwork is that it can take many forms. One can work with a dream on a personal level and make great leaps forward in consciousness. One can also approach the dream in a sacred way that brings one closer to the universal source of dreaming and feel touched by its numinosity. I think the reason dreams are so fascinating is that they are truly magical, truly other and if one enters the experience of the dreaming, one cannot help but be enlarged by it. In fact, many dream experts believe the main purpose of dreaming is just that: to enlarge our perspective; sometimes they do this gently, and sometimes in a shocking manner. At times, a shock can be just what’s needed to jolt us out of outmoded ways of being.

 

Approaches to dreams from depth psychologists

Jungian scholars whose interest is depth psychology focus on the experience of dreaming; they talk about less mining of the dream for personal insight, and more about tending the dream. They often use focusing extensively in the way they do dreamwork though they may not use that term. In the course of their work, they have developed a reverence for the dreamtime. They ask not, how can the dream serve me, but, how can I serve the dream? What does it ask of me?

James Hillman (1979) in The Dream and the Underworld took issue with the modern method of mining dreams for personal meaning. He is a thinker, a contrarian and likes to turn widely-accepted ideas on their heads. Hillman said he follows Freud and Jung in some of their ideas: “Freud by insisting that the dream has nothing to do with the waking world but is psyche speaking to itself in its own language: and Jung by insisting that the ego requires adjustment to the night world. I shall not be following them in bringing the dream into the dayworld in any other form than its own, implying that the dream may not be envisaged either as a message to be deciphered for the dayworld (Freud) or as a compensation to it (Jung)” (p. 13).

Hillman goes on to say that the only valid way to approach dreaming is to enter into its underworld realm, subjecting ourselves to the descent, not trying to use it for our own purposes. He does not think we need to add anything, or compensate from what’s not there. “Each dream has its own fulcrum and balance, compensates itself, is complete as it is… We cannot see the soul until we experience it, and we cannot understand the dream until we enter it “ (p. 80).

Hillman eschews the gestalt tradition of having dreamers enter into the experience of various dream figures as though they are parts of one’s own psyche. “This mode of dream interpretation becomes just one more modern way of inflating the ego” (p. 99).

Still, entering into the consciousness of various dream figures remains an accepted means of working a dream. Robert Bosnak (1996) is one modern dream worker who relies heavily on this Gestalt method. He says that,  “While dreaming, there are several different carriers of consciousness.”  We most often experience our dreams from the point of view of our dream ego, but Bosnak believes “one of the purposes of dreamwork is to experience the dream from as many facets as possible.”

He talks about making transits into the experience of other dream figures, to relinquish briefly our habitual point of view and enter into something that is other. In fact, one can enter into not just the people and animals in a dreamscape, but any significant feature. He offers an example of a man who enters into a deep freeze. “This brings about a change of attitude, a different sense of being alive” (p. 54).

Bosnak believes we can work only with living dreams, ones in which we are still able to re-enter the dreaming experience. Fresh dreams can be from years past, but most are recent. They are dreams where we can still sense in a bodily way. Bosnak asks dreamers to go very slowly back into the dream recalling as much detail as possible, paying particular attention to the others in the dream. He suggests you drop down into a liminal state and then enter into the consciousness of the other in your dream through sensing into your body. He calls is making a “transit” (p. 44) into the dream other. This is very similar to the focusing move of entering the felt sense from its point of view.

The attitude is a focusing one of curiosity, acceptance, and a sense that there is autonomy in what we are encountering, something to resonate with, not something we try to bend to our will.  Both focusing and dreamwork take place in the imaginal world, the world of image. There is a sense of autonomy about the image, as in working with the felt sense. We can experience it but we do not control its movements.

Pacifica founder Stephen Aizenstat (2009) does believe in talking to the animals and other figures in dreams, but respectfully and only once one has built a relationship to the dream figure. His favorite approach to a dream is the question, “Who’s visiting now?” This, followed by  a receptive, clear space in which the dream itself can respond, in the present, in a living, embodied way.

Aizenstat suggests a way of working with dreams beyond the Freudian idea of association, or the Jungian idea of amplification, to that of animation. Aizenstat calls his practice dream tending — working with the living image. Although it is not a felt sense, the interaction with the dream figure has many qualities similar to focusing: the act of bringing your open, curious attention to it. Its autonomy. The need to stay with it even when it might appear scary — that with our loving attention to it, from an observing, safe distance, it will transform, as will what it represents in our life.

 

Eugene Gendlin on Focusing and Dreams

Gendlin (1986) offers a similar perspective in his approach to working with dreams. Although he posits his methods of dreamwork as a long series of potential questions to ask of the dream, the attitude he suggests one should bring to these questions is not one of interrogation. Like Aizenstat, he suggests that one should “love and enjoy the dream whether you interpret it or not” (p. 27).

He sees great value in dreamwork, and even suggests it is as a shortcut to learning how to do focusing. He says the hardest part of learning how to focusing is letting a felt sense come. “With a dream, that is often easy. A dream usually brings you a felt sense. If not, it soon comes if you attend your body while pondering the dream” (p. 3). Gendlin sees dreamwork as having two stages: the breakthrough, where you discover what the dream is about and a second stage, where you get something new from the dream.

He also introduces a technique he calls bias control to help someone working with their own dreams overcome the natural tendency to interpret a dream based on what one already knows. This basically entails entertaining the opposite of what we might be drawn to, entering into the consciousness of a dream figure we dislike, for example. “A new growth direction is often the opposite of what we value most. That doesn’t mean we change our value to the opposite, not at all. We merely expand them a little” (p. 61).

 

Completing the dream process: Carrying forward

If you go through the experiential process of fully tending a dream, it will require not just a widening of perspective, but some sort of concrete action or ritual to ground and symbolize the change in you. An even better way to look at it might be: what are you going to offer in response to this dream? These lines of dreamwork practice we have been following ask that we ponder how we will serve the dream, rather than how it will serve us.

In Gendlin’s model, this may come in the form of an action step, some small but concrete step we can take in response to the dream. He gives an example where a man’s “dream points to a small action step he might not otherwise have thought of. This may seem a tiny step when compared with the whole regime this dreamer might need… As you will see if you try them, small action steps have a lot of power. They are hard to do. They let you encounter and work through what is in your way. They change you… Only action ultimately resolves more problems. Therefore action steps are needed as an integral part of what dreams mean… and only in actions does your body get to live the new way for more than a few symbolic moments!” (p. 114).

 

Dreaming from the Source

Dreams and the felt sense in focusing come from the same source, what Whitmont calls the Guiding Self, or Jung’s Self, a “superior, if archaic intelligence, bent on offering meaningful new attitudes,” (Whitmont Perera, p. 17).

Both focusing and dreamwork are difficult to do alone because of this — because they offer a viewpoint different from our customary one. Dreams are perhaps further from the ego’s standpoint because they often originate from deeper in the unconscious. Or, they may originate entirely outside of our realm of consciousness in a realm all their own. Either way, they are a stretch for us to grapple with. They offer growth potential, but also the potential to be disruptive or disturbing. Focusing is more of a middle ground between dreams and ego, and focusing on dreams is yet another intermediate step, bridging the gap between dream and ego, making dreams more accessible and potentially accelerating change.

Dreams are a product of the life force within us, as is the felt sense we contact through focusing. There are no bad dreams. The question is how to come into relationship with them, as you would a felt sense, to gain ‘life-forward’ momentum. And then, how do you embody this shift in the world?

 

References

Aizenstat, S. (2009) Dream Tending, New Orleans, Louisiana: Spring Journal Inc.

Boa, F. (1988) The Way of the Dream, Boston, Mass., Shambhala Publications.

Bosnak, R. (1996) Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, New York: Delta Publishing  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Freud, S. (1909) The Interpretation of Dreams, New York: Modern Library, Random House (1950 edition).

Hillman, J. (1979) The Dream and the Underworld, New York: Harper and Row.

Gendlin, E.T. (1986) Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications.

Jung, C.J. Collected Works. Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.J. (1961) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York: Random House.

Whitmont, E. and Perera, S. (1989) Dreams, A Portal to the Source, London: Routledge.

 

Posted in
Posted in

Experiential Dreamwork: Adding depth, creativity and transformation of trauma memory for you and your clients

By

Over time, dreams appear to help take the emotional charge out of challenging memories while enabling us to retain the information we need to make more adaptive decisions in the future. Engaging with dreams can augment and strengthen this process.

By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Paying attention to dreams adds richness, creativity and depth to inner process. Bringing experiential dreamwork into clinical practice also increases the likelihood that clients will experience deep and lasting change. In my recently-published book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2020), I offer many reasons for therapists to engage in dreamwork, both for themselves, and with clients. I close the book with a chapter on how neuroscience and dreamwork can combine to bring about transformation of core emotional patterns and beliefs. In this article, I offer a summary of these highlights from my book.

 

Why work with dreams?

“Clinicians who do not pay attention to their clients’ dreams are missing an opportunity to add a compelling dimension of depth, meaning and emotional authenticity to the therapy process. Because dreams often speak the language of metaphor, even the most seemingly-mundane content may carry important meaning that is outside of the dreamer’s immediate awareness. For example, a client who regularly brings dreams to therapy told me in one session that she had lots of dreams the previous night, but nothing important. Her dogs were in the dream, doing what they always do: the younger one pestering the older one who was, in the dream, getting to the point where she simply couldn’t take it anymore and was ready to snap. While acknowledging the dream snippet was literally true, the simple query: “Is there anything in your life like that, anything that you are completely fed up with?” opened up a whole avenue of process for her that was aptly represented by the dogs and may well have been left unexplored had she not mentioned her dream.

 

In addition to turning our attention to deeper matters, the benefits of working with dreams in clinical practice include the fact that dreams are creative and engage clients in the therapy process. They point to our most salient emotional concerns. They bypass our internal editing process and normal defenses, and so are unflinchingly honest representations of our life situation. Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that seems otherwise stuck. They provide diagnostic information and can be indicators of clinical progress. They help to regulate our emotions, and working directly with the feelings dreams engender may strengthen this positive effect. They can be a safe pathway to working with trauma. The ‘big’ dreams we occasionally experience can literally change our lives, and dream therapy can facilitate and integrate this transformation.

 

Much of what we know about how clinicians use dreams in their practice is captured in a handful of studies that were reviewed by Pesant and Zadra (2004) with the goal of making clinicians aware that integrating dream work into their practice is both beneficial and accessible. The researchers found that while most therapists do work with dreams at least occasionally in their practice, the majority are not comfortable doing so because they feel they lack expertise or the necessary specialized training. In fact, it is most often the clients, not the therapists, who initiate dream work. The review also found evidence that dream work helps increase clients’ self-knowledge and insight, and increases their commitment to therapy, which can be a predictor of good therapy outcomes” (from chapter 1, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy).

 

Dreamwork informed by neuroscience can lead to transformation

We will now skip ahead to the final chapter which brings much of the preceding information together. I map a process that touches on how dreams are implicated in the updating of our emotional memories. The following is an abbreviated version of the last chapter: Transformation: Applying neuroscience to dreamwork.

 

“It used to be thought that emotional memories were not malleable, but the discovery of the processes behind emotional memory reconsolidation (Lane et al., 2015) has changed this view. Current evidence suggests the brain is more resilient and capable of changing and healing than previously thought, even later in life. This is a cause for optimism because now that we know something about the specific mechanisms of change, we can attempt to engineer our therapy processes to engender such changes. The beauty of this kind of change, which can take place in basic neural structures (at the synaptic level), is that once it has taken root, the test of success is that clients maintain the changed behavior automatically and without effort. This is not the white-knuckling kind of change that reverts back to its former patterns under stress.

 

Implicit emotional patterns are malleable, and can permanently transform into more up-to-date responses, but only under the right circumstances. It used to be thought that long-term emotional memory was indelible because it was stored in synapses, in the basic structures of the brain. But Lee and colleagues (2004) have shown that if certain conditions are met, the synapses will destabilize, making revision of fear memory possible without reinforcing the original memory. According to Ecker, Ticic and Hulley (2012), the keys to unlocking the emotional brain involve clear, repeatable steps that involve juxtaposing a deeply-felt experience of an outdated emotional belief with something that feels true in current life, but opposite. This creates instability in the memory, and if the new experience is reinforced in a timely way, it will not just cover over or compete with the old information, but will actually replace it. Ecker and colleagues state that the resulting change will be transformational, rather than incremental. In my experience, this can be the case, but when beliefs arose in different contexts, transformation may take place over time, with repetitive experience of how the new experience contradicts the older paradigm.

 

Do not treat the trauma itself, but the beliefs that arise from it

This research highlights something important to keep in mind when working with trauma. The traumatic events themselves are not the important focus. The process, and an open curiosity should be directed to the beliefs that arose out of the traumatic events with the understanding that fear generalizes. For example, people who suffered from chronic neglect in childhood often develop the belief that no one is ever there for them. Feeling deeply into the experience of having even one person consistently show up for them has the potential to shift this long-standing emotional pattern. This is why falling in love can be transformational. Implicit emotional beliefs are not generic, however, but quite specific. They must be experienced in the body rather than speculated about with the mind for the change process to initiate.

 

Such beliefs and their opposites are often referred to in dreams. Jung was the first to notice this pattern. He found it so pervasive that he developed his theory of dreams as compensation around this idea. Although many early theories about dreams have been successfully challenged, this one persists and is incorporated into many current theories that suggest dreams bring new information and have the potential to transform our long-held emotional beliefs based on current experience. Therefore, dream material can be a rich source of experiential information to use as a base for facilitating memory reconsolidation.

 

Doing what dreams do, only better

This section describes how we can take a dream and by focusing on it, assist in the very processes that dreams are implicated in – those of emotional memory reconsolidation and emotional regulation. Over time, dreams appear to help take the emotional charge out of challenging memories while enabling us to retain the information we need to make more adaptive decisions in the future. Dreamwork can augment and strengthen this process. And it can kick-start a ‘failed’ dreaming process that is not working as it should, as is the case with recurrent nightmares of those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

 

One of the challenges of trying to engender emotional memory reconsolidation is that it can take quite a bit of detective work to uncover an outdated emotional belief that was formed implicitly. Ideas about the nature of the world are often formed in childhood based on experiences from one’s family of origin, and early beliefs are rarely explicit or called into question. Having no other frame of reference as very young children, we see our environment as simply how the world works, and the beliefs we pick up are a way of adapting to the emotional and relational world we found ourselves in. Dreams, however, can bring our emotional beliefs to life as metaphorical images we experience directly. They often represent novel information that contradicts what we believe. Such images are the keys that can unlock the process of emotional memory reconsolidation, updating and transforming how we respond to life situations in light of current experience.

 

Those who consistently work with dreams as part of their practice of psychotherapy already have an intuitive understanding of how to work with dreams to bring about therapeutic change. Most invite their clients into a deeply experiential sense of the dream, a critical ingredient in the process. Dreams often have within them contrary elements that can be juxtaposed. Inviting the dreamer to deliberately hold this ‘tension of the opposites’ (Jung) can bring about deep and durable emotional shifts.

 

In my book’s final chapter, I am suggesting that armed with a basic understanding of the role of dreaming in emotional memory consolidation, we may be able to explore the dreams that clients bring to therapy in a way that facilitates or strengthens the helpful processes that dreams are already a part of. Well-considered current theories suggest that: dreams are implicated in the process of reducing the emotional charge of memories that have current relevance; and dreams play a part in updating our store of memories to include current experience, better preparing us for what’s next. This could also serve as a definition of what happens in psychotherapy. Not just the dreams themselves, but the dreamwork process within therapy can facilitate these emotional and memory updating processes. In addition, nightmare treatment research has shown that by using what we know about dreams in specific and thoughtful ways, we can repair sleep-dream-memory processes that are not working well, helping healthy dreaming to resume.

Clinical examples of transformational dreamwork

What I have noticed about the process of memory reconsolidation is that theories of psychotherapy incorporated its basic elements well before the neuroscience underlying the process was discovered. The trend in dreamwork toward greater experiential practices is an example of how therapists intuit and/or learn by experience to use methods that engender change. In addition, Jung’s notion that dreams are compensatory, and Gendlin’s bias control are two ways dreamwork brings about an experiential juxtaposition that can cause significant shifts in the dreamer’s store of emotional memory.

 

An example of memory reconsolidation at work is shown in the dreamwork with the Grateful Dead dream earlier in this book. Initially, the dreamer is terrified of being shot by ‘Jack’, the man who in waking life had been abusive and was now aware of where the dreamer worked. In the dreamwork, this fear was juxtaposed by the feelings of safety I encouraged her to sink into very deeply. There were at least two safe places in the dream to draw from: memories of her first love, and also being with a group of like-minded people on the bus who prevent Jack from harming her. In a later part of the session, I ask the dreamer to ‘be’ Jack for a minute, another form of juxtaposition; she feels how hollow and sick he is, before we move on to the part of the dream where she is safe on the bus.

 

There is a palpable release of tension in the course of working with the dream, and this is sustained, which is the hallmark of a successful memory reconsolidation process. The dreamer reported that prior to the dreamwork, she felt very anxious in general, and especially going to work. After the dreamwork, the fear was no longer present. She said, “I’m not holding the charge anymore.” She could walk into work without her usual worried pausing at the threshold, and this was not a conscious, but an effortless, automatic action reflective of a structural change in the nature of her fear memories. Interestingly, in her subsequent dream, she confronts Jack and he apologizes, which is further evidence of change. I believe such dream changes are significant and authentic reflections of clinical change because they happen without conscious volition.  The dreamwork also shifted the way the dreamer holds the memories about Jack, with more of a focus on her friends coming to her rescue and her desire to cultivate community in her life.

 

The ‘new was’

In the preceding example, the client arrives at a new vantage point. From there, she views the past differently, but also, paradoxically, with a sense that it has always been that way.  Gendlin (1984), called this the “new was.” He viewed feelings, thinking, actions and words all primarily as lived experience in the body, and each bodily event as implying what comes next. He called this ‘carrying forward’ and said, “In therapy we change not into something else, but into more truly ourselves. Therapeutic change is into what that person really ‘was’ all along… it is a second past, read retroactively from now. It is a new ‘was’ made from now.”  From this new was, steps come that change one’s conception of the past entirely. The change is not just a current one, but a shift that ripples through our entire store of memory, revising many things accordingly.

 

There is room here to think about state-dependent memory, something I encounter frequently in working as a psychotherapist. To play with the above example, when the client feels afraid, the memories of Jack feel much more ominous and she recalls the worst ones. When she is less afraid, she may recall better times, such as her earlier relationship with her first love.  This fear bias colors her perception of the world in general, and of relationships specifically. I believe that the elements of this dream were particularly salient and powerful tools for engendering lasting change in her sense of relational safety. It can be a challenge in psychotherapy to create deeply-felt juxtapositions necessary to revise emotional memory, but dreams provide ready-made and highly relevant material for this powerful transformation process.

 

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis is an author, teacher, researcher and therapist with an abiding interest in inner life. She teaches therapists how to work with embodied experience, trauma and dreams, and offers on-line courses in dreamwork and focusing. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology with a somatic specialization. Shen has conducted award-winning research in treating nightmares of refugees using embodied dreamwork techniques. For more information, go to https://www.drleslieellis.com or contact her at leslie@drleslieellis.com.

 

References

Ecker, B., Ticic, R. & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the emotional brain: Eliminating symptoms at their roots using memory reconsolidation. New York: Routledge.

Ellis, L. (2019). A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dreamwork. New York & London: Routledge.

Gendlin, E. T. (1984). The client’s client: The edge of awareness. In R. L. Levant & J. M. Shlien (Eds.), Client-centered therapy and the person-centered approach. New directions in theory, research and practice, pp. 76-107. New York: Praeger.

Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38.

Lee, J. L., Everitt, B. J., & Thomas, K. L. (2004). Independent cellular processes for hippocampal memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Science, 304, 839-843.

Pesant, N. & Zadra, A. (2004). Working with dreams in therapy: What do we know and what should we do? Clinical Psychology Review, 24, 489–512.

Posted in
Posted in

Dreams as Doorways to Possibility

By

Dreams as Doorways to Possibility:
Four ways to open up even the smallest of dreams

Have you ever been stumped by a dream? Likely all of us have experienced genuine puzzlement when we wake up with a dream image that seems utterly mysterious, too wispy to follow or simply nonsensical. We are apt to dismiss such dreams as nonsense, or as not profound enough to warrant our attention. However, if you consider dreams as openings for further exploration, every dream is worthy of our attention.

In my year-long experiential dreamwork program, I always spend a session exploring dream ‘snippets’ as a way to illustrate how much can come of mere wisps of dreams. It helps to consider a dream as a doorway to a much larger world of experience. Or like the thread from the Greek myth by which Ariadne left a trail enabling her lover to escape the maze of the Minotaur. The end of the thread, the snippet, does not give us the whole picture, but rather, a way forward. The destination is not yet known, but ultimately might lead to greater freedom.

In this article, I offer a few different ways that you can explore any dream, big or small, in a way that opens to new possibilities.

Dreams as picture-metaphors for emotion
My dreams often come as single images without much of a story. They can be a simple picture, and for the person guiding me in a dream process, it may feel like there isn’t enough to work with. For example, I dreamt of an old-fashioned pair of crossed wooden skis. Considering Ernest Hartmann’s idea that dreams are metaphors for salient feelings, already something opens up. There is a sense of motion that is stopped, possibly because of an outdated way of doing things, or maybe because I am ‘cross’. Yes, I can feel some old anger I hadn’t realized was present…

The other thing that occurs to me is that these skis can still work and have served someone very well. They have been well-used, and I sense, well-loved. In Hartmann’s way of working, this feeling might correspond to something current and salient in my life, so further inquiry could head in that direction.

Dreams as bringing a bodily felt sense
Another way to deepen understanding of any dream image is to try a focusing approach, as offered by Eugene Gendlin. This involves getting a bodily felt sense of the image, and letting it open up from the inside. Like Ariadne’s thread, such a process can lead to new territory entirely, with the image as the starting place.

A felt sense of the skis, for example, takes me to a crossed place in my chest, but also an awareness of potential movement. The skis, of their own accord, want to uncross and be placed on the snow. Their essence speaks of forward motion and speed. I begin to feel an expansive sense in my chest, and am infused with enlivening memories of my cross-country skiing exploits. Rather than get lost in those, I go back to the felt sense (which is what I would do if I were guiding a dreamer here). I’m getting a message that feels like an unblocking, an opening and a sense that the way forward is available, and both awkward (old skis) and exhilarating.

Dreams as doorways
Carrying this little image forward in another way, I might explore the environment of the dream, and then venture out into it. This is a Jungian approach, called active imagination. You can take any dream image as a place to begin and then open up the setting or dream landscape.

My skis seem to be in the wall of a rustic cabin, and there is a sense that it might be an earlier time. These skis are not obsolete, but in fact, more an essential means of getting somewhere. There are now some old-fashioned boots and poles are nearby, and I see a skier breaking trail through a foot of fresh snow. The trail is flat, wooded, and inviting. There is the sense of a journey, but one the skier is very prepared for. In exploring this dream image, we can follow this trail as far as we like, potentially meeting challenges and helpful characters along the way.

Associating to dream images
The last opening I will suggest here is that of association. This is a more traditional way of exploring dream images, and one that I tend to use lightly. This is because the process of asking what memories or stories from our life are brought to mind by a dream image can sometimes lead us away from the essence of the image and into webs of memory that limit rather than open what we experience from the dream.

Associations to the skis are of fancy cabins that hang such skis on the wall as decoration. I also recall a pair of leather ski boots my dad used to own, and a childhood memory of trying to ski on flat ground in huge old skis and not getting very far. I also associate to skiing in general, which I love. To me, these images feel less generative than the methods listed above that open up the image via experiencing and imagination. Such is my personal bias. Associations can also be powerful.

My suggestion is to try any of these methods that appeal to you. Next time you wake up with a puzzling dream image or snippet, one you are tempted to dismiss, play with these avenues. Or if a client brings a dream that feels too thin and unsubstantial, try these ways of helping them to use the image as a leaping off place to a world of possibility.

DREAM CIRCLE Dec. 4: Dreams as doorways to possibility
Our last Dream Circle of 2022 will focus on imaginative and experiential ways that even the smallest of dreams can open the dreamer up to possibility. See the article above for a fuller description of the avenues we will explore as a group. This group is open to all graduates of my experiential dreamwork and focusing programs. More info here.

Posted in
Posted in

Addictions recovery chaplain says dreamwork practice is ‘transformative’

By

Dr. L.A. McRae offers impressions of their experience in the Embodied Experiential Dreamwork program

 

Sometimes a class can be truly transformative, and in this case Dr. L.A. McCrae, an addictions clinician and recovery chaplain feels this way after graduating from our year-long Embodied Experiential Dreamwork certification program. (A new cohort begins Sept. 21 and it’s not too late to join.)

L.A. noted that the dream program brought many helpful changes, both personally and professionally. “I am able to keep more of my dream content and really work through many underlying issues and concerns. Also, I have been able to integrate dreamwork with my individual clients and with my intensive outpatient groups. I now also keep a regular dream journal in my personal life. This has helped me to process trauma, grief, anxiety, and other uncertainties. I have found that I feel more alive in the non-waking life and am having meaningful connections and breakthroughs.”

I asked participants about the change in their comfort level in working with dreams. L.A. said, “At the beginning of the training, I felt that I was really in touch with my dreams. One of my spiritual gifts is dreaming and seeing beyond the veil. However, knowing what I now know, I would have put this competency at a 3. Since completing the program, I would say I am now an 8 and have a clear understanding of my growing edges.”

L.A. said their use of dreamwork in clinical practice has increased ten-fold and has shifted away from philosophical discussions to more experiential and focusing-oriented dreamwork. “With my individual clients, we always hold space for at least 15-minutes of dreamwork in every session. My clients really resonate with this practice and look forward to it. In my Anger Management outpatient group, we spend a significant amount of time with dreamwork and I have witnessed pretty amazing results. For instance, one participant was able to make the connections between the darkness he saw in his dream and the physical abuse from his father. This completely changed his demeanor and orientation towards healing. My Intensive Outpatient (IOP) group loves the opportunity to start the week with dream focusing in small groups. We went from no dreamwork to dreamwork almost every day.”

When asked what L.A. would say to those considering taking this program, they said, “DO IT! The experience in Dr. Ellis’ dreamwork course has changed both my personal and professional practice. The impact on/with my clients has been transformative. I have been able to access healing as an individual and hold space for healing with others. I am truly grateful for this experience and wish I could do it again! This dreamwork course was the best investment I made for professional development in the last decade.”

For more information about the program, visit https://drleslieellis.com/embodied-experiential-certification/.

Posted in
Posted in

Experiential dreamwork program doubles student confidence in exploring dreams

By

I am always trying to improve my programs, so I asked my most recent cohort how their comfort level and ways of working with dreams have changed over the past year as a result of participating in my Embodied Experiential Dreamwork program. It is so gratifying to hear how many deepened and freed up their relationship to dreams. On average students started with a comfort level of 3/10 in their dreamwork practice, and ended up at 7, more than doubling their collective confidence in working with dreams.

I have gathered some representative comments from the recent exit survey. These might be especially useful for those of you considering taking this program – the next cohort begins September 21, and there are still a few spaces.

One student, who prefers to remain anonymous said that as a result of taking the program: “I have been more motivated to dive deeply into my dreams, to spend extra time with them, to come back to them. It is now easier for me to explore a dream from the felt sense as opposed to analyzing and interpreting. Perhaps what I appreciate the most is the concept of how dreams have a life of their own, and that working with them changes them… Now it is easier for me to make space for whatever shows up.”

She continued: “The videos, podcasts, and articles were well organized and very clearly presented. The materials offered were very generous, over and above expectation. Class time was amazing, and it was good to have most of it be experiential. Leslie is a master at working with dreams and facilitating the group experience, in addition to having a solid basis from an academic perspective… This course was more than I hoped for, and I can’t imagine it being any better!”

Carrie Moy, a focuser in training, wrote: “This program teaches you a powerful way to work with your own dreams and those of others.  My connection to my dream life has deepened considerably as result of this program.  I have developed reverence for and love of my dreams, and I feel this has had the secondary impact of me increasing compassion and tenderness towards myself. I also have enjoyed working with others’ dreams in group processes.  It has brought heart-opening connection during these uncertain times.”

Michelle Carchrae, a registered clinical counsellor, said: “Now that I’ve had direct experience of doing dreamwork as a client, I know that it works and I have a sense of what it feels like when it does work. I have more trust in the process as well as an intellectual framework and steps in a process that can guide me when doing this work with clients.”

Markel Méndez, a Jungian oriented art and psychodrama therapist, said, “Now I am less worried about meaning or interpretation and more focused on experience and body sensations. In this new path, I found more creativity.”

Walter Smith, a retired minister and spiritual director, said: “This class gives particpants the ability to feel at ease in dealing with their own dreams while at the same time opens many different ways dream workers deal with dreams. It is an exciting way to become engaged with the larger dream world.”

Regarding quality of instruction, Smith wrote, “Leslie has a beautiful gift of creating an open and safe place for people to share dreams. Her presentation skills are top-notch. She never seems rushed, and presents in a clear and concise manner. This class was worth every penny. Not a single minute or dollar was wasted. Taking this class was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Rocio Aguirre, a coach and meditation teacher tells prospective students: “You will increase your confidence to work with your own dreams and the dreams of others. You will have a greater understanding of trauma-related nightmares and how to work with them… and you will be in the hands of an expert in dreams and dreamwork. Leslie is always looking for new research and keeping us updated during the course.”

Head of PhD Studies at University of California, professor Anthony Kubiak summed it up by writing: “I would recommend this course without reserve. It gave much more confidence going forward with my own and others’ dreamwork.”

Spiritual director Nancy Finlayson commented on the extensive online materials that come with the course: “Loved it. I really appreciated the quality and content. It helped me grasp the concepts and bring them into practice… Leslie is an excellent instructor whose passion for dream work is contagious!”

There is more… and I am so humbled and pleased that everyone gave me the highest rating as an instructor. There were also some ideas for improvement, and I will be adopting these in the next cohort, which begins Sept. 21 and runs from 9:30 to noon on Wednesdays for the coming year (skipping December). Robbyn Peters Bennett will also be teaching the class with me. We do hope you will join our amazing dream study community.

Posted in
Posted in

The dream text is not so sacred: Dreams as doorways to possibility

By 1 on The dream text is not so sacred: Dreams as doorways to possibility

“A dream is alive.” Eugene Gendlin wrote this in his book, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams to describe the ongoing, in-process nature of dreams and how much potential they possess because of this. He said dreams are ‘unfinished’ and therefore they represent a huge possibility space. Rather than dismiss what may at first feel like fragmentary nonsense, we can sink into our dreams experientially and flesh them out. This idea, that dreams are alive and rife with possibility, also means that they are fluid and responsive to our attention, rather than fixed. I see them as a doorway to the larger imaginal world of the dream, an opening to something larger.

In the early days of dream interpretation, a dream text was taken a little too seriously, as if it were sacred. I do have a deep respect for dreams. But when you think about what a curious mix of image, temporal anomaly, strangeness and confusion a dream is when you wake up…
and when you think of how much more comes (and how much more escapes) when you attempt to capture the dream in words as you write it down or tell someone about it…
and when you sense how much of the dream was not quite captured, how much more there was than you can recall… you realize the dream text you have written is not so sacred. Rather, it is a memory jogger, a leaping-off place into the world of the dream itself, which like a felt sense, contains so much more than you can actually say about it.

This is why I have adopted such an experiential approach to dreams. And why I like what Gendlin says about dreams needing ‘careful but irreverent handling.’ It’s okay to play with them and to engage with them. What feels unhelpful is to try to pin them down too soon, or to confine them to a particular meaning. That way of working with dreams can be a fun, intellectual exercise, but ultimately one that takes you further away from the dream itself. To borrow the words of another of my mentors, Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, a dream likes to be met in the way of the dream. The way of the dream is through imagination, play, creativity, and wonder.

This is the introduction I gave to my day-long pre-conference workshop at the Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapies world conference this month in Copenhagen. It was truly an honour to be among a new tribe of like-minded therapists and share my approach to dreams. It feels like another step forward in my mission to bring a modern, collaborative and experiential form of dreamwork more widely into clinical practice.

Why Work with Dreams?
Dreamwork (according to the research) is implicated in regulating our emotions – and one of the reasons sleep deprivation leaves us cranky and out of sorts is that we have missed out on the activity in REM allows for processing of our most salient emotional concerns. Dreams have been shown to help us work through grief and the impact of trauma while we sleep. They bring depth, meaning and creative solutions that may not be as available to our busy waking minds. With all input from the outside world shut out, and with our logical processing faculties dampened down, dreaming is a state conducive to associative play with images that depict our deepest concerns.

In therapy, they are a doorway to deeper conversations. They open up topics the dreamer may be hesitant to broach, but offer these in images and metaphor so the dreamer can process difficult topics with the help of mediating images. What I mean by this is that the images in our dreams can carry important pieces of process forward without the need to retell a traumatic story or go around the same pain- or problem-saturated circles. You don’t even have to know how the dream relates to the dreamer’s story. Such insights often drop in later, on their own. In the meantime, my best advice is to follow the dream itself, dive deep and trust it.

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers online dreamwork training programs to mental health professionals. Her flagship Embodied Experiential Dreamwork certification program begins in mid-September, and there are still a few spaces left.

Posted in
Posted in

Dream Emotion: A key to unlock their meaning and purpose

By

By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Emotion is key to understanding and working with dreams. Many theories of dreaming suggest that emotion is what generates dreams, and that one of the reasons for dreaming is to process feelings. Dream researcher Ernest Hartmann famously called dreams ‘picture-metaphors’ for the dreamer’s most prominent emotion. For example, he found that in the aftermath of trauma, people would often dream not of the trauma itself but of an image that depicted the magnitude of their feelings, a tidal wave for example.

One theory of the purpose of dream emotion is to tag specific events that are important to us so they can be woven into the web of associated memories, and therefore, available when we need to retrieve them. Memory reconsolidation is a helpful notion here. It is a big phrase for the way our memories are updated. Emotion is what tags the memory as important, and until we undergo some kind of process to integrate these emotional memories, they will stay alive and infiltrate our dreams.

As a psychotherapist, I have found that dreams also bring up unmetabolized feelings because they need to be experienced and processed before the body can let them go fully. We can do some this processing in our dreams, but if the same images or themes recur, then we may need to do some deliberate daytime processing as well. This is especially true of trauma and protracted grief – these feelings are big and take time to integrate, and they can be so overwhelming the related dreams become nightmares that wake the dreamer up. This is a hallmark symptom of posttraumatic stress injury.

In my experience, the core of every dream is emotion — sometimes big emotion, sometimes underground feelings. They are in our dreams because they want to be integrated and transformed. Focusing creator Eugene Gendlin said that nothing can change until it is fully felt. This is why experiential dreamwork is so important, and why all modern dreamwork methods contain experiential elements. So when you are working with dreams, follow the feelings, and invite the dreamer to immerse in them, fully if possible, partially if necessary.

How do you find the emotional core of dream? Sometimes the dream is simply steeped in the feeling, and all you need to do is re-enter, revisit and engage with the dream images. Sometimes the feeling is hidden in a dream element or character. For example, in a dream I worked on where the landscape was dark and littered with corpses, the dreamer felt calm. In the dream, a nurse was able to bring one of the bodies back to life, and when I asked the dreamer to become the nurse, she started sobbing – the sadness in the dream was located in another dream character.

As you invite experiential exploration, visit all the corners of the dream, and hidden and contrary places. Watch for signs of striking an emotional chord, and when you do, slow down and invite the dreamer to drop in deeper. Ask into that felt sense: what did that just open up in you?

A good question from trauma work and focusing, to keep the emotion processing manageable: is this feeling mine alone or is it bigger than me? Some dreams can be about collective and/or intergenerational trauma. If so, it makes sense to enlist help from collective or ancestral sources – don’t go it alone.

Here is a trick I recently learned from expert dream tender Stephen Aisenstat: You can set up a dialogue where your helpful dream elements are the ones that turn and face the overwhelming emotions. This gives you, or the dreamer, a little bit of space to see what might otherwise be overwhelming from the vantage point of the observing self. This is a good way to help manage dream emotions that are too large or overwhelming to face alone. For example, a friend had a dream that included an image of Putin as a cold-eyed killer, and she needed to enlist the support of the archetypal mother to manage the terrifying image her dream had conjured up. She could imagine a face-off between the Great Mother and Putin so that much of the battle could take place outside of her, while she observed. This rendered the pain of the image much more manageable.

Dream emotions are not always so challenging, but they can be quite particular. It is as though our dreammaker wants to engender very particular feelings in us, and creates a scene filled with details that do just that, and just for us. This is what makes most dreams so very personal. Only the dreamer will react in a particular way to the strange collage of elements from past and present in their dream. Sinking into the emotions the dream evokes will carry the feeling forward to a new place, which is what the dream wants.