Category: Personal dreamwork

Dreams have inherent therapeutic value. Why don’t we tap into them more?

By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Dreaming is therapeutic. Is there a way to make it more so? Unequivocally, yes. Much like therapy, the more we invest our time and energy into our dreams, the more helpful they will be. This is not a new idea, but one that is gaining a broader spectrum of supportive evidence, moving beyond clinical case studies to include the realms of neuroscience and traumatology. Our brains and bodies have a natural tendency towards health and wholeness, and dreams, even the so-called bad ones, are implicated in the process of maintaining our emotional and spiritual health.

There are the obvious cases. For example, a few years back, a client was having a particularly difficult time in her life and feeling wholly unsupported by those closest to her. She dreamt that a large bear of a woman gathered her up in her lap and held her close, rocking her and telling her everything was going to be just fine. This dream was vivid and visceral, and she woke from it feeling soothed and hopeful.

Most dreams are not quite so obviously helpful. For example, this summer, my beloved cat Shadow disappeared and I have not seen him since. Shortly after his disappearance, he came to me often in my dreams, at first so realistic I felt I could reach out and touch his silky fur. Later, his dream presence was more distant, his image starting to break up. These dreams are more like how therapy really is – helpful but painful too because it brings us face to face with what we are up against. Therapy is typically a process that allows us to consider, feel deeply into, and ultimately accept and move through aspects of life that we find challenging. Therapy includes many supportive moments, akin to the bear hug woman, but it is rarely as simple as that.

I have spent more than 20 years as a clinical therapist who welcomes and explores client dreams as an intrinsic part of the process. I have also paid attention to my own dreams. I understand first-hand the tremendous value dreams have in alerting us to what we need to attend to. I have been astounded at times by their wonderfully creative way of offering us new perspectives on tired old situations. But rarely are they clear and simple like the bear hug woman dream. Instead, their helpfulness usually comes in two ways. One is an automatic sorting and emotional processing that goes on in the background while we sleep. The other is via active engagement with dream images, a relational process that takes time and effort on our part. We can do this dreamwork on our own or in the company of a dream partner, group or therapist, or do both: begin exploring on our own, and then with the help of others. I recommend both.

My point is that while dreams are naturally therapeutic, we can greatly enhance the help they bring us if we spend a little time and make an effort to engage with them. And yet so many people ignore this nocturnal resource. Why is that?

I can offer several possible reasons. First, dreams often feel too mysterious and unapproachable. For example, recently I had a dream where there was a clear felt sense that I had been searching the world and had finally found what I was looking for. The rest of the dream is more vague, and only partially recalled… but my holy grail seemed to be in the clear turquoise waters of a shallow lagoon in some faraway place, and maybe was a school of fish. Then I was a disembodied watcher floating above the dream scene looking down on a white car with strange gull-wing doors flung wide open. This image has a spiritual feel to it, the white car reminding me of snow angels.

The dream also brings to mind my very first and most vivid lucid dream — I was swimming underwater and the realization that I didn’t seem to need to air sparked my lucid awareness of dreaming. To process this dream, I had a meandering conversation with my dream partner, and gained a better sense of how this dream might be “just what I was looking for.” Some helpful pointers: the car was floating, a vehicle, a mediator of sorts between the air above and the water below. I made plans to draw the image to engage with it further. Rarely do dreams offer up clear and easy answers.

Then again, this is also similar to therapy, at least in the way I practice it. I do not see myself as in the business of providing opinions, solutions or answers. I am an active, empathic listener, and a supportive advocate for my clients. But this support comes in a way that ideally enables them to hear their own voices more clearly, to plumb their depths, to face their demons and if needed, to metabolize embodied trauma and memories that may be holding them back. But I don’t view therapy as an excavation project in which we search the past for sources of pain. I believe the best working material for therapy comes from the present, and attending to what arises now that needs attention (which of course will include the past). Dreams very often bring up what’s most salient, emotionally-charged and related to current challenges. They can also point the way forward.

This brings me to another reason I believe many people turn away from their dreams despite their inherent therapeutic value. It’s the same reason clients often arrive in therapy only after they’ve reached a point of desperation, their inner demons shouting too loudly to be ignored any longer. We tend to dream of what we repress, those aspects of our lives that can be difficult to face. When we wake from a dream, I expect there is some level of awareness that the dream is telling us something we need to hear but don’t want to hear. Dreams are like homeopathic medicine – a small dose of what is ailing us, a direct experience of our problem. They are an irritant that has the potential to begin the process of response, and ultimately of understanding, metabolization and healing. But first we need to turn toward them and have the courage to let them in.

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers dream exploration courses online to clinicians and anyone interested in engaging with their own dreams. She is author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy, and many articles and book chapters on embodied experiential dreamwork and focusing. Join her for a free talk on dreams and therapy Jan. 16, on the Jung Platform’s Dream Summit.

If you are wrestling with a particularly challenging issue and no amount of effort yields an answer, sometimes ‘sleeping on it’ can bring insight that eluded you during the day. If you deliberately ask your dream-self to help you solve problems, the help that comes from such inquiry offers multiple and surprising benefits.

Some notes on the history of dream incubation

Dream incubation has a long history, far beyond the scope of this blog. But there is some wisdom to be gleaned from the past. According to Patton (2004), the dream incubation rituals of the Ancient Near East and Greece had three main elements: intentionality, locality and epiphany. Without at least two of these elements, a dream can’t be considered incubated.

Intentionality is the understanding that the dream incubation was entered into deliberately and for a specific purpose, most often healing. There was often a ritual preparation, cleansing, possibly supplication to the gods for a therapeutic dream. It was understood that such dreams were coming from the gods and not the person dreaming them. Patton wrote that “incubation is a process one enters deliberately, intentionally, on one’s own behalf, with an eye to hatching dreams of power” (p. 203).

Locality speaks to the fact that dreams were considered to be in relationship with the place one dreams them. Dreams were originally seen as “place events… the dream’s setting is radically connected to the place where the dream is dreamed” (p. 204). Dreamers attending the ancient temple of Asklepios, for example, would sleep in the abaton with all the other people hoping to have a healing dream. The places chosen for such rituals were understood to be where the veil between the material and spiritual world was more permeable.

Epiphany involved the realization of a dream incubation and subsequent sharing of the dream encounter. Successfully-incubated dreams were seen by the Ancient Near East and Greeks as visitations from the gods, marked by the appearance of the actual god in the dream, or another form which the god often assumed, i.e. Asklepios as serpent. The process was often completed with some kind of offering or artwork commemorating the dream and offering thanks. After a dream in which the gods paid a visit, they were understood to inhabit the dreamer for a time, or for a lifetime, bringing about fusion of the larger and smaller self.

Patton writes eloquently of the relationship between the dreamer and the gods:

“Although incubated dreams certainly do not “belong” to human beings any more than any other dreams do, they are far from impersonal. For our part, we are far from passive receptacles for the self-expression of the gods through dreaming. We contribute to the incubation a delicate yet powerful web of experience, memory, will, fear, awe, and desire where the divine dream can take place. When the spirit of place hatches dreams through mortals, it also dreams about us and for us as individuals, as a tribe, and as a race.

Thus the process of incubation, viewed through this phenomenology— or constructive historical theology—emerges neither as conjuring magic (whereby the dreamer is all powerful) nor as a kind of slavery to the night terrors sent by a celestial despot (whereby the visiting dreamed god is all powerful), but instead as a delicate relationship, as paradoxical and symbiotic as any other two-sided affair.”

Dream Incubation Goes Beyond Problem-Solving

Whether or not you ascribe to the view that dreams are messages from the gods, it does appear that dreams bring us many gifts, especially if we make a point of deliberately asking them. Dream incubation research shows that the resulting dreams go beyond problem-solving and can bring insight, lift mood and point to health concerns. In a controlled experiment by White and Taytroe (2003), 96 frequent dreamers rated waking and dream moods over ten days and recorded their most vivid dream for each night. Half incubated a dream before sleeping and half upon waking. Night dream incubation participants were more likely to report that their distress around their problem was reduced, and that it felt both more solvable and improved in some way. Night dream incubation also improved mood, reducing both anxiety and depression over ten days relative to the control group.

The researchers used Delaney’s (1996) simple dream incubation technique:

“Write down a one-line question, phrase, or request that expresses something you think is important for you to know or do in order to help you solve your personal problem. It is not a wish that something would happen to another person or to circumstances beyond your control that are part of your focus problem. Examples are:

Help me understand my friend _____,” “What is really going on between _____ and me?,” “Give me an idea for my physics project,” “How can I get motivated to do _____?,” and “How can I improve my study habits?”

You might think of several phrases before you find one that seems most direct and appropriate. Be as specific as you can to your focus problem.”

An Embodied Dream Incubation Practice

If you would prefer a more embodied method, here is one I developed based on focusing. While it doesn’t work for me all the time, on occasion it has produced profound dreams in direct response to my inquiry. Here’s a script to guide your incubation process:

Start by allowing your body to choose a particular topic or issue that you would like your dream to respond to. Check inside for what seems to most want your attention. Get a sense of how it lives in your body – where it is located, and how you would describe it. See if you can also get a sense of what it might be about. Spend a couple of minutes with this – an example might be: a knot in my stomach that seems to contain some anger to do with my relationship. Or a fluttery sensation in my throat that feels like anxiety about the pandemic. As you attend to this felt sense, ask your dream to offer something relevant, a way forward. Stay with the embodied question, and the actual felt sense in your body for a few minutes, ideally not too long before sleeping, and then let it go. You can do this for several nights in a row if your dreams don’t respond immediately. Treat all the dreams that come within the next few days as if they are responding to your query.

Dreams and the body: Early warning signs

In another dream incubation study, Harvard psychologist Dierdre Barrett (1993) examined the effects of dream incubation for creative problem solving. She found that among the 76 participants, roughly half of their dreams were deemed relevant to the question posed in the incubation process. Of those, about 70% of the dreams were rated, both by the dreamer and by independent raters, as offering a solution to the problem. Barrett found that incubation is most successful with queries of a personal nature, and that medical and body-related questions can also generate helpful dream responses.

There is strong support for the notion that the early warning signs for some medical conditions come to us first in our dreams. According to neurologist Oliver Sacks (1996), dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” Neurological disorders can alter dreaming processes in quite specific ways, and these can vary from person to person. Sacks gives the example of a patient with an occipital angioma who knew that if his dreams turned from their usual black and white to red, he was about to have a seizure. In other examples: the loss of visual imagery in dreams is a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams can presage remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to small changes in the body, and so appears prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

In some cases, this early warning provided by dreaming can be lifesaving. Dreamworker Jeremy Taylor (1992) offered the example of a woman who dreamt of a purse of rotting meat. The dream was so disturbing to her and her dream group members, the woman sought a diagnostic pap smear which turned out to be negative. She insisted on further testing which revealed she had a particularly aggressive form of uterine cancer that would have killed her had she not caught it in time. At the time of the dream, she had no symptoms and was about to go on a trip – she credits the dream and the dreamwork for saving her life.

Taylor said that all dreams can be read on many levels, but that every dream contains some reference to the body that is dreaming it. In some dreams, houses can be seen as analogies for the body – for example, the wiring is our nervous system, the plumbing our digestive system, windows are eyes and so on. This embodied level of the dream is always worth considering, especially if the images seem particularly ominous or insistent, like the purse of rotting meat.

However, dreams are not always so serious, and only very rarely are they warnings of something deadly. I am hoping that when you try these dream incubation practices, you bring a spirit of curiosity and play. Love and enjoy your dreams and they will often respond in kind, bringing new insights to old problems and lifting up your mood along the way.

Dr. Leslie Ellis is author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy. She offers clinical dreamwork courses online.

References

Barrett, D. (1993). The “Committee of Sleep”: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Dreaming, 3(2), 115-122.

Delaney, G. (1996). Living your dreams. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Patton, K. C.  (2004). “A great and strange correction”: Intentionality, locality and eipiphany in the category of dream incubation. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from: 075.080.230.207 on March 03, 2018.

Sacks, O. (1996). Neurological dreams. In Barrett (Ed.), Trauma and dreams, p. 212-216. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

White, G. L. & Taytroe, L. (2003).  Personal Problem-Solving Using Dream Incubation: Dreaming, Relaxation, or Waking Cognition? Dreaming, 13(4).