I’m feeling celebratory because yesterday I pressed ‘SEND’ on the very last step in writing my book on the clinical use of dreams. Happy and tired, like I’ve just given birth – which, in a way, I have. Now I want this long-term labour of love to be read widely, and to reach those it’s intended for. Hence, this blog, intended to help spread the word about the book, and to be a vehicle to continue sharing my expanding knowledge about how to work with dreams. I expect to be a student of dreams for a long time.
The question I was asked most often in the past year and a half, when I told people I was writing a book about dreams, is, will it help me interpret my own dreams? Can anyone read it, or is it just for professional therapists? Most seem to be wanting some dreamwork self-help, which got me thinking about what kinds of things might facilitate doing dreamwork on one’s own.
The first caveat is that I think it is always better to tell a dream to a partner or group because we can be amazingly obtuse about our own dreams. Dreams often refer to things we repress, and as we revisit them, the same biases are present in our attempt to make sense of our dreams. However, there are lots of situations where you might want to do some personal dreamwork: if you have no one else available, if you want to revisit a dream that is still reverberating with you, or if you have a backlog of dreams you can’t get to in your dream group or therapy session. Sometimes a dream just lingers, its striking images flashing through our minds during the day, and inviting some form of engagement with the dream.
Let the dream fill you up
There are many things that will open up the dream to you in spite of your inherent tendency to dismiss or overlook some key aspects of it. The first is to write it down in detail along with your impressions and associations to the dream. Then read the dream back and attempt to re-experience the dream, especially the emotion it brought with it. In sampling that emotion, perhaps ask yourself if this feeling is familiar or trying to tell you something, or maybe just linger in the feeling and don’t try to figure it out. If you let it fill you up, it will speak to you in some way that may not be predictable in advance. You can’t get the message by speculating about how you would feel if such a thing were to happen, but rather by having the experience in your bones, or your belly, or wherever it seems to live in your body.
You can draw a sketch of the dream. This also has the potential to quiet the analytic part of you that will prematurely try to decipher the dream as if it were a puzzle to be solved. Drawing a dream shifts you into the right hemisphere, the associative, experiential side of the brain that is better suited for dreamwork. As you draw, the image may speak to you more directly from the dream itself than from your written account, and surprise elements may creep into your drawing.
Both carrying the dream images and emotions with you, and making a drawing of the dream are ways to continue the engagement with your dream over time. The big, numinous, moving dreams we have are worthy of this level of engagement, and the process can shift and change, sometimes over a lifetime.