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This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completing this course, mental health professionals will be able to:
The materials in this course are based on the most accurate information available to the author at the time of writing. The field of dreamwork is simultaneously ancient and continually explored and updated. Nightmares have been part of our experience from antiquity through modern times. The past several decades have expanded our understanding of dreams, dreamwork, and integration of healing modalities including dreamwork into our clinical practice. This course will equip clinicians to have a basic understanding of the nature of sleeping and waking dreams, introduce an overview of the neurobiology of a dream, and offer multiple methods to incorporate dreamwork into modern clinical practice.
The purpose of this course is to introduce or refresh the therapeutic use of dreamwork in clinical practice for the modern clinician. Our dreams and the dreams of our clients are the closest we get to a clear view of our inner life and struggles and our unconscious or preconscious selves, along with the wisdom of the unconscious to formulate solutions and strategies for solving these dilemmas. Dreamwork practices have greatly evolved since Freud and Jung, and while still honoring the debt to these early analysts, there are a great many additional styles of doing therapeutic dreamwork. This course considers somatic, expressive, spiritual, and trauma-based modern approaches to therapy and dreamwork.
One of the main differences is that modern dreamwork is a bottom-up, not a top-down style of working. It is not the clinician who interprets the dream, or simply tells the client what it means. Rather, it is a collaborative venture whereby the clinician helps to guide the client in their exploration of the dream with observations, questions, and interventions, but ultimately it is the dreamer’s “aha” and acknowledgement of meaningful associations or correct understanding, that carries the day. Practically and creatively, dreamwork helps us to cut to the chase and find the core of an issue efficiently, and it contains the seeds to solutions to problems within the dream itself if we know how to find them.
Exploring the wisdom and potential for healing that understanding our dreams can bring us has been part of therapeutic and spiritual practices since ancient times. It has fallen into disuse in recent years, depriving both clients and clinicians from utilizing this rich and deep source of knowledge, problem solving, and growth. Schiller’s work uses a multi-layered psycho-spiritual and embodied approach that empowers the dreamer to not only understand their dreams, but to be able to take concrete action in life to enhance their well-being and heal from past traumas and wounds.
The materials in this course are adapted from portions of the author’s book on dreamwork, Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul’s Wisdom, Schiller, L. Y. (2019), Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing and are reprinted with permission of the publisher.
“Just close your eyes, dear, click your heels together three times and repeat, ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’.” from The Wizard of Oz
Most of us know this incantation. At the very end of her dreamlike journey through Oz, Dorothy receives the magic formula to returning home from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. That had been Dorothy’s goal the whole time she was in Oz – to find her way back home. All that remained for her to do was to close her eyes, click the heels of her ruby slippers together three times and say the words, “There’s no place like home.”
Working with our dreams can bring us back home to our most authentic selves. The goal of this course is to help your clients gain the skills to journey through the layers of their dreams, find what is hidden underneath their surface, and use this information to come home to the balanced center of their own lives. Dorothy must travel through her own Oz-dream, including its nightmarish parts, to find her guides and companions and gain the wisdom and power she needs before she is given the gift of this ritual and incantation to get back home. When Scarecrow asks Glinda why she didn’t just tell Dorothy how to do that when she first arrived in Oz, Glinda replies, “She wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”
That message for Dorothy resonates in this type of dreamwork: to help clients learn for themselves how to find the way back home. We can’t really tell our clients what their dreams mean, but we can serve as their guides. Each of us must find that personal “aha!” of knowing for ourselves. The final arbitrator of the meaning of a dream are the dreamer themselves, so when we guide our dreamers, we can ask questions, hypothesize, and wonder, but not insist that we know their own inner truth.
All of us can get blown off course in our lives as Dorothy did and find ourselves in a very different landscape than the one we expect. Like Dorothy, the people we work with – and we ourselves – can become lost and disoriented, feel lonely or unwanted, frightened or confused in our lives. We can find ourselves at a crossroads in life wondering, “Which way should I go now?”
We all need guidance at times. We need it when we have an important or difficult life decision to figure out, are stuck in a creative block, or are struggling with a trauma or loss. We may also need it for a worrisome health issue, a question about our path in life, or a desire to connect with a meaningful spirituality. Our dreams can connect us with the hidden core of our own truth for all these quests.
Simply stated, any question such as, “What would help me with this problem?” or “Which way should I go now in my life?” can be answered by our dreams. Mulder and Scully, the fictional FBI agents in The X-Files, tell us that, “Dreams are answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.” Unasked questions and answers show up in our dreams, too. Helping our clients to attend to their dreams gives them access to their deepest personal wisdom and an internal GPS. The wayfaring system of our dreams can lead us home.
Our dreams are alive. These portals into our unconscious can feel as real as waking life. They are seeds that contain the potentiality for the whole, embodying our hopes, our fears, and our creativity. They serve as a permanent witness to our life’s journeys, and are a portable, practical, and unlimited resource.
Socrates told us to “Know thyself” and that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Dream-tending, a term coined by Stephen Aizensadt (2011), allows us to know ourselves more fully; and knowing ourselves is a prerequisite for being at home in our lives. Dreams also allow us to know our dark sides, called the Shadow in Jungian terms, and integrate them into the wholeness of our being. Shadow is neither good nor bad, but something that is simply a part of us all. It can be that part of ourselves which is unknown, or parts of ourselves that are unacceptable, embarrassing, or fearful to us. Many of the issues and problems our clients bring to us are parts of their dark or shadow sides that need to be acknowledged and resolved. Jung and others tell us that our Shadow side is the part of ourselves that is so deeply buried in our unconscious that we experience it as “not me” (Jung, 1959; Storr, 2013). The following are examples of Shadow showing itself in dreams:
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, (Estes, 1992) also reminds us that the shadow figure in our dreams can be a message about either our interior or our exterior life. It can be a call to be strong and find ways in our lives to stand up to a predator. Encountering our Shadow in dreams can be a call to arms. Integration of our dark and light sides through dreamwork brings us home to the wholeness of ourselves, just as the wholeness of the yin and yang symbol contains elements of the opposite within each half. We need to acknowledge all the parts of ourselves to be complete. Jung wrote that we don’t become enlightened simply by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness visible (Jung, 1983).
Dreamworker Jeremy Taylor (2009, p.6) reminds us that no dreams come simply to tell us something that we already know. Therefore, we can start orienting to our dreams with the assumption that they contain something we don’t know yet, even if the dream seems obvious at first blush. Some additional knowledge is lurking just below the threshold of our consciousness waiting to be discovered.
Ally, a colleague of mine, worked on her dream, and subsequently wrote down a list of 22 associations to life issues she thought that the dream might allude to. At the time she did this exercise, she didn’t recognize how many of them were relevant for her. She just allowed them to stream out of her. Two years later, she came across that list again in an old file folder. Lo and behold, they were the things she was now working on in therapy. They had been there in her psyche all along; she just had to “find them for herself” as Dorothy did, and wait for the right time for their ripening and fruition. We can’t rush the workings of our soul.
Dreams can bring us home. So ask yourself and your clients, what does it mean to be “home”? Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder said, “Home is where the heart is.” Nineteen hundred years later, Robert Frost told us, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (Frost, 1914) Glinda had something to say about this too: “Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.” (from The Wizard of Oz movie). Jungian analyst Michael Conforti tells us that home is a psychic space where one lives. (Conforti, presentation at the Jung Society, Newton, MA, 2014). In different ways, they all tell us that home is within us, or that which embraces us.
Home. It’s where we refill and replenish; it is a sense of security, a sense of belonging. We speak about bringing it all home when we complete a thought or a project. In many of the games we play as children, the goal is to get home. So this concept is ingrained in us early on. In the game Tag, you are safe when you get to “home base.” Same for Capture the Flag. Same for Parcheesi. In backgammon, you have to get all your pieces to your “home quarter” before you can begin taking them off the board for a win. Same for baseball. We round the bases towards home, and hitting a home run is as good as it gets!
The turtle and the snail are always at home wherever they are – they literally carry their homes on their backs. We too can benefit from the skill of being able to access that feeling of being home at a moment’s notice as they do. However, so many of our clients and we ourselves still seek that place of refuge, of belonging, that can seem so elusive. Perhaps most importantly, we need to feel at home inside ourselves. Knowing yourself well enough – your own heart, your own mind, and your own courage – to say that you are at home inside your own skin is a deep teaching of many spiritual disciplines and a core of deep psychotherapeutic work. Working with dreams brings us into contact with our deepest and fullest selves, perhaps the closest to the core of our being, our true home base, that we can get this side of the grave. For any client who has suffered a serious loss or abandonment or ongoing trauma, this is the core of healing – to be at home in themselves.
Our dreams and even our nightmares contain the seeds to enable us to come into relationship with our own essence, our highest and wisest self. Dreams can provide us with practical answers, show us a path for healing, connect us with the Divine, provide creative juice, and even see around the corners of time to events that have not yet happened. If we learn to follow the yellow brick road of the clues strewn amidst the landscapes and characters in our dreams, we find our deepest home. Like a compass that will point the way to true north, the compass of our dreams will always point us to our truest home.
In a dream we can we simultaneously access multiple perspectives at once. We can be a character in our dream as well as an observer from the outside. We are as alive inside the dream as we are outside of it, and our night landscapes are often as real and as rich as our dayscapes. Our dreams are multi-layered like a Pentimento, a fine-art term for a painting with another one painted right over it. Both paintings can occasionally be seen at the same time, as one layer ghosts through another. Often though, the top-most layer must be carefully scraped back to reveal the second one underneath. Our dreams are like this – they come to us with multiple layers of meaning. We will learn to peel back these layers to get to the core of truth embedded within.
A recent qualitative analysis found that, regardless of therapeutic modality, there are commonalities to the ways in which clinicians work with dreams. The author of this study also speaks to a movement in the field towards a universal approach that would be more experiential and collaborative in nature (Ellis, 2019). In this course, I will be discussing the Integrated Embodied Approach, which represents my overarching philosophy of working with dreams. I have honed this approach over 40 years of dreamwork. It incorporates into dream exploration our physical awareness and bodily senses, our cognitions, the images themselves, our associations, our emotions and feelings, and our spiritual connections. In other words, it is a body/mind/spirit approach to dreams that gains our deepest and fullest understanding of these nocturnal messages.
Other dreamworkers also use embodied methods. Robert Bosnak is one who invites us to dive deeply and listen to our body (Bosnak, 1986), and other therapeutic practitioners add dreamwork to their body-oriented treatments (Mindell, 2001, Gendlin, 1978, 1986.) However, my integrated embodied approach to dreams attends to the uniqueness of each person and their dream life by offering the dreamer many modalities of working on a dream. I don’t espouse a single orientation such as Freudian or Jungian or Gestalt; rather I prefer a combination style of work that freely moves between orientations to find the optimum meanings and directions embedded within each dream.
In doing so, I provide a way to honor each client’s different needs and styles. Each dream gives up its secrets in different ways and every client is unique to themselves, so I believe that it is important to have a whole repertoire of options for interpreting dreams. Therefore, we also examine the imagery, metaphor, character, and story in our dreams, and can explore our dreams from a spiritual or shamanic perspective that recognizes forms of dreaming while awake as well as when asleep.
To be home within ourselves is to be present, and to be present is to be aware, noticing what is around us in this moment, not distracted or pulled into our stories of what was (our past) or what might be (our future). Mindfulness is also the ability to be in the center of one’s own life. Self-Energy, a state of calm self-awareness, is the term used in the therapeutic modality of IFS (Internal Family Systems). IFS developer Richard Schwartz (Schwartz, 2019) identifies the poetic “seven C’s” of conscious self-energy: curiosity, compassion, centeredness, clarity, calm, connection, and courage, that can help to bring us home to ourselves. (workshop presentation, Therapy Training, Boston, 2016).
We have all had the experience of getting lost or of losing our sense of direction, at least metaphorically, if not literally. This is one of the main reasons clients seek therapy – they have lost themselves somewhere along the way. To find ourselves again, to find our way home, we first need to be able to re-orient. To do so, we need to either spot a familiar landmark or receive directions. Then we need to get back on track or find a new direction. In many sports, and in politics, this is called course correction. In archery and boating it’s called sighting. We need to sight, or orient ourselves, toward where we want our canoe or our arrow to go, and then make any necessary corrections in our trajectory if we’ve gone off course. Dreams are our internal navigational system that checks our course in life and offers us options for recalibration.
If our clients are off course in their lives, we can invite their dreaming selves to offer up course correction to get back on track. If we and they pay attention to their dream messages, explore the layers of meaning embedded even in the seemingly simplest dreams, and then take some waking action based on the new understanding, we help them to recalibrate and reorient toward their true direction.
Here is an example of how a dream helped me with course correction, starting first with a related “waking course correction” to clarify the concept. I love to swim, but for years I always swam crooked – no matter how I tried to orient myself to the pool lane, or to some landmark on the shore, I always ended up swimming at an angle and I couldn’t figure out why. One day while swimming at Walden Pond, I mentioned this to my friend Anne, who was a swim instructor. It was a hot summer day, and we were lazily swimming across the lake together. We turned face-to-face, doing sidestroke to talk, and she said, “Maybe one arm is stronger than the other, and could be pulling you off course. If that’s the problem, you just have to compensate for it.”
That advice immediately rang true. I replied, “I am a very strong lefty – my right hand is practically incapable of even opening a bottle cap. Thanks so much – I’ll start paying attention to that.” As I did so, I noticed that I did always veer to the left when swimming. But until Anne pointed it out to me, I hadn’t noticed it. Now I could begin to correct my course. I began to give a few extra strong pulls with my right arm every few strokes to correct for the imbalance. Recently, I noticed that I rarely have to do that anymore; with years of practice my stroke has evened out. Most often now, I am swimming pretty straight. It seems I have finally internalized this learning and now am unconsciously making the needed correction.
We and our clients all have times when we can’t figure out what is needed in our lives, or what our dreams are telling us. I needed that swim instructor to evaluate my stroke to tell me why I was veering off course; I hadn’t been able to figure it out by myself. But that was her area of expertise, so she diagnosed the problem rather quickly. After I knew what the problem was, I was able to adapt and figure out a solution. This is where you as the psychotherapist come in. We can offer insights and perspective to a dream that our clients may not have been able to see themselves. We can hold up the additional mirror through which they can better see the back of their own heads.
Next, here is how this can work for dream-guided course correction. Staying with the theme of swimming, several years ago I developed arthritis in my neck. I was saddened to think that I may have to give up swimming altogether, as the turning-the-head-to-breathe part of the crawl stroke quickly became painful. To seek a solution to this dilemma, I asked for a dream to help me. The dream I got a few days later was simple – it told me to “Swim like a fish.”
That was it, the whole dream. I had an image of a fish, and those words. I knew it was connected to what I had asked, since it was obviously about swimming, but I didn’t know at first what it was trying to tell me. What about fish, or swimming like them, could help with arthritis in my neck? Unless I could magically grow a set of gills, that dream would be of little help.
Weeks went by and I still couldn’t decipher this clue. Then I remembered that a year earlier I had been snorkeling off the coast of Mexico while on vacation. I had been mesmerized by the beautiful underwater world of fish and coral for over an hour and that my neck hadn’t bothered me. “Aha! That’s it!” I exclaimed as the realization struck home. I had been wearing my snorkel and mask, and therefore didn’t need to turn my head to breathe. This was my answer. “I don’t need to grow gills to swim like a fish, I just need to keep my head on straight.” Fairly straightforward, but I had to figure it out in my own time, just as Dorothy did.
I now bring my snorkel and mask with me wherever I swim – to the pool at my gym, to the lake at dance camp, to the ocean beaches on the north shore of Boston. I can swim without suffering, a practical solution gifted to me by my dream. Our dreams can show us how to adapt to the changing circumstances of our lives.
To paraphrase a graduate school entrance exam (the Miller Analogies), symbol is to dream as word is to language. Symbols can contain multiple meanings, just as a single word can have many meanings ranging from the literal to metaphorical or analogous. The word “run,” for example, can mean to move one’s legs very quickly, or a flaw that appears, often quickly, in a stocking. A dream might also show a run in a stocking as a symbol meaning to “run away from” a situation, possibly something embarrassing, much as a run in a stocking could be embarrassing if you have an important presentation to make and want to look your best. Spring is the season following winter; it can also stand for a coiled metal wire, a surprise, or the action of hopping or jumping. The meaning of the symbols depends on both the context in the dream and the associations of the dreamer. At the end of the day, if the interpretation resonates, the symbol’s meaning is idiosyncratic to the dreamer. So, if your client dreamed of a coiled wire, it could imply any of these, or other more personal meanings.
We share universal human experiences and cultural commonalities. Therefore, some symbols have a more universal resonance that could also hold true for our dreams. Invite your client to think about their personal associations to a dream image, as well as considering universal meanings and how they could be used as symbol, metaphor, analogy, or a play on words. The personal meaning may contain a surprise – so much the better if it does. A single symbol can contain many layers of meaning simultaneously; it is not a matter of either/or, but rather the possibility of both/and.
For example, after discussing water and fish in the previous example, we can examine water as a symbol that often has universal resonance. Water in the lexicon of dream symbols is frequently a metaphor for the unconscious mind. It is then symbolic of inner depths and the parts of oneself that we don’t yet know consciously. A dream that contains water can be examined in its literal sense, such as which ocean or lake it depicted, but a deeper meaning for therapeutic work may require understanding it figuratively and metaphorically as representing inner depths or something under the surface. Our client’s own emotional resonance will also affect the meaning of the symbol for them. If they are a non-swimmer, or an anxious one, water may imply feeling “out of your depth.” If they love swimming, it may imply feeling held and buoyed up. As Freud tells us, sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar” in a dream, but sometimes it means something else entirely, such as a phallic symbol, a smokescreen, or a foul odor.
We must remember that the only authentic meaning of a dream is that which resonates as true for the dreamer. Without the personal “aha,” that shiver or tingle of truth at the bone, it’s probably not true for your client. This tingle or aha may be a function of memory. At some level, we recognize that we already knew this, like a deja vu of the night, and that we are remembering something that that was previously buried as it rises to consciousness in our dream.
Estes (1992) also tells us that stories are medicine, and we know that dreams are stories. Narrative therapies are an important part of our repertoire as therapists. In her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Estes (1992) makes explicit the connections between myth and dream – all of which resonate in our deep life of the spirit – by writing that fairy tales, folktales, legends, and mythos contain instruction for our lives, and that our dreams are portals, entrances, preparations, and practices for the next step in consciousness. Dreams can be windows into higher and deeper levels of consciousness. W.B. Yeats is credited with stating, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our sense to grow sharper.”
Cultural and spiritual traditions the world over have looked at dreams as portals into healing and into a spiritual or sacred realm. Many Native American traditions emphasize the importance of both spontaneous dreams and those dreams or visions that come through on a vision quest, one of the primary transition rites to adulthood. The young man or woman goes off alone to meditate or pray for a period of time with the hope of having a dream or vision to find their true name and a direction that will guide them for the rest of their life. The capacity to dream, and to dream strong, with messages for the tribe, is a central spiritual value in many Native traditions. We take special notice here of the community value of dreaming for not only oneself, but also on behalf of our tribe.
Australian aboriginal creation mythology tells us that the world was dreamed into being through song-lines from the “Dreamtime.” Jeanne Houston, human potential scholar and author, tells us that “Dreamtime” contains the “depth world” flowing through this one; that it is always and never; a time that never was and is always happening. (Houston, 2004, p.186). The aboriginal storytellers teach their children that the world was sung and dreamed into being. Sitting at night out under the stars, they tell that in the beginning the Spirits of the Dream moved out over the land, singing the earth into being. These dream spirits take the shape of the native animals, who then give their names and corresponding gifts to the clans that carry their spirit. This is part of the meaning of totem animal – the animal whose power of flight or far-sightedness or swiftness graces us with their gifts.
The spirit-songs put down paths of power on the earth called ley lines (which frequently correspond with modern electro-magnetic energy lines). Each invisible ley line relates to its own totem animal. The journeys of each clan follow the line of their own totem animal. Their history is preserved and passed down through the stories, art, songs, and dances that reflect this Dreamtime. This oral tradition of song-lines is an ancient memory code or mnemonic device used by indigenous cultures around the world.
Eastern and Western cultures both speak of night dreams and day visions in many of their sacred books. In Western religious writings, we learn of the importance of dreams to the ancient Egyptians from the biblical story of Joseph. He is brought forth from imprisonment to interpret the Pharaoh’s dreams, thus securing himself a place as Pharaoh’s chief advisor. Joseph also saved the ancient world from widespread famine through his correct interpretation of the dream of the seven fat and seven lean cows. His subsequent dream-based action step of stockpiling grain in silos to use during the seven lean years was directly based on his understanding of the dream symbols.
The Judeo-Christian Bible has multiple references to both waking visions and night dreams. In the original Hebrew, the same word is often used for both: “Chalom” (rhymes with shalom). It can mean either dream or vision, depending on its context. Here are a few examples of where this multi-purpose word chalom is used. After Joseph, perhaps the most well-known biblical dreamer is Jacob. He fell asleep on the mountain with his head on a stone and dreamed of the stairway to heaven, a ladder between heaven and earth with angels going up and down on it. When Elijah hears the “still small Voice” of God speaking to him (I Kings, 19:12), it is at the self-same spot that Moses earlier had the vision of the burning bush. The word chalom is used again. Elijah was wide awake when he heard the voice of God. In this instance, chalom is translated as “vision,” thereby letting us know that he was hard awake hearing the Voice.
Ezekiel dreams of a mystical chariot, with four different animals as its four wheels, hinting at an image of God (Ezekiel 10:9-10), commemorated in the spiritual song, “Ezekiel saw a wheel a-turning, way in the middle of the air…” This vision serves as the basis for the most mystical branch of Kabbalah. Islam also has a strong tradition of attention to dreaming, and writers about the life of Muhammad speak of his dream revelations and prophecies. We see that dreams and visions are closely related; both contain the numinous, and both contain messages for our lives.
Turning to the East, Vishnu, one of the major gods of the Hindu pantheon, dreams that a wonderful lotus grows out of his navel from which arises the universe. According to Buckeley (2003), the meaning of this image is that whole worlds are created out of dream matter right there. In Buddhism, a core creation story is the conception dream of Queen Maya, who dreams of being impregnated by a sacred white elephant.
Dreams can do their work to help us integrate and metabolize the events in our lives, even if we don’t understand exactly how they do so. The following are some dream functions:
Memory Consolidation: Dreaming helps us to integrate the learning that we have done during the day. Reseach on this topic shows that dream-related affect can impact memory retention. In particular, negative affect in dreams may contribute to long-term memory consolidation (du Plessis & Lipinska, 2023).
Dreaming may assist us with information storage and memory processing. Dreams also provide a forum in which we can plan or rehearse new actions or ideas. This can activate and grow new neural networks in our brains, and like a good gardener, our dreams can also prune away those that we no longer need. In other words, we can dream to remember, and we can dream to forget. “Let me sleep on it” is a valid response for problem-solving and decision-making.
Compensation: Classically, this refers to a psychic adjustment that our unconscious makes for us while we are asleep. It can help us integrate events of the day, aiding us in adapting to the changing circumstances in our life. Dream compensation attempts to sensitize us to aspects of ourselves that we are not aware of, targeting the blind spots we all have so we can then make adjustments needed for balance. Our dreams can provide us with a snapshot of the current state of our being: our mental, emotional, and even our physical self. As the dreams help us to let off steam in our sleep, they thus return our system to a more balanced state of internal homeostasis. This is one of the functions of dreams that serve to “bring us home."
For example, my client Deborah has trouble expressing anger in her waking life; she describes herself as “conflict avoidant.” In her compensatory dream, she got very angry at someone, and in the dream screamed at him that she hated conflict. Because she avoids conflict to a fault in waking life, this dream points out the irony of yelling about hating conflict.
Precognitive: This refers to potential awareness of future events, a type of future consciousness that lets us dream something before it happens. Like a weather report, it is not always exact, but can serve to let us see around the corners of time a bit, to have a heads-up and thus be able to better prepare. Some strong dreamers are gifted with not only the ability to see future events for themselves, but to get insights for loved ones through their dreams.
Telepathic: Related to precognitive dreams, these allow us to connect with the minds of others. Each year the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conference holds a dream telepathy contest, where a volunteer concentrates strongly on an image in a picture before going to sleep and the rest of the conference attendees are invited to try to dream of the image the volunteer is concentrating on. It constantly amazes me how close some dreamers get to the target image. This kind of mind-meld can happen spontaneously as well.
Prodromal: Dreams can be sources of healing, and a type of dream known as prodromal dreaming has been known to provide health reports even before a problem shows up on medical testing. For example, Stan had recurring dreams about having plumbing problems in his house or his office over and over, with increasing urgency. In the first dreams there were drips, and in the next ones he can’t turn off the faucets, and finally the drains clogged up. Because of our awareness that dreams have a potential layer of reference to our physical bodies, the therapeutic dream group urged him to check out these “plumbing issues” with his doctor. Testing showed early prostate cancer, which was still in the very treatable stage, thanks to early detection by his dreams.
Reductive: Some schools of dreamwork reduce everything in a dream to one orientation or interpretation. For followers of Freud, it may be sexual, for Adler it may be power, for Jung it may be spiritual. My own orientation is not to approach the dream from a single framework, but to consider many options and meanings. I do want to consider these three big ideas, but I prefer not to be limited by just one theory.
Reactive: These dreams occur in reaction to something that has happened in our lives. The stimulus for these dreams is a recent or historical life event that is registering neurologically. It can be quite literally a replaying of events that occurred as our system digests and integrates them. If they are pleasant events, we enjoy the instant replay. If the dreams are nightmares, particularly recurring nightmares, then we have not yet metabolized the unpleasant or traumatic life event sufficiently to put it to rest (so to speak). Persistent negative reactive dreams are an important source to attend to when working on healing from trauma.
Creative Resource: We get inspiration through our dreams for our art, our music, our writing, and our dance. They connect us with our muses and tell us stories. Some of the greatest artists of all time attribute their inspirations directly to their dreams. Paul McCartney is said to have acknowledged that he dreamed the song Yesterday before writing it, and Marc Chagall’s floating and surrealistic images are overtly dreamlike.
Portals: Many people believe that our dreams can be portals through which we travel to other worlds, connect with our departed loved ones, with the Divine, and with other spiritual beings, guides, and realms. Many who have lost loved ones are immensely comforted when visited by the departed in their dreams. These visitation dreams often have a numinous and vivid quality to them that differentiate them from symbolic dreams. Whether or not this is a part of your own belief system, it can still be a source of comfort for our clients – since you never know. At the very least, our dreams are portals into other states of being or ways of knowing.
1. Invite your clients to think or journal about the meaning of the state of “being home,” spending some time reflecting on where they have lived and where they have felt “at home” in the most personal meaningful sense. Some may feel most at home inside a house or building, others outside in nature in a special hidden spot, still others in a place of worship. Ask them to notice whether they carry their sense of home inside or outside of themselves. That is, does something in their world remind them of home, or make them feel at home, or is it some inner state of emotion or sensation? Some people feel at home when they recognize that they are calm and relaxed, or when they have a peaceful or loving feeling in their heart or their belly. Pay attention to the kinesthetic as well as the emotional and cognitive indicators.
Invite them to notice if they dream about houses. What makes a place feel like home? For some, it may be the furnishings or the pictures on the wall or mantel. For others it is the people who are there. For yet others, it may be a sense of connection with something sacred or larger than themselves. It might be favorite foods, or certain smells.
2. Reflect also on the theme of Orientation – that concept of sighting or course correction. This can be in a dialogue with you, or a private journaling. How does that work in their own waking and dreaming life? How do they notice if they are “off course” somewhere? Have them write some about that too. If they have received advice or suggestions about how to get back on track from professionals, or friends, or their own dreams or journaling, what do they typically do when receiving inner or outer suggestions? Finally, as they begin to catch more dreams, see how the themes resonate at this particular time in their lives.
We need our dreams. Without them, we lose a crucial part of our innate ability to process and metabolize the experiences in our life. Dreams help us with memory consolidation. Our dreams contain guidance for help in making a crucial decision, and for improving our recall and memory of events learned that day. This is part of why a good night’s sleep before a big test is so helpful. In addition to being well rested, our dreaming brains actually set more firmly the information we studied the day before. Several Harvard University dream and memory researchers confirm this thesis in their studies. (Barrett, 2020; Kahn, 2018; Stickgold, 2021; Zandra, 2021)
Dreams help us work through difficult emotions and life events. They allow us to reprocess the material, get more distance from it, and hopefully become desensitized to it so we have less reactivity. As a therapist, I always encourage my clients to start a dream journal and catch their dreams. This adds an immeasurable amount of richness to their work in therapy. We tend to quickly forget most dreams unless we have reordered them in some way. In addition, when we have a record of dreams over time, we can see patterns and themes.
Sleep and brain studies confirm that we all do dream every night. So, when our clients say, “I don’t dream,” what they really mean is, “I don’t remember my dream.” Neurological PET scans of the brain in sleep labs have clearly shown that we all have four to seven sleep cycles called REM cycles nightly (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, the quick movements our eyelids make when we are in the dreaming part of this cycle). This is predicated on an average of 7-8 hours of sleep a night. If you or your client are one of the lucky ones who can still function well on less sleep, then you probably have fewer cycles. (Personally, I am happiest with at least eight hours, and really happy when I can get nine.) We generally only remember the dreams that occur in the REM cycle right before we wake up.
There are several ways to understand the concept of strong dreaming. Some strong dreamers are those who frequently catch multiple dreams per night. Mia, a member of my dream circle, is such a dreamer. She ultimately devised a shorthand system of notation to jot down keywords in the four to six dreams she remembered each night and then used her notes to write them out more fully in the morning.
Another type of strong dreaming is the out-of-body experience, where the dreamer witnesses what is happening from outside or above. This experience has been reported both in nocturnal dreams and in conscious and unconscious near-death experiences. It may not register on our medical equipment, but has been frequently reported anecdotally.
An additional variation on strong dreaming is known as lucid dreaming. (Johnson, 2021) These dreamers develop the ability to recognize that they are having a dream while in the middle of dreaming it, both spontaneously or through practice. They have the sensation of being awake while they are asleep and experience an awareness that they are dreaming while in the middle of their dream; sort of a “meta” layer of the dream. This skill can be learned with practice and can empower the dreamer, especially with nightmares.
Other strong dreamers have the ability to pick up on cues from their waking surroundings while asleep. These cues somehow penetrate their dreams and provide them with information. Harry Potter, in The Order of the Phoenix, dreams that the snake avatar of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” is attacking his friend Ron Weasley’s father just as the attack is happening. He thus was able to alert members of the Order to get to Mr. Weasley quickly enough to save his life.
Our cave men and women ancestors and the tribespeople of indigenous cultures count on the strong dreamers of their clan to use their dream radar to extend their consciousness beyond the cave and be on the alert for potential danger. Our dreams link us back to our ancestors through this shared collective knowledge. In dreamtime, we too have the ability to extend our consciousness to the waking world, alerting us as it did for our ancestors to the saber-toothed tiger or the approaching storm that we need to make some preparations for. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 2020)
This skill is still latent within us, but oft disbelieved or neglected. It perhaps shows up most often these days with our children. Many parents report that they tap into this sixth sense when they wake suddenly at night, somehow alerted in sleep to the slightest sound or intimation that their child may need them. Here is an example of a personal experience with this phenomenon.
While I was camping in the White Mountains with some friends for a weekend, I had a dream that woke me suddenly in the night, and I heard and saw ambulance lights flashing from within the dream. My immediate waking thought was “I hope my husband and daughter are alright." I had no way to check, though, until the next day when we got back into cell phone range. When I was able to reach home, my daughter told me that my husband had a bike accident and an ambulance came to take him to the hospital. Luckily, it was not life-threatening. My dream radar had shown me those ambulance lights right after the event occurred! Honor this gift as a strength if your client shares it. It can be quite unsettling.
Precognitive dreaming is another form of strong dreaming. There are times when we dream of events before they occur, probably more often than we realize. They are not always big life-shattering events but can also be small daily occurrences. Recently, I dreamt that a large tree came down by the roots in front of my house, but luckily the house wasn’t damaged. Two days later we had a major nor’easter storm, and that exact tree from my dream was uprooted one block away. (And, as predicted by my dream, the houses weren’t damaged.) We may not remember these precognitive dreams however, if we did not write them down. Learning to value and find guidance from their dreams can be a welcome additional resource for our clients.
Sometimes, strong dreaming can be delightful, but it can also be exhausting, uncanny, or frightening. Knowing that it is a part of our inherited legacy can help us appreciate it, respect it, and learn to use it well.
The state of sleep in many ways is the ultimate in not being in control. Anxiety can prevent many of our clients from relaxing into slumber. We all need to have a certain amount of trust to voluntarily allow ourselves to be so out of control that we truly are not even conscious of where we are (which is the state of being asleep), and excess anxiety can certainly interfere with trust.
Spiritual author and counselor Byron Katie (Katie and Mitchell, 2021) has spoken about needing three kinds of trust to make our way well in the world: Trust in ourselves, trust in others, and trust in the universe. When one or more of those is missing, we and our clients need to heal the parts of ourselves that have lost this birthright. So, if the ability to fall asleep is in part an issue of trust, the assistance of calming, soothing, and protecting rituals before bedtime may help us all relax into the arms of sleep so that we can remember our dreams. Whatever helps your clients feel safe at night can used: A bedtime prayer, surrounding themselves with light, checking to be sure they have locked the doors, a warm bath, or a cup of tea.
There are many things that may interfere with our ability to remember our dreams and there is still much that is unknown as to why there is such variability in individuals’ ability to remember them after we wake. Interestingly, one recent study has shown dream recall may be linked to more frequent awakenings from non-REM sleep (van Wyk et al., 2019).
Drugs of all kinds may be the first culprits: certain prescription medications, recreational drugs, and sleep aides or sedatives. Our insomniac culture has come to rely more and more on artificial sleep-inducers. Caffeine and alcohol can both interfere with sleep and dreams. Most of our clients know that caffeine too close to bedtime can interfere with sleep, but that glass of wine or nightcap can also dull their dreaming brain, even though that may seem counterintuitive.
Ambient light in their rooms can also impede sleep. Lights from the ubiquitous screens, the LED light from the alarm clock or any kind of plug-in can interfere. We are not yet sure how computers may affect our dreams or our sleep – or our brains, for that matter – so it is prudent to have them closed and away from our heads. Keeping screens off and lights covered can help. We can also encourage our clients to invest in a small eyeshade to preserve the darkness.
We need deep dreaming sleep for our physical and emotional health. We are currently experiencing an “epidemic of sleep and dream deprivation” in modern culture. Since the 1960s, research has shown that loss of REM/dream sleep results in health concerns that include depression, weight gain, hallucinations, erosion of reason, loss of memory, lower immune-system functions, and a loss of spirituality, according to Dr. Matthew Walker (2017). Having good solid sleep that gets us to REM/dream stage helps the brain process traumatic events.
We’ve all heard the saying, “Time heals all wounds.” Since dreams help us process what has happened in our lives over time, we can also say that dreaming helps us heal our wounds. Walker tells us that, “Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity."
Dreams are a mirror of our emotional state, and the emotional resonance of the dream is what stays with us. The affect present in a dream can make the difference between the same dream being experienced as entertaining, scary, sad, or confusing. Depression and other mood disorders affect cognitions and emotions, and can interfere with dreams. In fact, lack of dream recall is one of the features of depression. In addition to persisting negative thoughts, feelings, and physical signs of depression such as a loss of appetite, loss of interest in participating in life, and loss of energy, the lack of REM sleep can be both symptom and cause of depression.
Rosalind Cartwright’s (2010) research on the brain indicates that REM sleep may be disrupted in people suffering from depression; it either begins too early in our sleep cycle or lasts too long. Dreams contain a mood-regulating function. When this regulatory metabolic function is not being properly accessed, we are unable to utilize our nocturnal processing to modulate our emotions or repair our psyche. When someone who reports being depressed can gain or regain access to their dreams, they often simultaneously report a lifting of the depression. This does not happen overnight; sometimes the system needs weeks or months to re-organize.
My client Lisa had suffered several losses in her life. Her mother died when she was five years old and she lost her father at age 22. She came to therapy at age 28 when she had finished graduate school and had recently broken up with her boyfriend. Lisa had no idea what to do next, or if she even wanted a career in the field she had studied. She had grown up in a buttoned-down, stoic family system. When each of her parents died, she was told, “Just get over it, no use crying about it.” She was not encouraged or supported by her family in grieving. By the time she started therapy at age 28, the unprocessed grief had become internalized to a chronic low-level depression.
Among other things, I asked Lisa to keep a dream journal to help her climb out of this depression. When she told me that she “never” dreamed, I explained to her the science of dreaming, and that while she didn’t remember her dreams yet, they were in there. The addition of the word “yet” to accessing a resource for practically any dilemma or sticking point opens a whole world of possibilities. She was willing to try, so I suggested that if she ever awoke with the sense that she might have had a dream, even if she couldn’t remember anything about it, to simply write the date down in her dream journal, and the words “had a dream” next to it.
After a few weeks of faithfully keeping her journal by her bed, she came in excited to report that she was conscious of having had a dream that week, even though she recalled nothing of the content “yet.” The very fact that she was excited about this was already a good sign, signifying a small break in her flat, grey wall of depression. And sure enough, a few weeks later, she recalled the contents of her first dream in years.
This didn’t just happen overnight, though. Lisa focused her desire to remember her dreams for several weeks before she was able to remember them. She developed the practice of attending to her dreaming self. As we continued to work with and process her dreams, she had more and more vitality, and reported her depression lifting.
Our clients may suffer a lack of connection with their dreams because of depression, drinking, or medicating them away, but also because of devaluing and not attending to them. This has both personal and societal implications. This inattention to dream life reflects how out of touch our world often seems to be with a deep spiritual wisdom that the best of our elders and traditions can offer us. We would all be well served to re-establish our connections with and our respect for non-linear ways of learning and knowing – such as dreaming.
There are many techniques and methods that can enhance dream recall. First and foremost, your clients must want to remember them and really place value on them. It may seem obvious, but if you think about it, we tend to remember things better that are important to us and that we value. Invite your clients to tell themselves that they want to remember their dreams before dozing off and make the commitment to themselves that they will pay attention to the messages their dreams are sending. They can write this commitment in their dream journal or speak it out loud or silently.
Marcia, one of my dream circle members, hypothesized that she was not remembering or recording her dreams lately because her life was so full of transition and turmoil at the time that she just didn’t want to remember them. This insight helped her refocus, along with my suggestion that she could simply record them to work on later even if she didn’t have the psychic space or energy right now. You can offer this idea to your clients if they are reluctant to engage in dreamwork: Record now, work on it later.
Next, help your clients to visualize remembering their dreams. Athletes are often coached to imagine a play-by-play successful touchdown or field goal to achieve prowess in their sport. In that way, our body/mind puts the desired process in motion as a form of rehearsal. This technique of pre-emptive visualization works for dream recall as well. The visualization you offer them might be something like:
“I see myself waking up in the morning before my alarm clock rings with a clear dream in my mind. I remember to hold very still to ‘set’ it, and then I carefully turn over onto my side where my dream journal is and reach for it slowly. I pick up my pen and write my dream down. I am able to remember all the details.”
This is also part of dream incubation, which we will investigate in more detail in the next section. Once they have primed the pump and have started remembering, they can also use this technique to ask for help and guidance on specific issues or dilemmas.
Critical for remembering dreams is investing in a journal and keeping it right next to their bed, along with a pen or sharpened pencil. Invite them to choose a style of journal that gives them some pleasure so they will be more inclined to reach for it. As far as writing implements go, both online and at most office supply stores, we can even get special pens that light up in the dark. The most critical aspect of the writing implement is that the pens have ink and that the pencils be sharpened. I tell my clients that their unconscious will know they aren’t really serious about remembering if they neglect to make sure their tools are in working order! As they record their dreams, have them date each entry. That way they begin to have a chronological record of dreams and themes that reoccur and can check them against what was going on in their life that day or week to get some immediate connections and insights when they go back to work on them.
Dreams are like helium balloons – they need to be tied down to stay with us or they float away. Anchor them by writing or recording them right away. Most of us forget our dreams shortly after waking. Although there are occasional dreams that stay with us long after we have dreamt them, most dreams have the substance of shadowy mist or wisps of smoke. They need to be solidified in writing or recorded orally to gain enough traction to remain in the waking world. The more solid we can make them, the more we can grasp and work with what they have come to teach us. If your clients choose to record their dreams in an online journal, the same principle holds: Be sure that their device is charged and near their bed.
We also must recognize that dreams do not come only in words. If they wake with a feeling state that is not explained by their immediate environment – that may be what they are recalling from their dream. Wake inexplicably happy? That is their dream. Wake feeling anxious for no apparent reason? That too is their dream. Record these as well. The feeling states in our dreams are one of the primary signposts to the idiosyncratic meaning of the dream for each of us. Wake with an image or a picture in your mind’s eye? Your client may be more of a visual person than a narrative one, and so that may be the dream too. Have them record this image either in words, or in a sketch or drawing.
Remind them that when they awaken, they should try to move as little as possible while reaching for the recording materials, to prevent disturbing the fragile fabric of the dream state. Sit up slowly, or even write while still lying down. If they had a dream, and it slipped away, they can try putting their body back into the same position it was in when they woke – our bodies have “positional memory” and we can often re-capture the dream if we return to the same position. For example, if they were sleeping on their left side with their knees curled up and hands tucked under their chin, recreate that exact position to try to recall the dream. Stay in that position for a few moments – it sometimes takes the body a little time to recover its memory of what it was doing when last in that position. It constantly amazes me how well this technique works. The word “remember” can be broken down into “re” and “member.” A member is a body part, often a limb, so we are literally putting our bodies back together again when we re-member with it.
Invite your clients to try to write down the dream in the same order in which they dreamed it – what happened first, next, and last in a dream sequence makes a difference when working with it later. Sometimes though, the only hook that we have back into the dream world is to start with the ending. So, if they are afraid they that they will forget it if they don’t write down the end first, invite them to go ahead and do so, but then rewrite it in order, or at least make some arrows and notations so they know the chronological order in which they actually dreamed the scenes. Some of my own dream entries are replete with arrows and notations as I scurry to capture them before they are lost.
If your client is tempted to start to analyze their dream as they are writing or recording it, you can suggest that they wait until they have finished writing it down. Otherwise, it can get confusing later on to sort out what was the dream itself, and what were the thoughts about the dream. If they have some immediate associations at this stage that they don’t want to lose, have them create a separate section called “notes” or “thoughts” and write them there. The waking associations and ideas can contaminate the unadulterated dream material, and we don’t want to lose the pure access to the unconscious process by mixing it with conscious thought at this juncture.
Dream recall is like any other practice – it gets better with time and practice. Buddhist teacher and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh has written and spoken of mindfulness practices throughout the world. He said that people expect him to be really good at it since he teaches worldwide, but that his own mindfulness practice still takes a lot of work. At a workshop I attended in Boston, he said that we all spend so much time every day being sad, or angry, or unconscious, that we give these states of being a lot of practice. He encouraged us not to spend so much time practicing suffering, but rather to practice joy and equanimity. Similarly, the more we and our clients practice dream recall the more skilled we will become at it.
It is perfectly normal to have periods of time where we remember many dreams, and then dry periods where we can’t capture any. It could be that our daily life is so full at the moment that there is no room in our psyche for more information to come through. Or your client may already be working deeply in waking life (in therapy with you, in journaling, or in deep conversation, for example), so that their dream muse feels that their inner life is being covered for now.
Learning to recognize the many forms a dream may take can also help our practice. Not all dreams take the form of narratives with a clear story line. Some do, to be sure, but some are one-liners. One line remembered from sleep is a dream. (If you recall, my whole dream in the earlier section was simply, “Swim like a fish.”) One phrase counts. So does a single word or single image. Don’t dismiss these dream fragments – often they contain the essence of the message the dreaming mind is sending in a crisp “Reader's Digest” format. A single word or phrase can contain worlds. In addition, we can have dreams in the liminal in-between zones of waking and sleeping called the hypnopompic and the hypnogogic zones. Here, in this space where we are not quite awake or not quite asleep; these are dreams too. Invite your clients to write down these drowsy thoughts as well; they are formulated in the same parts of the brain that our fully nocturnal dreams come from. Waking with an unexplained emotion can also be the dream.
Although many clients will struggle more with not being able to remember their dreams, some are overwhelmed by the numbers or length of them. They become exhausted by the sheer volume and need a break. If your client is one of those copious dreamers, they can endeavor to contain their dreams prior to going to sleep. They might use their dream journal to write down the goal of allowing through only the dreams of highest priority, and to filter out anything else.
They might write,
“I will remember only the dream that is in my highest good and best interest,” or “My strong mind and dream muse will screen out any dream that threatens to overwhelm my system or that I am not ready to cope with.”
Use the language that works best for each client. This method can work to contain some nightmares too, until they have the resources to work with them safely. We want to help our clients avoid abreaction or becoming too triggered by recounting their nightmares without adequate safety measures in place. A future course will cover more specifics for working with traumatic nightmares, but for now, you can help your clients to ground, center, and orient to the present before delving too deeply into a nightmare. Use techniques from cognitive approaches, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), energy medicine, and somatic therapies, as well as the power of presence and your relationship, to enhance feelings of safety.
A Native American tradition is to hang a dreamcatcher near our bed. The story that accompanies these woven circular creations is that the dreamcatcher snares any upsetting dreams or nightmares in its threads. The narrow hole that is in the center of authentic ones serves to allow only positive dreams to slip through and then down the hanging threads or feathers to the sleeper underneath. You can also ‘infuse’ your dreamcatcher to snare an over-abundance of dreams. They are pretty easy to find these days. If they cannot find one in stores nearby, a world of choices ranging from simple to elaborate ones can be found, like so much else, online.
Inviting your clients to surround themselves and/or their bed and/or their room with a bubble of light for protection and safety, and with good boundaries, can also be useful. Find the color(s) that are just right for each person. There are no right or wrong colors, and they can change from night to night or remain constant. White contains all the colors, but they might just as easily want green or blue or purple. Listen to what feels right to each client. And, of course, they are not limited to one per night. One of my clients, Ellie, wrapped a rainbow around herself and her bed nightly.
You might invite your client to imagine closing a door in their mind before going to sleep. This door is to the portal between the waking world and the dreaming world. You can also add a phrase such as, “I close the door to unwanted intrusions in the night.” Encourage your client to really visualize the door or portal in their mind's eye, and to be sure it is well closed. They might want to imagine hearing that click as the door shuts. It could be a door they know from their actual life, or an imaginary one, or their idea of a wormhole or mystic portal to “the other side.”
Finally, your clients can try saying the word “No” strongly, perhaps even out loud, to their dream muse. They should be firm and clear that they are setting a limit and a boundary. Before going to sleep, they can decide if they would like a dream to come through that night. Then write a sentence or two about the issue or topic they would like guidance on, and end the writing with a seal or verbal stamp. (In Hebrew this is called the Chatima, the seal of closure on a prayer.) Their closure can be “May it be so,” or “Just this and no more,” or whatever feels right to each person.
Writing down their intentions for a dream is part of the practice of dream incubation.
Dream incubation is the practice of purposefully turning to your dreams to find answers and guidance for the problems and issues in your life. In a nutshell, it is endeavoring to dream on purpose. In ancient times, rituals that accompanied this goal often included embarking on a journey to a sacred site, bringing sacrifices to the gods, or praying for a healing or revealing dream. In modern times, our ritual may be to take a long hot shower, light a candle, meditate, or write down the question we are hoping to get an answer to through our dreams. We then go to sleep with this question nearby, intending to have a dream that guides us and opens us to new ideas to solve or heal our dilemma.
At its core, dream incubation is about intentionality. We intentionally turn to a source of wisdom that is larger than ourselves, and open ourselves to the response we get from the universe through the portal of our dreams. A definition of dream incubation by Juliet Harrison in her article on classical Greek dream incubation is, “a practice in which a person performs a ritual act and then sleeps in a sacred place, with the deliberate intention of receiving a divine dream.” (Harrison, 2009, p.1) We can either visit or create a sacred space.
Dream incubation is most often used to ask for a specific dream to address an issue or problem that is important in your life. It might be a question about your client’s physical or mental health, their creative block, or a relational conundrum. Incubating a dream is a way of lining up our queries and our intentions with the highest Source to get answers, or at least guidance, to questions that we are not able to fully answer on our own. Through the practice of intentional dreaming, morning can bring new light to the dilemmas we were stuck with when we went to sleep the night before.
Ancient dream temples in Greece continue to attract thousands of visitors today, many of whom have left written testimony of their healing experiences (Janes, 2017; Harrison, 2017). It seems that the temples were frequently built on power or ley lines on the Earth, which correspond with the Earth’s magnetic field (Malcom and Harris, 2016.) The geomagnetic charges and the positive or negative ions thus charged affect our own bioenergy fields. This theory, sometimes known in America as the “Sedona Effect” after the energy vortexes that Sedona, Ariz. is known for, may explain why we continue to be drawn to these sites.
In Greece, pilgrims from all over the land would regularly make short and long journeys to the temple of Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing, to receive healing dreams. They would bring gifts of cakes and honey to the priests and priestesses of the temple, and then would oft-times be given a “prescription” to sleep in the sacred dream temples in a special area called the abaton, set aside for the express purpose of having a healing dream. When they got to the temple, the seekers would ritually cleanse and purify themselves and set their healing intention. The supplicants would then sleep the night there under the stars, often in the company of other pilgrims seeking healing. This practice was called incubation, from the Greek “to lie upon” (Janes 2017).
Later that night, the temple priest or priestess would set loose small non-venomous yellowish-white snakes among the sleepers. The snakes would slither about the dreamers and were thought to whisper the healing dreams into their ears. In the morning, if the supplicant had a dream, the priestess would help him to interpret it. Many cures were reported from this method. Asclepius himself, son of the sun god Apollo, was trained in healing arts by the centaur Chiron, known in myth and Jungian studies as the Wounded Healer. It was his encounter with a wise snake that apparently gave him the power even to raise the dead. His staff is depicted as entwined with snakes and is a prototype for the caduceus, the modern symbol of medicine.
Luckily for us, snakes are generally no longer part of the prescription for our own dream incubation journeys. However, other parts of the ancient ritual can be easily adapted. If we and our clients choose, they can still make a journey or pilgrimage to a place that is sacred to them, or holds special meaning, or even sleep out under the stars. The key element of a pilgrimage, though, is a private, undisturbed, and sanctified place where you can wake on your own time. It can even be in the privacy of one’s own bedroom that one creates sacred space and follows either the quick or the more extensive guidelines of the incubation processes that follow.
Dream incubation comes with preparation as well as intention. Anthropologist Kimberly Patton (Patton, 2002) speaks of three elements common to the topography of incubation in ancestral times: Purification, Sacrifice, and Pilgrimage. First, we will look at how our ancestors may have done these, then how we might adapt them for ourselves.
Purification: First, some form of personal purification was part of the ritual. Bathing in a sacred pool of clear or flowing waters was common. Revered teachers in both the mystical Sufi and Kabbalistic traditions (notably Hefetz and Reb Nachman, respectively) teach that when our hearts are broken open, that is where the Divine can enter. Perhaps that is what poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen had in mind when he told us in Anthem (1984) that, “There is a crack in everything, (which is) how the light gets in.”
Two of the most frequently watched TED Talks are those by Brene Brown (Brown, 2012, 2021) on vulnerability. In them, she normalizes and elevates this state of being, contrasting the beauty and the ultimate humanity of this open-hearted vulnerability, as opposed to viewing it with shame. Connected to this concept of beauty in the brokenness is the Japanese art of Kintsugi. This craft consists of repairing a broken piece of pottery by filling the cracks with gold or silver. Thus, the repaired piece is even more valuable than the original un-cracked piece. What a wonderful metaphor for healing – that we are more valuable for having repaired the places where we have been cracked open than if we’d never have been broken at all. When we purify ourselves in this part of the dream incubation process, we are letting in this beauty and healing to the parts of ourselves that are seeking answers and responses to our deepest quests.
Sacrifice: For our ancestors, the next step to incubating a dream was having a proper frame of mind and making the proper sacrifices. For our biblical foremothers and forefathers, the sacrifices often included burnt offerings, usually of a sheep or goat. The supplicant would then sleep on the skin of the sacrificed animal. Patton (2002) tells us that the burning of the animal transformed its physical earthiness into the world of smoke and vapor and air, thus allowing the gods to smell the pleasing odor as the burnt offering went up in the smoke.
The concept of the Four Worlds of Earth, Air, Fire and Water appears in many mystic, pagan, and indigenous traditions as well as in Jungian typology. Therefore, a ritual that connects us with each of these worlds makes intuitive as well as logical sense. We burned the animal (Fire) on the Earth, it rose in smoke (Air) and we purified ourselves by bathing in Water. You can share this mythic information with your clients if you think it would resonate with them, or not if you believe that it would be too weird or irrelevant for them as per your clinical judgment.
Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage is the third step of this incubation process. This is about locality, or as Realtors say, “location, location, location.” An outward journey was taken to imitate the inward journey one hopes will happen. Anthropologist James Frazer (reissued 2009) notes several kinds of magical practices he found in his studies, and one of the most common was imitative magic. The pilgrimage part of dream incubation is the external manifestation of what we hope our inner dream journey will imitate. The promise of dream journeying is mimicked by where one sleeps, ideally in a sacred place set apart. Our ancestors would frequently travel great distances in order to incubate their dreams on holy ground.
Alternately, the ground on which the ritual took place would become holy by virtue of having rituals performed on it. Frequently, holy ground, by whatever means, was in a high place – on a hill or a mound. Perhaps the membrane between the worlds of ordinary and non-ordinary reality is thinner there, just as the air is thinner atop high mountains. Think of the tall standing stones of Druidic or Celtic traditions reaching up to the heavens, of Mt. Sinai where Moses met God and received the Ten Commandments. Rome and Athens were built on seven hills. “Castles on a hill” are often seen in fairy tales. Our fabled city of Oz is set on a hill. As Dorothy and her companions emerged from the dark forest, there it was, gleaming on the horizon. Once clearing the poppy field, our little band of dream travelers climbed up to the Emerald City on the hill to meet the Wizard.
So how are we to translate these ritual elements for our times, since most of us or our clients aren’t about to kill a sheep or spend the night alone atop a mountain? At its root, the word sacrifice means to make sacred. For our clients, accessing the sacred may be a part of their quest, intention, or desire to connect with a higher source of wisdom. They may need to make a sacrifice of some kind, to be understood perhaps as letting go of an outmoded way of thinking, or of an old belief or lifestyle. It also could be letting go of or sacrificing an easy way of doing something for the harder but ultimately healthier way. If they are journaling about their dream intentions and what they are incubating a dream for, they might write down their willingness to follow the guidance and wisdom from the dream muse, even if it is uncomfortable or inconvenient.
For example, if your client is incubating a dream on a health issue, they can make the intention – and write it down as part of their pre-sleep journaling – that they are willing make the sacrifice to change their diet or lifestyle or negative cognitions to support greater health. (To resolve some long-standing back pain of my own, I had to make the sacrifice of sleeping late to get myself to the gym or the pool on a more regular basis.) If your client has a relationship dilemma, are they willing to sacrifice their own pride or ego to compromise or to apologize if that is appropriate? Making a decision to do or not do something is often the first step toward change.
To practice purification in our times, our clients might cleanse themselves by smudging with sage or incense. (We can join them in this ritual in our office if it won’t set off our smoke alarms!) They may decide to take a long shower or a bath with clear intention to prepare themselves to dream deeply. They could wash with salt water as our ancestors did. They can surround themselves with a blanket or bubble of pure white light in their mind’s eye before going to sleep, or envision themselves breathing out negativity as they prepare to sleep and dream. As clinicians, we can guide or assist with ideas or preparations that our clients might find useful.
Pilgrimage today can be an inner or an outer journey. They might retreat from the business of their daily lives to a yoga center, or camp out in the woods for a few hours – or for a day or a week – to have a pilgrimage experience. They might set aside an hour or a day to meditate, journal, and reflect on the incubative question they want to pose to their dream muse. As our ancestors sought out high places, they may be able to also find a high place from which to contemplate these questions, and thus take themselves out of ordinary time and/or space temporarily. Breathwork techniques or meditation can take us far and deeply into an inner journey.
Here are two examples of small pilgrimage/incubation journeys I took that may enhance your own ideas for your clients. A few years ago, I felt an overload in my life, and I asked a friend if I could use her meditation room for a day. I drove to her house just 20 minutes away and spent seven hours in lovely solitude. I even had a nap complete with a dream in that designated space that contained within it the energies of the people who had done yoga and meditation there over many years. It later occurred to me that it was even a high place: To get to that room, I had to climb up a crawl ladder to the finished attic that was the meditation space.
For my second pilgrimage, in order to have the time and quiet to begin to turn five years of short blog posts into a book about dreams, I went off by myself on a writing retreat for four days. I was not atop a mountain, nor did I sacrifice a goat, but instead but rented a small cottage on a lake in Western Massachusetts. As a busy professional and mom, I relished answering solely to my own rhythms for a few days. I had my purification waters with the lake at my doorstep, and I sacrificed television, internet access, and indoor heating during that time.
On my second day there, I received a gift: At 10 a.m., I sighted a large barred owl right above my head as I walked in the woods. Mornings are not the time an owl is usually about. Nocturnal creatures, they are more often spotted after dark. It felt like a sign that my dream muse, taking the form of this night owl, showed up during the day and was blessing this time and space as an answer to my dreams.
The core of the practice of dream incubation is to simply spend a few quiet moments before going to sleep to write down in a dream journal the question, the dilemma, or the issue that you would like some guidance on. Invite your clients to take a few minutes, or longer if they choose, for this writing process, but try to end up with a specific question. The more specific your question, the easier it will be to see how it is answered in the dream. You can work with your client to narrow down their dream incubation question to the most specific core of the issue; creating a “well-formed problem” as we do in the practice of EMDR and other mind/body methods.
Have your clients be sure to date their writings as well, as it may take more than one night for a reply to come through. It often can take several days of intentional dreaming on the same question to get your answer. Remind them of this to avoid despair if a dream doesn’t come straightaway, and that they may need to reframe or clarify the question before getting a dream in response. This can also be part of your therapeutic work.
They can choose to spend a little time on the purification part of the ritual by bathing or cleaning their room to prepare a sacred space. A saltwater bath and/or lighting a candle or incense can help to clear out the energetic space for answers to come through. Joy, a member of my dream circle, found a lovely variation on this method. She had several important dreams involving whales over the years and felt that she gained much valuable information from the whales in her dreams. She began to use them as her guides, and now incubates dreams by directing her queries to her “Whale Council” when she has a dilemma she wants to dream on.
You can invite your clients to align their dreaming mind with the wisdom of the universe via the simple steps stated above before going to sleep. When they wake, they should write down the dream on the same page as the question, even if it is not clear to them how the dream applies. Later, when you work with them through the dream they received, you can both see on the same page exactly what question they were asking and how the dream connects to it. Often the connections appear later, so not to worry if you can’t figure it out right away. The dream knowledge is also frequently coded in symbol or metaphor, so using inquiry and curiosity and the skill of associations may be needed to decipher the message.
Invite your client to think of a dilemma or question they have, perhaps something you have been working on with them that feels stuck. It may be something straightforward, such as how to commit to a healthy lifestyle practice, or as life-changing as deciding whether it is the right choice to marry the person they are dating. Decide if the pilgrimage part of the ritual speaks to them. If a pilgrimage speaks to them, they can sit for a few minutes by a local pond, hike in a nearby wood, or visit a place of worship or any spot that feels sacred to them. Being out in nature often gives us perspective and clears our heads. Find what feels right. If there is something they need to give up, to sacrifice in order to get what they want, have them spend some time thinking about that. It might be something concrete, like sugar, or something ephemeral like time or convenience.
Finally, decide if they want to do any preparation for the purification part of the incubation practice. If so, they can take a saltwater bath, or visit the ocean, or smudge with sage before writing and sleeping; then they can spend some time outlining the problem in their dream journal. They should be sure to end the writing with a question that is as specific as possible. You should advise them to set an intention, turn off the lights, and sleep.
Remember, together with your client, that dream responses and answers often come through in symbols and images that you will then have to decode. Therefore, after they have dreamed their dream, and written it down with as many details as possible, they then can look for associations, metaphors, analogies, puns, and plays on words – both on their own and with you as a guide and question-asker. If they cannot get clarity, they can ask for another dream to explain the first one. Sometimes we all need to be a little bossy with our dream muse when the stakes are high, or the time is short. You can help them write another dream request, with language like, “Please quickly send me a dream that is crystal clear and unambiguous to guide me on the next steps I need to take.”
There are three types of dreams: sleep dreams; waking dream states such as intuition, synchronicity, and deja vu; and daydreams.
What we call daydreams are not quite dream states per se, as much as a type of reverie. Our mind is off on its own, so to speak, untethered from our current surroundings. Daydreaming, also called mind-wandering, most commonly refers to musing, spacing out, or wool-gathering as we drift off to somewhere other than our present surroundings. During a daydream, we are caught up in our own internal thoughts or fantasies, such as, “What should I have for dinner?” or, “Wasn’t that last vacation at the beach so lovely,” rather than attending to whatever is happening in our actual environment, such as a lecture, a staff meeting, or a conversation with a client. (Daydreaming is different from traumatic dissociation, in that it is not a protective unconscious response that separates or fragments our consciousness.)
What the three dream states do have in common though, is some link to non-ordinary reality or an altered connection to time and space. Jung (Chodorow, 1997) tells us, “Intuition is perception via the unconscious.” Each dream state gives us access to information that is not available to our ordinary left-brain linear thinking, and/or allows us somehow to be in two places at once. We can be in our own bed at night and at the same time be on safari in the jungle. We can be sitting in math class and simultaneously on the beach where we spent our last vacation as we review it in memory. We can run into a person or situation and have the distinct feeling that we are reliving something that has happened to us before in another time or place (the experience of deja vu). Knowing from the field of neuroscience research that we currently understand only a small part of how our brains work, it stands to reason that the rest of our mysterious grey matter has additional abilities and functions. We just don’t fully understand how to recognize, control, or quantify these other states or functions – yet. Linear thinking is not the only valid form of information-gathering.
Shamans and mystics from cultures throughout the world speak to us of the dream world as a real place, a parallel universe, if you will. Dorothy told her family upon waking, “It was a very real place.” Many traditional as well as Western spiritual traditions believe that our soul can leave our bodies at night during a dream and travel in the astral realms. This, by the way, is the reason you are not supposed to wake up a sleeper too suddenly. Several mystical traditions describe the dreaming soul as connected to the body by a thin silver thread and awakening too suddenly can snap the thread and the soul would not be able to find its way home back into the body.
Lynn McTaggart (2001), in her landmark book on non-local consciousness, The Field, writes: “Deep in the rainforests of the Amazon, the Achur and the Huaorani Indians are assembled for their daily ritual…At dawn…as the world explodes into light, they share their dreams…The dreamer is the vessel the dream decided to borrow to have a conversation with the whole tribe.” (McTaggart, 2001, p. 1125, as cited by Sabini and Russo on https://dream-institute.org/deep-dreaming/)
For these tribes, the dream is not an individual possession, it is owned collectively.
Michael Harner (1990), anthropologist and shamanic practitioner, remarks that one of the core principles of shamanism is that spirits are real, and that spirits produce dreams. Shamanic theory proposes that the human soul and other spirits that have formed an attachment to the person can produce their dreams. While we have no way to verify this, I instinctively resonate with this idea. It is one way of understanding those vivid visitation dreams we sometimes get of departed loved ones, that their spirits still have an attachment to us and thus visit to provide comfort or just to say, “Hi, we still are here with you.” This can be a great comfort to those who have lost loved ones.
Our minds and our bodies provide us information through our dreams. We are multifaceted beings: logical and imaginative, made of clay and made of stardust. Dr. Patrick McNamara, a neuroscientist at Boston University School of Medicine, encourages doctors to routinely ask patients about their dreams as a way of assessing mental status, believing that dreams are faithful reports of a patient’s emotional life. (McNamara, 2014). Unresolved emotional baggage from days or decades ago can show up in our dreams, trying desperately to get our attention by keeping alive the memories and feelings connected to the events until such time as we are able to sufficiently resolve them. This is also the essence of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) nightmares: replaying prior traumas in real or symbolic fashion in our dreams. Recurring nightmares serve as an SOS from the unconscious, alerting us that the traumatic events are not yet fully resolved or metabolized, and our wise unconscious continues to up the ante and escalate the nightmares until we pay attention and attend to the work on our healing.
Prodromal dreams are our medic alert dreams. I have encountered countless stories in the dream-sharing world of men and women who have had recurring dreams pointing to something being awry in their bodies, even though they had no symptoms to report. The dreams are frequently symbolic in nature rather than literal, so in this line of inquiry it is important to get consultation from others. Some people use their dreams to accelerate their healing by using incubation, dream re-entry techniques, and other dreamwork methods. One key line of questioning when working on a dream is to ask whether the dream might be pointing to a physical symptom that needs some attention. If we get an “aha,” then the next step might be a doctor’s appointment to follow up on these clues.
Imaging studies at Harvard and through NIH researched by Kahn, (2018), Stickgold, (2018), Hobson 1999), and others have shown that our brains do not discriminate between waking and sleeping realities. As far as our brains are concerned, they think that the events and imagery in our dreams are the same as the events and imagery in our waking life. I love that discovery. It confirms, in a sense, what our shamans and mystics have been telling us. Here’s how it works.
To start with, we have two sides to our brains. While there is overlap, the left side of our brain provides us with most of our logical, linear, and sequential thinking, while the right side of our brain contributes most of our creativity, imagination, and intuition. These two sides are divided by what looks like a seam in pictures, called the corpus callosum. We also have front, center, and back parts of our brains. The front part, right behind our forehead, is the cortex. This is where most of our declarative thinking and parts of our memory is stored. At the back of our head, just above our neck is the medulla, which controls most of our autonomic systems such as respiration and digestion. Deep inside the center of the brain is our limbic system, which holds court with our emotional world, contains the unconscious parts of our memory, and provides both the accelerator (the amygdala) and the brakes (the hippocampus) when we perceive threat or danger. This is where our flight, fight, and freeze responses are generated.
Neuroimaging studies show that dreams emerge from multiple parts of our brains, including the limbic system and the orbital-frontal cortex, which is the visual and social center of our cortex located right behind our eyes. Harvard neuroscientist Dr. David Kahn tells us that dreams “have amazing complexity” because they involve many areas of the brain at once. “The limbic system helps to account for the emotionality of our dreams, and the orbital-frontal cortex helps account for the social nature of dreams and for the interactions between the dream self with others in the dream.” (D. Kahn; personal communication, 2018)
Both the limbic system and the cortex are structures that straddle the central seam of the corpus callosum. Thus, they are found on both sides of the brain. This may be why dreams do not discriminate between waking and sleeping realities. Because our dreams are generated from both sides of our brains, they gain content and traction from both parts and functions. Once again, we see the capacity of dreams to link more than one world at a time, here examined in a physiological structure sense
When we wake, we recall and work on our dreams using our prefrontal cortex (the area under our foreheads), which holds our thinking and our declarative memory. Connecting the dots between our night experience of dreaming and our daytime memory of the dream is the medial temporal lobe, the part of the brain that serves as a bridge between memories and visual recognition, and which helps us to process things that we saw and that happened to us.
Here’s the punch line: Neuroscience has also figured out why our eyes move (REM) while we are dreaming. Researchers (Nir & Fried, 2015) noticed that each flicker of our eyes accompanies a new image in our dream, and that the REM movements act much like a reset function between individual dream image “snapshots.” By using electrodes that had been implanted in patients’ brains prior to brain surgery to alleviate epileptic seizures, they found that the neural brain activity while seeing new images in a dream was essentially the same as when actually seeing new images in waking life (Nir & Fried, 2015; italics mine). In other words, neuroscience confirms that the brain does not distinguish between waking sights that we see and dream images. No wonder our dream adventures and characters seem so real – to our dreaming brains, they truly are!
Tuning in to our waking dream states of being can also be a wonderful additional resource for our clients. Carl Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity, which states that two events may occur as a coincidence with no obvious cause, yet they are experienced together in a way that is meaningful to the individual (Jung 1985). Synchronistic events serve to reveal underlying patterns and a larger conceptual framework. We accidentally stumble into this world at times. When we do, if we stop and tune in, more of the patterns in life will be revealed to us. We are given a glimpse of an order larger than ourselves that we and our clients can then contextualize ourselves in.
Synchronicities call us up short and take our breath away. We are more likely to encounter this threshold between worlds when we are looking for and paying attention to the potential for meaningful messages in our lives, but this liminal space can also show up unasked. It is the world of meaningful coincidences. “Co-incidences” refers to things that are “co-occurring,” the kind of phenomenon that prompts us to say something like, “Wow. What are the odds that I should run into my client here, of all places?”; or “I just was talking to you in our last session about my mom, who I am having serious issues with, when she texts me. She never texts me!”; or, “What are the odds that I should see a night owl at 10 a.m., just when I am writing a book about dreams?”
Meaningful coincidences or synchronicities are found in the realm of the waking dream-weave of strange co-occurrences; the experience of deja vu; of unusual meetings; and “out of the blue” connections and happenings. Some of them are fun, some are uncanny, and some are awe-inspiring. What may seem to be accidental coincidences may be signals from the universe that something we seek is right here, or that something here is seeking us. Being awake to our sleeping and waking dreams allows us to find meanings and patterns that can enrich our lives, which is one of the main goals of any therapeutic endeavor.
Here is a three-part example of synchronicity.
Part 1: I am working with my client Susan one night, and we are talking about the foxes that had shown up in her dreams several times in the last week.
Part 2: A few hours later, I pick up a message from her on my voicemail, where she excitedly informs me, “I just had to tell you that a fox just crossed the street in front of my car as I was pulling up to my driveway – and I’ve never seen one here before.” Here was synchronistic confirmation of the importance of the ‘fox medicine’ for her life.
Part 3: Part three of the fox story ties together synchronicity and intuition. Susan’s dream foxes came as a response to an issue she had been working on in therapy. “Why do I tend to push people away when I begin to get close to them, and why do I quickly lose my trust in people for minor infractions?” Exploring her childhood history of abandonment and neglect provided her with some insight into this pattern. Then the foxes appeared both in her night dreams and again through an actual living encounter. We didn’t yet know how they were related to this issue, but acknowledged the truth that when something is doubled in our sleeping or our waking dream life, that is a sign of importance.
Here’s where intuition comes in. The following week, while working with Susan on her dream of the foxes, for no apparent reason I had a strong recall of the book The Little Prince (A. de Saint-Exupery, 1943, 1971), and of the fox in that story. This book is an allegory about loneliness and the need for trust in order to have relationships, as told through the eyes of a little prince who lands on earth from another planet. The fox he meets in the story teaches the little prince that the most important things in life are visible only to the heart; “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye”; and that it is his love for his rosebush on his home planet that makes her unique and worth caring for (p.87).
I have learned over the years that when I get an association with a client’s dream to pay attention to it and offer it, but not to impose it on them (remembering that the dream belongs to the dreamer). I do, however, want to be sure to check in to see if it may have any relevance for them. This is part of the power of dream-sharing with others – we all have the power to tap into associations that are present in what Jung calls our collective unconscious that the dreamer may not have considered yet.
I asked Susan, “Are you familiar with this story?” and she replied, “It is one of my favorite books from childhood.” So, here’s a hit already. She remembered the fox, but not its significance. We reviewed that part of the story, recalling that the fox taught the little prince how to tame him. I then pulled the book off my shelf, and we read together: Each day the fox comes a little closer and closer until he finally let the prince sit next to him and pet him. Then after some time the fox tells the little prince he had to leave. “But why?” asked the little prince, “I shall cry if you leave.” The fox replies, “One runs the risk of weeping a little if one lets oneself be tamed.” The price of closeness and intimacy is a willingness to be vulnerable, to be willing to take the risk.
The dream foxes and the fox in her driveway and the fox from the Little Prince all came to share this message with her: Letting people get close and trusting them does not guarantee that they will never leave, but taking that risk is often worth the price. For you never know, if you let them get close, they just might stay. And even if they don’t, as with the fox in The Little Prince, the encounter is still a treasure that can be held forever in the memory of your heart. Susan took this message to her own heart as she began to tiptoe toward more trust and connections in her life. Had Susan not been paying attention to the possibility of a response to her questions, she would have missed the importance of those foxes.
Dreams and intuition are connected. One form, precognitive dreaming, means that we dream something that later occurs in waking life. In essence, intuition is about the ability to see around corners into a future time. We must remember our dreams though, in order to know if they come to pass; this is another reason that writing them down becomes crucial. It is highly likely that many of us experience precognitive dreams regularly; we just don’t remember them.
Not all precognitive dreaming is earth-shattering. It can be about the mundane events of our everyday lives, such as “I dreamed that it was going to be pouring rain next Monday when it was my turn to drive carpool,” and it does indeed rain. Hopefully, our precognitions are not like poor Cassandra of Greek mythology. She was a powerful seer, but she only had the ability to foretell disaster. People tended to run in the opposite direction when they saw her coming. Additionally, the waking dream state of deja vu, that “I’ve been here before” feeling, may be the echo of a forgotten dream. The term deja vu itself is French for “already seen” and is the overwhelming feeling of familiarity with something that we have no recollection of having actually experienced before.
Author and energy worker Anodea Judith (2004) writes that we begin with a state of fragmentation and move toward becoming whole through intuition. A strongly intuitive person closely attends to their inner promptings and to their dreams as well as to their outer surroundings. To purposefully access our intuition, we need to set our intention, then ask the right questions, and finally listen and watch for the answers (notice that we must both listen and look since we don’t know in what form the answer might occur). I tuned in to this inner guide when working with Susan and her foxes. We can invite and teach our clients as well to attend to and trust this inner GPS.
It is easy to miss this third step of listening and watching once the question is asked. As well as watching and listening for signs, we might also experience the response as a synesthesia, that state of being where our senses mingle and we see sounds, or taste sights. To complete the loop with intuitive ways of knowing, we also need to learn how to listen both from the inside and from the outside, just like dreamwork. When we work on our dreams, we can do so from outside the dream, by processing and analyzing what we have dreamt, or from inside the dream, whereby we re-enter the dream in our waking imagination, walk around in the dreamscape, dialogue with the characters, and re-experience it in present time. Both are valid and useful styles of dreamwork.
To receive wisdom from our intuition, listen to the words that come to your inner ear, as well as to the emotions you feel and the body sensations you experience. All are forms of communication. Although the information that comes through may seem spontaneous, intuitive skills are frequently the accumulation of years of work and preparation in many practices that may include dreamwork, meditation, shamanic studies, mindfulness, spirituality, book-learning, and tuning in subtle body signs such as a spontaneous breath, a change in temperature, or that tingle we speak about when a dream association hits home. Accessing our intuition necessitates our willingness to be open to receiving knowledge from uncanny sources, asleep or awake. I have learned over many years of practice to listen to my own inner promptings when I am sitting with a client, and to share them, sometimes even if I can’t yet connect the dots of their meaning. This is sometimes part of our countertransference response, and sometimes something more.
1. Develop your intuitive capacity to find meaning and messages in your waking dream states and invite your clients to do so as well. One way to enhance this capacity is similar to dream incubation but done while awake. Put your attention on a question or a dilemma you have, and then hold it in your mind’s eye as you go about your day. Every so often take it out, literally or figuratively, and look gently at the question, asking the universe to give you a sign that will answer it. Then be on the lookout throughout the day for any unusual sights, sounds, words, people, or animals that may be relevant to your question. It may be a repeating color, or song lyric, or animal that catches your attention over and over, or is in unusual places.
If, for example, if your client is looking for confirmation about a decision whether to move to another city to take a new job or to go to graduate school, invite them to look for signs that seem to point one way or the other (in addition to your usual repertoire of therapeutic skills). If the job is in Denver, and graduate school is in Maryland, what shows up on their radar screen? Does the song “Rocky Mountain High” come on the radio, or does an old friend who lives in Maryland suddenly show up on social media after a year of no contact? This obviously should not be the only input into their decision-making, but it can become part of the pros and cons list. By holding the question in their mind, they will begin to make connections and see patterns they may not have noticed before. Remember that the messages can come from surprising sources, and can be fun as well as serious.
2. Patterns are another thing that that we can be on the lookout for. You or your client may start seeing a pattern emerging before you know what it is about, or why you are seeing or hearing these things. My client and I had foxes show up three times before we figured out the message they were bringing. The patterns can be both in your waking and your dreaming life. Held together and noticed, they can give you needed information. The combination of repetitive dreams and/or running across something over and over in waking life can be messages from both realms on the same topic. It may be the same sign, or related ones. Is your client dreaming of missing phone calls, of someone leaving garbled messages, and having their power go out; and then in waking life drops their phone in the toilet and has a power failure during a storm? Taken separately, these may not seem significant, but taken all together there may be a message for their life about the need to improve communication with any number of individuals. Explore the symbolic nature of these dreams and signs to see how they fit together.
As previously mentioned, there are a number of methods that can be utilized when doing dreamwork with our clients. There is also emerging research suggesting there are commonalities in methods that might lend themselves towards developing a universal approach (Ellis, 2019). Recent research has been compiled on outcomes related to a Cognitive-Experiential approach, which has been shown to increase client insight into their dreams (Spangler & Wonjin, 2023).
For the purposes of this course, I will highlight three main sources of inquiry within our dreams: 1.) The narrative story of the dream itself; 2.) the emotions within the dream; and 3.) the images and pictures in the dream. These three elements let us attend to the verbal message or storyline of the dream, the varied feelings in different parts of the dream, and the images themselves for those dreams where a picture is worth a thousand words. The information we glean from our dreams includes both what transpired inside the dream itself, as well as what comes through in the post-dream exploration.The emotional narrative is perhaps the most important element in dreamwork. The emotional resonance of the dream within the context of each of our own lives provides the core of its meaning. Notice how the emotions change over the course of the dream: Does the dreamer feel better or worse by the end? This emotional narrative will give you information as to where your client is at regarding resolving the issues the dream is pointing out.
We feel our emotions in our body. They are called feelings because we feel them. Invite your client to notice their physical responses to the emotions in their dreams. Pay attention to where in their body they have a sensation, and what it feels like. Is it in their chest, or belly, or fingers, for example? And is it agitated, peaceful, tight, hard, constricted, warm, tingly? This is the felt sense of the dream. Our physical responses resonate in us at a level that bypasses our analyzing and thinking brain, thus containing an unmediated core of inner truth and integrity.
Creative engagement with our dreams can also serve as a tool to heal and transform our lives. According to biographer Katharine M. Rogers, as a child, Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum had nightmares of a scarecrow chasing him and trying to put its fingers around his neck. He later gained mastery over that nightmare when he reimagined and reintegrated the scarecrow figure into a benevolent and gentle helper for Dorothy, whom we know now as The Scarecrow.
Baum’s solution of transforming a frightening dream character into a source of help and wisdom exemplifies how we can rewrite our dream stories to gain a new and more satisfying resolution. We can also restructure dialogues between characters, resolve tensions, and add resources that our dream characters need, inside of the dream itself.
You might creatively engage with the dream by, for example, turning left at a crossroads instead of turning right, and imagining how the story changes. If that crossroads is where a car rammed you because you turn left, you might avoid the collision by turning right instead. Instead of drowning when the ship capsizes, what would happen if you were able to call your dolphin allies at that moment to carry you to safety? These rewritten dream stories could then become part of your new life story, the basis for an artistic project, or a new source of healing. In narrative therapy, this is a technique known as “spotlighting.” We highlight, or spotlight, the positive or the potentially positive, and find the silver thread to pull out from the dream of darkness or confusion and use it reweave the dreamscape with the bright new thread. The following anecdote is an example of beginning to transform a nightmare into a healing journey.
While I was vacationing at our annual dance camp, another dancer, Debra, approached me saying, “I heard that you do dreamwork – I’ve had a really bizarre dream, could you listen to it?” I told her that I only had about 20 minutes free just then but agreed to listen and do what I could in that amount of time. You will see why Debra felt an urgency to address her dream. This is her dream:
“I want to break up with my boyfriend. He is good to me, but really boring. I leave him, and try to get home, but get lost on a street in New York City. While looking for my way home, I meet a man whom I ask for directions. He said that he would give them to me if I went up to his apartment with him first to get them. I go up, and then he tells me that he will not let me leave, and he was planning to sell me into white slavery.”
Then she woke up with her heart pounding.
Given the intense content of this dream, I told Debra that this felt like an important dream that deserved more time than I had just then, but that I would be willing to give it what I could, as long as we both acknowledged that it would be incomplete. As a dreamworker and therapist, having heard it, I felt a responsibility to respond in at least a limited fashion. I also checked to be sure she had resources available at camp (such as a supportive friend or family member) given the story line of being lost and then held captive.
I began working with her dream by asking her for a title. This simple-yet-powerful first step has many benefits, one being it provides a way to track the dreamwork to see if the title changes after we work on the dream. When a title does change, it can mean the dreamer has made some headway in resolving the underlying issue or dilemma.
Debra’s first title sums up her thoughts and feelings about the dream in one word: “Trapped.” Next, to track the emotional content of the dream for resonance with her life, I ask if the dream accurately expresses her feelings about her boyfriend. Debra responds yes, he is “safe” but they have little in common and she is bored with him.
I now invite her to go back to the dream, asking her where she can make a different choice or do something different in order to effect a different ending. Debra replies that she wants to change the dream when the story takes her up to the apartment of the man she meets on the street. My instincts/intuition/clinical experience – and just common sense – tell me that this might be too late, so I ask if that is where she first starts to feel unsafe in the dream.
A core concept for work on upsetting dreams is to establish or reestablish safety. Ideally, we want to start the dreamwork where the dreamer does feel safe and has resources, and build from there, rather than starting where she doesn’t feel safe. I asked her how she felt down on the street, when the man first suggested she go up to his apartment, and she realized that was actually where she began to get anxious and nervous, but she went up anyway. My query was not to impose my choice on her, but to make an observation that she was free to use or discard. Given her response, I asked her if she could make a different choice while on the street before going up to his apartment, since that is where I felt that the dream turned into nightmare territory. She immediately said, “I could tell him no thanks, I’ll get directions from someone else and walk away. There are plenty of other people on the streets of New York who could help me out.”
Debra confirmed that this choice felt just right, so I encouraged her now to re-work the dream. I invited her to re-enter the dreamscape, then walk away from that man and get directions to home from a safe person (back toward home is key, that’s where she was trying to go in her original dream). Once she had done this and was safely on the road to home I invited her to repeat her dream action three times. Three is the magic number not only in fairy tales, but also in dream rehearsal to better create a new neural imprint in our brains. After she performed her dream action three times, I asked if she had a new title. She replied yes, “Independence.” We agreed that progressing from “Trapped” to “Independence” was pretty good for 20 minutes of dreamwork, maybe even very, very good! We spotlighted her ability to make a healthy choice and use her skills of differentiation to choose a better directional guide.
By making a different choice at that crucial juncture of the dream, Debra re-storied an ongoing theme of powerlessness in her life that she had shared with me in background material about her life’s current circumstances. She also discovered options other than being stuck between boredom and endangerment. If she does break up with her boyfriend from that the dream, she may feel lost for a while, but does not have to follow a stranger up to his apartment to get directions. In other words, she has other options, both in the dream and in her life. By making a different choice in the dream, she primes the pump for making a different choice in her life. I am careful to stay just in the dream material and not move out of the dream into her life in this brief encounter. She is not my therapy client. When we make shifts in our dream story, we are making shifts in our self-story. That will be Debra’s own journey to make.
1. Work with your client to identify their emotional resonances to all the parts of a dream. For example, I will often create the emotional narrative section by leaving a bit of room on the page as I record the dream, and then placing a vertical line next to the dream and writing the corresponding emotions next to each part of the dream. Give the dream an initial title.
2. Next, as they write out the feeling narrative alongside the action narrative, see if there are places where they can rework the dream action with the goal of achieving a different, more positive emotional resonance. This is particularly powerful with upsetting dreams or nightmares. What other choices or resources can they bring into the dream in waking life to achieve less distress inside the dream? If they have titled their dream before working on it, what title does it now have once they have changed the dream action in some way and thus changed the emotional response?
Cross-cultural and historical perspectives on dreamwork across time were explored. The concept of dream incubation – putting your dreams to work for you or your client by mindful practice – to find answers to questions and dilemmas in life was described. Next, we examined the waking dream states of synchronicity and intuition and their similarity to sleeping dreams, and what modern neuroscience can tell us about how and why our brains dream. Finally, we examined how to use dreamwork to create a more healing story for our clients by attending to the emotional narrative of the dream, and using dreamwork techniques to change elements of the dream after waking to reduce distress and to find the gifts embedded inside the dream material.
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