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This is an intermediate-level course. Upon completing this course, mental health professionals will be able to:
It was a time of dark dreams. They washed in like flotsam on the night tide, slipping beneath doorways and window latches, rising through streets and hills; and the little fishing-town of Scarlock foundered deep.
– J.A. Clement, On Dark Shores, The Lady
Our dreams slip in through the cracks in our consciousness every night, whether we recall them or not. Many of our clients have nightmares slip in too, some occasionally; and others all too often. Nightmares are frequently one of the primary symptoms of both acute and chronic trauma and stress. Inadequately addressed, these nightmares can block and sabotage treatment. Few professionals receive training in working with dreams and nightmares, although a great many clients and patients bring their dreams to explore in their sessions. The study of dreamwork simply isn’t offered in most graduate school programs. As professionals, we need this information and treatment approach to facilitate both deep healing and relief from current distress. Addressing this gap in training can have profound effects for us and our clientele. Becker, et al. (2024) suggest that examining dreams and nightmares in view of the trauma that precipitated them, in their study of the COVID-19 pandemic, can contribute not only to healing, but also to prevention strategies.
Dreamwork takes us on a deep dive into the heart of our healing capacities. Attention to our clients’ dreams and nightmares help them to go forward and backward in time to heal from personal, ancestral, and global traumas, and then, along with the dream-guided action steps, pass on the healing rather than the trauma to the next generations.
Dream interpretation and active dreamwork allow us some of the most direct and unfettered access to the unconscious wisdom of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls. We heal within relationships, and working with others on our dreams combines relational healing with this depth approach, adding voice and connection.
On an average night of seven to eight hours of sleep, we all have five to six REM cycles (Rapid Eye Movements), the part of our sleep cycle where most of the dreams are generated.1 We tend to only remember those we have just before waking, however. Nightmares are generally vividly realistic, disturbing dreams that frequently jar us awake. Our natural tendency is to want to look away from them, to put them back to sleep, if you will. Marcia, one of my colleagues, says that while she is a faithful recorder of her dreams, she knows that she sometimes consciously chooses not to write down some of the scary ones because she just isn’t ready to deal with them. This is valid; we might not yet be ready to deal with our ghosts and demons, we need to respect our need to go slowly.
However, when unaddressed, these dark dreams can follow us around in other forms, sneaking in through the cracks and fissures of our consciousness until they are finally faced, comforted, and healed. Conforti (2013) cites his mentor Dr. Yoram, who taught that an inability to find a place for these memories can keep us shackled to a constrained, Sisyphean world. In this world, our movement into the future is thwarted by these “forgotten” memories which keep pushing us back down the hill. He states that while retrieving these memories is a psychological issue, learning to live with what we remember is a spiritual process. That is part of the premise of this book; that healing from our nightmares allows us deep healing at a psychospiritual level.
The purpose of this course is to give you tools to help you in healing your clients from their nightmares in an integrated body/mind/spiritual approach so they can return to enjoying a good night’s sleep or perhaps be able to do so for the first time. Even if they have been habitual lifetime nightmare sufferers, this course offers help and tools to find peace in the night, and greater healing from the upsetting or traumatic events that generated their nightmares in the first place. It may take some time, particularly if they have been chronic or lifelong, but it is possible. You can help your clients find peace and healing to replace the fear and grief and pain.
Nightmare sufferers ofttimes despair of ever finding relief or ending the emotional hijacking of what should be their peaceful, restorative sleep. Some even develop fears or phobias of going to sleep at all, as the anticipatory anxiety that they may have yet another nightmare keeps them from feeling safe enough to relax into asleep. They sometimes develop elaborate rituals to stave off sleep and the concurrent terrifying dreams. You and your clients may have tried many solutions: medications, therapy, guided imagery, TV or social media, alcohol, or other drugs, tiring yourself out through exercise, or putting a night-light in your room. Some may have worked temporarily, only to have the same or a different nightmare return to seep into their sleep and bring new dangers or dilemmas to their dreamscape.
It may be helpful to remind yourself and your clients that above all else, nightmares come to us to help us process information. This somewhat neutral statement can be a great source of comfort and relief if they wake with a nightmare in the middle of the night. Simply telling yourself, “Oh, okay I am processing some information here” can help them catch their breath and ground until they have the time and space to deal with the information they are processing, perhaps in their next therapy session.
Carl Jung (1961) hints at inherited and archetypical as well as personal memory, and Freud tells us that we need to make conscious our forgotten memories, otherwise we tend to “repeat what we do not remember.” Our nightmares actually contain within them the seeds of hope and transformation. Our dreams hold, as does our life, what Zorba called the full catastrophe, the whole range of our emotions and our experiences from the glorious and wonderous to the terrifying and enraging. If we don’t engage with and resolve our nightmares, we also miss out on the joy and larger possibilities for our life.
Nightmares are also biologically adaptive. They provide a threat simulation rehearsal to help us gain skills and perspective in case we ever have to face that threat again. They also provide an evolutionary perspective: We must keep remembering so that we don’t forget. Dissociated memories can reoccur in dreams because of the biological imperative of remembering.
The nightmares that trauma survivors experience may disturb not only their nights but linger with sticky tenacity into the subsequent days as well. They may contain consciously known griefs and frights, such as the pain of the loss of a loved one, the helpless feeling of experiencing a natural disaster, the dull depression of living during an isolating pandemic, or the shame and blame-filled traumas of an abusive past. Research by Miller, et. al. (2024)identifies that with combat veterans as the target research group, trauma-related nightmares may serve as trauma cues or triggers that heighten daytime distress, which in turn increase the chances of another TRN, trauma-related nightmare.
Trauma can be public or private, familial, cultural or societal. Being “othered”, whether because of skin color, ethnicity, race, size, gender or any other differences, can have profound effects on our conscious and unconscious selves. Nightmares can reflect these types of woundings as well, and it is not uncommon to find common nightmare images and themes among groups of marginalized peoples. In addition, many indigenous peoples and non-western cultures hold a much more central place in their collective psyches and spiritual traditions for the importance of dreams and nightmares, so to practice wholistically and respectfully, we want to be sure to attend to these aspects of our clients.
Also appearing in the dreamscapes are those woundings that we are as-of-yet unconscious to in our waking minds. They are claiming the space they need to emerge during the night when the waking “day censor” parts of our brain are asleep. These too, the unknown ghosts of our past, our present, or even our future can haunt our dreams with their icy fingers. Charles Dickens touched on this concept with Ebenezer Scrooge’s powerful dream apparitions of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. That might be the bad news. But there is also good news.
The Shadow is a Jungian term for the repressed, unresolved, hurt, or unacceptable parts of our unconscious mind, and is used to describe the dark parts of our lives and ourselves. Here is the good news though: We are not meant to stay wounded – we are designed to heal. Our psyche wants to move us toward healing and wholeness. Psychotherapist Diana Fosha (2001) frequently tells us that the movement toward healing is in our hard wiring, in our very DNA.
The goal of this course is to transform both the heart-pounding nocturnal missives into a new story: One of hope, of healing, and life-affirming images. Although it is not possible to live in this world or in these bodies and not experience pain or suffering at times, the good news about nightmares is that healing is possible. Even for the most long-standing or repetitive and terrifying ones. Trauma touches our spirits as well as our body and minds, so we need to help our clients to carry the healing there as well. Full healing includes bodies and spirits as well as minds and hearts. It is said that the soul can feel separated from the body during trauma, and deep dreamwork helps to restore soul loss and become re-ensouled.
How do we know when our clients have resolved the issues that contribute to their nightmares? The short answer is: When the scary dreams stop, or they feel at such a great distance from them that they no longer have an upsetting emotional impact. When the suffering ends, the trauma has been resolved. It is not as if it never happened, but the events no longer interfere with their life or sleep or functioning. Sometimes the nightmares are short-lived and cease quickly, but more often they gradually decrease in frequency and intensity. As we engage directly with our clients and their dream images and stories and help them to do the work to resolve the underlying issues as well, the dreams become less and less frequent, contain less and less emotional intensity, and ultimately the frightening dream story is transformed. Working with new dream endings (called rescripting) in conjunction with polyvagal theory and other practices has shown that the progression of dream content from repetitive and replicating trauma to a more normative healthy dream life coincides with trauma recovery. (Ellis, 2023)
If your clients don’t already have one, encourage them to buy a dream journal and record their nightmares and dreams to keep track of this progress.
Lena, a client of mine who is also a therapist, remembers vividly one nightmare story line from her adult life and one from her childhood. In her recent dream, the understanding and resolution came relatively quickly. The childhood one had lost its power over the years but was not fully resolved until several decades later. In her adult nightmare she dreams:
I am underwater and trying to swim up to the light. I am holding my breath and hoping I will reach the surface before I run out of air. I finally manage to surface with a big gasp.
And then she woke up panting. “Whew,” she realized with relief, “that was a dream.” And yet a lingering sense of uneasiness stalks her from her bedroom and out into the day. When she brings this dream into her session, I know that we need to pay attention to this, especially since it was so much outside of her usual style of dreaming. When we are in the habit of dream-catching with our clients, we and they develop a compendium or repertoire of common themes so that unusual dream themes can be noticed and given extra attention.
It was clear from the dream that something in her life was overwhelming and threatening to pull her under, but we didn’t know what. We all have our own blind spots, and no one can see the back of their own head without two mirrors. Carl Jung famously said that he always needed help to get to the bottom of his own dreams. We figured out together where in her waking life she needed to “get my head above water,” stop to take that much-needed breath, and how to respond proactively with real-world action to resolve the nightmare. The confluence of personal, professional, and global overwhelm, all contributed here. The goal of this course is help you to do the same with your clients’ and your own nightmares: to understand, to heal, and to resolve them.
Her childhood nightmare was a repeating dream with the same storyline. It lasted off and on for about five years.
I am being taken up in a helicopter with my dad and brother and some bad men threaten to cut all of us into pieces.
She remembered that this dream was quite distressing as a child, but by the time she was an adult, the emotional part of the dream had dissipated, and she just remembered the storyline. She had never worked on it before, just recalled it. Fifty years later, bringing it up in therapy, she made the connection that she started having this nightmare during the time of her parents’ divorce, when her family was being “cut into pieces.”
Lena said that the emotional resonance of the nightmare had long since faded with time, maturation, and some good therapy, but she never forgot the content, and was pleased to figure out, even many years later, what the play on words and imagery meant: She could then put it to rest even more completely.
As paradoxical as it may sound, the Talmud (a central text that is a compilation of theology, law, and commentary on the Torah, the Hebrew Bible) tells us that nightmares come bearing gifts and can ultimately empower us. The power of repair in dreams will ripple out into our lives as well. We can then work together to transform the fear in the nightmare into the gift from the dream, and then make a gift to the world from the history of suffering and healing.
Embedded in Scrooge’s journey in A Christmas Carol and in our dreaming is the rich potential of transformation and joy: Our clients, and we too, can engage with and heal and learn the lessons from our dreams, and thus change our lives. Scary dreams and nightmares don’t just come out of nowhere. Something has happened to our client, to their family, to their ancestors, or to our society that has seeded in us the fears that “haunted (our) midnight pillow,” as Mary Shelly observed. As the title of this course indicates, some dreams are embedded in post-traumatic stress disorder, the unresolved traumas our clients have experienced in their lives. As we address these traumas both large and small, both the personal and the global, with the dreamwork and trauma treatment tools contained in this course, we can access our highest potentiality and help our clients to manifest it in their lives.
The first half of the course will orient you to the relationship between trauma and nightmares. We will examine how the storyline of the dream connects with the emotional narrative in the dream, which is what differentiates a dream from a nightmare. Next, by closely examining the complex and varied nature of trauma, and how it is experienced, we make the connections between nightmares and traumatic experiences. The protective autonomic response of dissociation, which is often responsible for compartmentalizing the memories until such time as we are safe and grounded enough in our life to address and heal them, gets special attention. One aspect of dreaming is the re-membering things that we once knew but have buried. To “re-member” is to put ourselves back together again, to literally put our body “members” (our limbs) back together.
Careful self-pacing is part of the essence of healing from trauma: Only go as fast as the slowest part of your client is comfortable going.
The remainder of the course will offer the GAIA Method (Guided Active Imagination Approach) I developed with its two-part methodology based on best-practice trauma treatment and Jungian active imagination principles. This method of nightmare exploration reduces the likelihood of re-traumatizing the nightmare sufferer in the process. The final portion offers a framework for the main goals of healing – that of post-traumatic growth and the opportunity to give back to others through the archetype of Chiron, the wounded healer. I have added one more letter to the framework of PTSDreams to get PTSG-Dreams: Post-Traumatic Spiritual Growth Dreams.
The word dreamwork rather than dream interpretation is used throughout this course. This is a purposeful choice. Most of us want to know what our dreams mean. How can we interpret this symbol or that metaphor? If I dream of a cat – what does that mean? If I dream of my hometown where I grew up – what does that mean? This is a valid and very human response. Off the top of my head, I can give you several possible answers, without even knowing who you are, based on my knowledge of potential meanings of dream symbols and metaphors. They may or may not be true for your dream or your clients’ though, as each of our dreams is contextualized within the specifics of our own life.
In addition, this is not the only purpose of dreams. Dreams come with messages and meanings and their own internal structure and story. Ofttimes, we need to first stay inside of the dream story itself and work directly with the metaphors of the dream to glean their reasons for coming to us. If we rush too quickly into “this means that,” we may miss both the beauty and power of the dream story and miss out on the message it may be sending us in its own language.
Dreams have a language of their own, and as we know, translation from any language into another is imperfect. Staying first with the language of the dream itself, in the way it has come through to us, gives us a chance to get the full flavor in its own language. Therefore, you may often want to choose to first work within the dream itself, and let the dream tell its own story before we work with our clients to expand or continue it or add more resources to a scary dream. Only after that do we move into what each symbol may mean – if we still need to. Sometimes we don’t because we have extracted the messages and our marching orders for what to do in our life because of the dream without parsing out every image into a waking sensibility.
The difference between a dream and a nightmare is contained in the emotional story that accompanies the dream narrative. The feeling of the dream; or in other words, the emotions that are experienced both within the dream itself and upon waking, are what change the story from dream to nightmare. Dr. Ernest Hartmann (1998), noted dream researcher, makes the case that the connection between dreams and waking life is through the cross-section or the net of consciousness between the two.
He makes the case that the dominant emotions in the dream are what should guide the exploration of the dreamer. In his research on thousands of dreams, he found that the emotional concerns of the dreamer guide the dream imagery and storyline. Dream journaling may be our own Jacob’s ladder between the worlds above and the worlds below. The dream journal provides the rungs or scaffolding to hang our dreams on to be able to carry them with us into waking consciousness, and thus honor them and carry their healing potential into our lives. Encourage your clients to buy one and keep a record of their dreams and nightmares.
Invite your clients to purchase a journal to record their dreams. Dreams are ephemeral, if they are not anchored down in writing or dictation, they frequently disappear like puffs of smoke as we wake. Make a notation in the journal that they intend to bring healing and resolution to their nightmares and bad dreams. Setting that intention and writing it down in their journal will start to point them in the direction of healing even before you work more actively on it.
If they have dreams or nightmares they recall from their past, they can write those down to start with, and date them as closely as they can recall. Try to write the oldest dreams they remember first so they have a time log for their dream progression. Notice if the general direction of the dreams is toward greater or fewer nightmares. Once they have captured past dreams as much as possible, they can continue to record current dreams and nightmares, remembering to date them in the journal. Ask them to notice if they find any themes or dreams or images that repeat and encourage your clients to highlight them to keep track. Write, draw, or sketch the dream.
Some of my psychotherapy clients tell me that certain dreams should come with a trigger warning. Rick’s nightmares are full throttle terrorist chases through twisting dark alleys, right up to the edge of a cliff, often with the sound of gunfire coming increasingly closer. Merrel frequently wakes with a panicked gasp, her heart in her throat and an icy feeling of anxiety shivering in her limbs, but she doesn’t recall any pictures or stories – just the embodied emotions. The physical and the emotional feelings she wakes with are all that remain of her dream, so for all practical purposes, they are her dream. She doesn’t yet know why, since her daily life is reasonably safe. Robin screams “F ... k you” to her dream characters, something she would never dream of doing while awake, and her husband tells her she screams this out loud in her sleep too. Jay relives his assault over and over in his dreams. Alisa dreams of a creepy, murky river that she needs to navigate. Larissa dreamed of an alligator crawling out of the swamp and approaching her with its mouth wide open, exposing his large, pointed, threatening teeth. Lemyre, et al. (2023) quote Duval and Zadra that a “a post-traumatic nightmare is a highly dysphoric dream for which the main feeling and/or scenario share similarities with a past trauma.” Some of these past traumas are obvious to the dreamer, others are symbolized and encoded within the dream imagery.
One other adult nightmare occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Annie simply screamed out loud in her sleep, and then woke up. She had no memory of any content, just the emotion that generated the scream, and she needed no help figuring out what that meant this time; we were all living with various degrees of panic and fear as the waking nightmare of the virus unfolded.
Tracing the emotional narrative as it changes within the dream, and as we work on it after we wake, are the magic keys to under- standing and unpacking the meaning of a dream and to know when a nightmare is resolving. Advise your clients to keep a record of their dream-life over time; that is imperative to knowing whether or not they are making progress toward resolving an issue that shows up in their dreams. Otherwise, they and you won’t know if the nightmares are changing, getting less frequent, or less intense – or not. A dream journal, whether written, typed, or dictated, to record all the dreams (not only the nightmarish ones), with a date for each dream, is the best way to track your progress.
The strength or intensity of the emotions inside the dream, as well as the emotions experienced upon waking and recalling it, are what constitute the barometer that takes the pulse of our dreams and should be part of the focus of the dream journal. A change in the emotional storyline in a dream can take the same scene, the same actions, and alter their meaning as our reaction to them varies. Different people can have similar dreams, but the meaning may be wildly different for each, depending on the emotional resonance they have with the dream figures and actions. If one person meets a panther in the woods of their dream, they might be delighted to run into their totem animal and expect that he has come to bring some advice or insight. Another, however, who does not have a panther as a totem, or has not encountered the idea of helpful totem creatures in their life or dreams yet, may feel terrified. We can also experience intensity variations in the same emotional arena. Anger, for example, can range from fury to rage to mad to upset to irritated to annoyed. (Your client’s specific progression may vary, but you get the idea.) All are forms of anger, but one end of the spectrum is intense while the other end is mild. Notice with your client how the emotional barometer changes on varied emotional bandwidths of the same feeling state, as well as if it changes to different emotions with the same narrative story, for clues to the soothing of the distress.
When our clients experience a dream, what are the emotions at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the dream? A sign of progress is when they feel better by the end of the dream or after working on the dream than they did in the beginning. Are they feeling anxious, delighted, or angry? Do the feeling states change as we move about various parts of the dream? High numbers for pleasant feelings have us wake feeling grand, but an 8 or 9 on the fear barometer indicates that this is a nightmare.
In both energy medicine and trauma treatment this rating scale is called the SUDS scale, or Subjective Unit of Distress. It is primarily used to rate our level of upset, and the treatment goal is to get that number as close to zero as possible when recalling the trauma in present time. We can also use this rating scale in our dreamwork to get very concrete and quantifiable information on our progress. If we started working on a dream of being chased by that panther and the fear SUDS level was an 8, and by the time we had squeezed as much juice out of it as we could and it is now rated a 4, then we have a quantifiable measure of progress, not only on resolving the nightmare, but also with reverberations to the underlying issue that generated it. EMDR and several other body/mind protocols use this rating scale to concretize progress.
Questions about the type and the intensity of emotion are profoundly important for nightmare healing. They provide feedback as to where we are vis-à-vis the problem or issue that the dream is highlighting. We also get feedback from which emotions are found at the beginning, the middle, and the end of our client’s dreams. If they start out feeling anxious but can resolve the dream problem inside the dream and end up feeling calm by the end, we know that they are already making real headway in their healing. However, if the dream ends with the same anxiety, or worse yet, escalates into abject fear, that too is information. It is telling us that what we have been doing thus far is not what our client’s psyche needs to resolve the problem, and we had best find other resources, other help, other ideas or solutions, or ways of holding the problem gently until such time as we can bring greater healing to it. We may need to move more slowly.
There is a timelessness to both trauma and dreams that needs to be addressed. We need to slowly unfreeze the frozen-in-time aspects of trauma that still show up as “now” in our soul and in our dreams. Then, in the dream states, where it is always now, we have the opportunity to rework and thaw the state of frozen terror.
These kinds of explorations of the dream comprise part of the template for healing from nightmares. As the guide, whether a therapist, counselor, spiritual leader, medical professional, this book, or your own internal highest best self, we bring fresh ideas, alternate emotional response options, and potential solutions to the dream and the dream characters. Once the SUDS is lowered and the emotions have calmed, we help our clients to find a better resolution to the threat than the one that appeared in the original nightmare. We keep doing this as many times as we need to until the nightmares cease or transform.
To provide a taste of the relationship between story and effect, as well as a taste of the many layers embedded in each of our dreams, here is an example of a waking dream that connects to a nighttime dream. A waking dream is not the same as daydreaming or losing our attention to a fantasy or thought. Rather, a waking dream may be defined as an event or reoccurring series of events that seem to be more than coincidence; or, alternately, an image, a symbol, or a synchronistic experience that contains something of the numinous in it. Jung (2010) has often described synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence. Deja vu and intuitive knowledge are both aspects of waking dream states. When something catches our attention in this way, we can bring our dreamwork skills and curious mind to examine it for deeper meanings.
Here’s the waking image/dream: My client Lena also has a picture hanging in her office of a woman swimming upward underwater in a luminous blue-green pool or river. In the picture, the woman is swimming up through tall reeds toward brilliant sunlight that we can see shining overhead above the water. The reeds are wrapped around her legs as she swims, and it is not clear from the picture if she will successfully clear the surface as she tries to swim or be pulled down by the reeds and the undertow. Lena can’t really see the expression on her face, which might give her a clue. Looking at it one way, with the emotional resonance of anxiety or panic filling our chest, it would be the nightmare of potential drowning. Rating the SUDS in the drowning version, it could an 8, “I can’t do this, I can’t breathe, I could die” or a maybe a 4, “This is so hard, but I think I can get there.” Looking at the same picture from another perspective, that of a strong swimmer enjoying the water and confident in that element who just needs to make a few strong kicks to surface, it becomes a picture of joyful personal strength and emerging into the light. The level of upset would then be zero, and the feeling would be one of empowerment and delight. Two very different dreams of the same picture.
A few weeks later, she sees the connection between this picture that has been hanging on her office wall for years while she works with trauma survivors, and her own dream of swimming underwater and just making it to the surface before waking that we referenced earlier:
(I am underwater and trying to swim up to the light. I am holding my breath and hoping I will reach the surface before I run out of air. I finally manage to surface with a big gasp.)
It was clear from the dream that something in her life was overwhelming and threatening to pull her under, but we didn’t know what. We all have our own blind spots, and no one can see the back of their own head without two mirrors. Carl Jung famously said that he always needed help to get to the bottom of his own dreams. We figured out together where in her waking life she needed to “get my head above water,” stop to take that much-needed breath, and how to respond proactively with real-world action to resolve the nightmare. The confluence of personal, professional, and global overwhelm, all contributed here. The goal of this course is help you to do the same with your clients’ and your own nightmares: to understand, to heal, and to resolve them.
In waking life, she actually loves the picture – it is a print of the Celtic goddess Boann that was painted by a friend on one of the cards in her goddess deck of the Tarot. She used it frequently as a sort of Rorschach test to assess progress in the treatment. When I looked up how to correctly spell her name, I found this description: “... Boann, herself a water goddess approached a sacred and forbidden well. Because of this transgression, the well became a raging river, which then pursued her. In some versions of the story, she drowned, and in others she managed to outrun the current. But in either case, she became the presiding deity of the river Boyne.” (Maharat, 2004)
We discovered that even the mythic stories about this goddess contain two possible endings. Here we find yet another layer to the dream and the dreamish picture – the resonance with deep archetypical forces and mythos. Ancient myths and legends and holy books also seep into our dreams, sometimes at a layer beyond our conscious awareness. This too becomes part of the dreamworld we explore for resources.
Lena’s own personal association to the picture on her wall in waking life had always been that it is beautiful and hopeful. However, she had her swimming and “just-getting-my-head-above-water” dream in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. No wonder she could just barely surface. In addition, her daughter had just completed some surgery and was on crutches, so it was like being in a double quarantine for a few months until she got her mobility back. The good news was that she did gulp the air and breathe before waking, signifying her hope and confidence that she and we would all breathe easy again. And, if we continue the associations, which are one of the keys to strong dreamwork, the most distressing symptom of this virus is respiratory distress. Yet another layer of potential meaning to take into account.
It is this way with our dreams and nightmares too – sometimes a change in perspective, or how we look at something, can mean the difference between a heart-pounding dream of terror or a hidden gift.
Motivational speaker Wayne Dyer (2009) tells us, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Does she drown, or shake off the offending reeds and breathe freely? “If this were my dream…” (as we say in the dreamworking world), my imagined outcome would depend on my emotion. If I woke panic-stricken, I might worry about drowning, but if I woke feeling confident that I had plenty of air to reach the surface and I was having fun swimming, then that is a different dream altogether. Active dreamwork allows us to work with the images that may have started out as nightmares and transform them from a traumatic dream to one of safety and empowerment.
This is the same principle that holds true for trauma treatment. When the actual traumatic events are in the past and are no longer currently happening, then it is the memory of the event, rather than the event itself, that is wreaking havoc in our psyche. We can then move with our clients in the healing work from the experienced memory of fear into the present moment of now with safety and empowerment. However, when the traumatic events have very recently occurred, or are still occurring, we may need a different approach that considers the reality of their current situation; perhaps by finding small moments of empowerment or of safety or self-efficacy and control within the larger scope of the ongoing events. Both dreamwork and trauma work also allow us to widen our perspectives. We can use both the telescope lens of clearer far-seeing and the microscope lens of enlarging our close-up seeing to broaden and highlight time and space and get different perspectives on what happened to us.
Here is one more association to this dream that some of you may have already gotten to ahead of me: George Floyd. “I can’t breathe.”
Lena doesn’t remember if she had the dream before or after that tragic event, but either she was resonating with it at a visceral level or had a glimpse of prescience or pre-cognitive insight into an upcoming event. This is a collective layer of her little personal dream that we can all grapple with: the breath of justice for all in our country and in our world. Sometimes the work on an individual dream can take us far afield from the original dream content alone. We can dream for ourselves, we can dream for our families, and we can dream for our world – and the same dream may contain all these layers simultaneously. The gifts buried in even the darkest nightmares may contain gifts for the world as well as for our clients themselves.
Some milder nightmares signal the presence of the little run-of-the- mill daily slings and arrows of life (such as when we were cut off on the highway or when we were endlessly kept on hold while trying to make an important call). In addition, some nightmares represent normal hallmarks of traversing a developmental life stage (especially in childhood: weaning, starting day care or school, first losses, such as a friend moving away). These types of traumatic events are what we might call the small-t traumas; upsetting, but not blocking our life force or dysregulating. The other more intense type of nightmare represents the big-T traumas, alerting us to large-scale, life-threatening, or life-changing events. They may have happened in the past and they have not yet been fully processed, or they may still be occurring. These big-T nightmares generally have to do with violence, abuse, childhood neglect, disasters, and/or traumatic losses. War veterans, domestic violence survivors, childhood abuse, and living during a time of global crises and pandemic are a few examples of big-T traumatic events that may infiltrate our dreams. Micro and/or macro-aggressions because of difference or racism can persist throughout a lifetime as well.
Other nightmares still may contain the fingerprints of intergenerational traumas. The relatively new science of epigenetics informs us that events from generations past can still affect us for generations after the traumatic events occurred. While extreme stress or trauma may not change our actual DNA structure, scientific studies have now shown that it does make chemical changes or leave marks on our genes in a process called methylation. That affects how these genes are expressed and may affect the function of the gene itself. These generational ghosts can show up in our nightmares, demanding their due.
Have your client go back and look at some of the dreams they have recorded in their dream journal. Now ask them to write down the emotional storyline that accompanies the narrative or image. One way to do this is to write down the emotion they felt in the dream next to the section of the dream that they experienced it. If there is no room on the page, use arrows to indicate which feelings went with which parts of the dream, and next time when recording a dream, simply leave a little space alongside it. By doing so they will have constructed an emotional narrative to go along with the dream. Now you can more easily see whether you are already moving in the direction of resolution and healing if the nightmare ends on a more positive note than it began, or that they are still as stuck in distress by the end as they were in the beginning of it. This insight will help to inform you and them as to what direction to go in next as you work on the dream: more of the same, or something else; different or more resources are needed before they can resolve it.
Ask your client to think about the relationship between their waking dreams and their sleeping dreams. If you haven’t already done so, as them to also begin to pay attention to the synchronicities, the déjà vu, and the meaningful coincidences in their waking life. How do they relate to their dreaming life? Can you begin to build a bridge between the two? Are there themes that continue to surface for your client? Can you find a connection between the nightmare themes and waking life issues or concerns in their current life or in their past? If you turn the prism around, twist the end of the kaleidoscope, the telescope, or the microscope to get a different configuration or look at it differently, can you help them to get a different perspective?
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
The Gospel of Thomas
We all experience upsetting events, losses, and distress from time to time. Sometimes these life circumstances are stressful enough to reach the threshold to be to be categorized as trauma. In this section, we will differentiate between stress and trauma, how each affects dream life, and what are the criteria of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.) One of the many hallmarks of PTSD is the presence of reoccurring and intrusive nightmares. Both general stress and anxiety, as well as trauma, can affect our dreaming lives and create upsetting dreams and nightmares. When our innate dreaming functions are working well, dreams provide mood regulation. However, with PTSD dreams, the opposite occurs – rather than helping our clients to metabolize and digest the material or events from waking life as non-traumatic dreams do, the high emotional valence in these dreams without the restoration of balance makes the upset worse. They can become chronically reactivated rather than calmed and restored in these looping nightmares. This is when they need to get some help to restore balance and health.
Trauma is defined as an injury to our physical, emotional, spiritual, or energetic bodies or all of the above. It may be a result of experiencing the injury oneself or witnessing happen to another. It is often sudden and unexpected, and frequently invokes the emotions of fear, anxiety, vulnerability, overwhelm, and intrusion. The traumatic events we are dealing with may have occurred recently or some time ago. They may have happened to our clients directly or they may have experienced them or learned about them second hand, which is then called vicarious trauma. Caregivers and medical professionals who witness and care for people who are suffering can experience the trauma as if it was their own, as they interact with and bear witness to the suffering on a daily basis. Trauma can also be experienced as “Big T” traumas or “little t” traumas: large life altering events that rent space in our minds and bodies for years to come, or smaller upsets that affected short-term quality of life but not the overall or long-term functioning.
We also know that loss pulls loss, and trauma pulls trauma. A current traumatic event may trigger, reactivate, or rekindle the memories of previous traumatic situations involving the same or similar emotions both in daily life and in dreams. So, a field hospital set up to treat COVID-19 patients in a football stadium may re-kindle battle memories for a war veteran of the field hospitals set up on the edges of a war zone. Similar emotional memories of threat, vulnerability, terror, and helplessness may reemerge even though they are now safe.
A Buddhist philosophy often attributed to the Dalai Lama says that in life, pain is inevitable, but that suffering is optional. This speaks volumes to what we all do and don’t have control over in our lives. Our reactions and responses to the pain, stress, and traumas that we inevitably experience make all the difference in the subsequent quality of our lives. Deep dreamwork can provide resources and healing to be able to move through the pain and release the grip of the suffering. Much of the suffering experienced happens when someone is re-triggered to an older trauma by a recent event and then feel both in spades. Kelly and Kim speak to research connecting the association of nightmares to less ego strength, more nightmare proneness, emotional dysregulation, and a general sense of vulnerability, worry, paranoia, and in general a wide array of emotional upset and disturbance.
Being triggered happens when there is an emotional response to a current situation that is out of balance to the event itself, more than one might expect from just the situation itself, or larger than life. In effect, being triggered is unconsciously combining a current loss or trauma or even an echo or a reminder of one, with previous unresolved events in life that have a similar emotional landscape or valence. If not sufficiently resolved, the original emotional upset keeps recurring; even accumulating force, much as a snowball rolling down a hill picks up more and more snow until it becomes a massive snowball or even an avalanche. A recent Facebook meme showed a character holding a big sack on his back containing rocks labeled pandemic fatigue, climate change fears of fire and floods, loss of job, and political unrest. He then stubs his toe, trips, falls to his knees, and breaks down sobbing in complete collapse. The caption read, “Don’t you think you are over-reacting a bit?”
Both the waking and the sleeping response to these triggers is often the re-experiencing of the emotional state that accompanied the original trauma. So, a feeling of panic or overwhelm in a seemingly neutral situation or waking up with that self-same feeing of panic but not even knowing why, can be a sign of being triggered. In fact, waking up with strong emotions out of the blue, not necessarily even with any dream imagery or content can be the dream itself. The emotion itself is the dream, or all that remains on waking. Encourage your clients to record these in their dream journals as well. They can simply write the date, and then write, “Woke feeling anxiety” or “Waves of sadness overwhelm me on waking.” That is the part of the dream that they remember.
Jeanette was an emergency nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. She showed up for work daily like a trouper until she began to experience symptoms of overwhelm and of PTSD such as recurrent nightmares, high anxiety, irritability, and loss of focus. She was referred by her supervisor to her H.R. department for crisis intervention therapy. While seeing her therapist there, she disclosed that she had lost a child to suicide six years ago, and that her family had been singularly unsupportive and unhelpful during that crisis. She felt that this period of time was being reactivated in her with her current daily stress and pain of caring for the suffering COVID victims, and the inability of the family members to be there with them. This older multi-layered trauma was triggered by her current work environment: both the physical and emotional pain and the lack of support the victims and survivors received. It was a double dose for her: the vicarious trauma in the field, and a rekindling of her own personal traumas of the loss of her child and her family’s lack of support around the circumstances of her death. She became consumed by negative beliefs about herself, including “I am always alone” and “No one will help me.”
This sense of darkness and aloneness permeated her dreamlife as well, created nightmare themes of blackness, of isolation, and one dream of being a tiny boat all alone in a vast ocean. Using EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, her therapist was able to help Jeanette to metabolize both her current and previous trauma using imagery, metaphor, and body-based practice. EMDR is an integrated body/mind therapy developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro (2016). A large part of the protocol mimics the eye movements found in REM sleep. The premise of EMDR is based on bilateral stimulation of the brain: right/left, right/left as the eyes follow this back-and-forth motion and the client simultaneously follows the cognitive protocol that accompanies the eye movements. The eye similarity of eye movements in dreams and in the EMDR protocol likely make the combination of these protocols particularly effective.
Trauma can also be a part of the emotional and energetic field that we live inside of in family systems. The traumatic experiences may be a part of the larger family system. This is called a legacy burden in the therapeutic modality of IFS, Internal Family Systems (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2019), and we are learning more about it through the new science of epigenetics. Through epigenetic research we are discovering that trauma can be inherited both through learned behavior and through actual DNA. For example, our client’s grandparents may have been subject to violence or extreme poverty in their country of origin which led to their emigration to America, and traces of these traumas can show up in their own lives even though they have not personally experienced the trauma. For example, Deborah reported that her grandmother was molested by her father. While parenting Deborah’s mother, this grandmother passed on the messages not to trust men, and that to be beautiful was a curse and put her at risk of harm. Deborah herself then got this coded message passed on from her own mother and developed both an over-eating disorder to hide her body, and a fear of her own sexuality and femininity. This became a generational response, and she luckily discovered it in her own dreams and therapy before passing it on to her daughter as well.
Meagan’s grandparents survived the great Irish potato famine. To this day, her mother and Meagan herself are very careful never to waste any food and to save all leftovers. Meagan sometimes dreams of little potato eyes winking at her. When she unpacked this dream message in her treatment, she decided that they were winking at her to let her know that she and her family did in fact survive, and the wink was a green light to go forward in her life without fear of starvation. It is also fun to find humor and puns in dreams and nightmares.
In Holocaust studies, Dr. Rachel Yehuda and others have been doing research on second and third generation survivors, many of whom exhibit the same types of intrusive and violent nightmares that their parents or grandparents experience, even though they themselves did not experience concentration camp life. Although the parents, and our clients themselves may not have experienced the violence or starvation, the memory traces of that history remain in their energetic field through the epigenetic imprinting in their DNA called methylation. They are also passed on through the repetition of the reactions and responses of the subsequent generations that may have been actual coping styles during the original traumas. Both Meagan’s and Deborah’s stories are examples of this. Parenting styles such as being suspicious of outsiders or never wasting even a drop of food evolved from being parented themselves by trauma survivors, and then the next generation of parents passes on both direct and indirect messages about safety, food, or trust, to name a few. This then becomes a learned response and can show up in dreams and nightmares, even though our clients may not have gone through the original traumatic event that started this chain of reactions.
Trauma dysregulates our ability to cope and function optimally in our lives. A trauma response may also cause people to react to historical events as if they were happening right now. The past and the present become entangled and confused, much as in a dream state. Martha, one of my clients who is an author, was recently asked to appear on television to promote her book. Her knee jerk response of panic to that invitation went way beyond typical performance anxiety. The next night she dreamt,
As I make my way to the television studio for my interview, I know that I will be killed if I go through with it. The only recourse is to run home immediately and cancel the show.
As we unpacked her dream and her reaction, she traced it back to generations of family history where she got the message, “Don’t be visible, it isn’t safe. The only safety is in hiding who you are.” While processing this dream, she was able to remember numerous messages about assimilation, “passing”, and not standing out that she received from her parents and grandparents. Her family had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the previous century. Living in the United States in the 21st century, this was not Martha’s current reality, but it registered as such in her unconscious until we could identify the sources. Then we could use active dreamwork and other therapeutic modalities to upgrade the operating system of her unconscious and dreaming mind as to what was in the past and what was in the present, what belonged in her own life, what belonged in generations past.
The events of traumatic experiences are often confused with the reaction or response to trauma. Reactions include behaviors such as the fight, flight, and freeze responses and emotions such as panic, fear, overwhelm, helplessness, powerlessness, vulnerability, etc. When faced by a threat or danger, our nervous system quickly assesses the situation and provides several possible responses. If we chose the right one for that threat, we escape the danger and survive. If not, the consequences can be painful or even fatal.
Peter Levine (1987), creator of the body/mind healing modality of Somatic Experiencing, describes this in relation to his studies of animals in the wild. If the hawk is tracking the rabbit for its dinner, turning and fighting the hawk is not going to be a successful choice for the rabbit. Rather, it may be able to outrun the hawk and get to the safety of the bush. If cover is not an option, it may be able to freeze in its tracks and thus escape the notice of the hawk who tracks prey by their movement. In other cases, when cornered, even a smaller animal may turn to fight a larger one if there is no other option. Rats, for example, will often turn to face their attacker, and because of their arsenal of teeth and claws they may have a fighting chance at survival and escape even from larger predators. The deer will try to outrun the wolf, but the boar may turn and face it and attack back. Another key to healing that Somatic Experiencing offers is how to avoid developing PTSD through releasing physical movement.
Additional responses to trauma have been more recently delineated in the fields of trauma treatment and Polyvagal Theory. According to Stephen Porges, Ph.D, polyvagal theory states that not only does the body remember a traumatic experience, but it can get stuck in the trauma response mode. So even when the threat is gone, the body still perceives danger, and its defenses stay engaged. This psycho-biological phenomenon may also add an explanation to recurring nightmares, where the dreaming mind is stuck in trauma response mode. In humans, in addition to the more commonly recognized fight, flight, and freeze responses, also experienced are responses to chronic trauma in three additional states: the collapse/submit state of chronic helplessness, the disorganized attachment/cry for help response of inability to be soothed, or a please/appease response that is close to what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome of bonding with captors or jailors to achieve greater safety or protection.
Trauma itself can be a single incident, several ongoing incidents, or years of repetitive exposure to extremely stressful events. It can further be broken down into acute trauma, chronic trauma, and complex trauma. Acute trauma refers to current dangerous or highly stressful event or events. Chronic trauma is repeated and prolonged exposure to dangerous or highly stressful events, such as living with domestic violence or in a war zone. Complex trauma occurs when a person is exposed to multiple types of trauma, generally over an extended period of time, and of an invasive and interpersonal nature.
Trauma can further be examined through the lens of public or private trauma, with similarities and differences between the two. Public trauma refers to traumatic events that occur in the public arena and are visible and recognized by others. There are witnesses or pictures that can verify that the traumatic events occurred. This category includes events such as natural disasters, car accidents, or terror attacks. Common to these experiences is that the traumatic event is seen and accepted by the general public, and the event not questioned as to the veracity of the report. There is generally little if any subjective sense of shame attached to experiencing this type of trauma.
Private trauma refers to traumatic events that take place out of the public eye, often in the privacy of a home or family, and away from other witnesses, such as within an institution, group, or religious setting. This includes experiences such as growing up in abusive or addictive families or subtler forms of trauma such as emotional abuse or neglect. In private trauma, the additional burden of being believed and then supported in a “he said, she said” scenario compounds the original traumatic events. The responses of the caregiver or the person who receives the disclosure become intricately connected to the healing of the trauma, as well as how long it takes before the child or adult gets to a safe place. Addressing this later part as well is crucial to healing.
I am postulating that there is a third ambiguous type of trauma category that I have recently identified. It occurs when traumatic events happen in a public arena, but not everyone agrees as to what they have seen or witnessed. Thus, we have in the public sphere the type of questioning of reality or validity that is so often seen in private trauma, including the lack of an agreed-upon narrative by all parties involved. This phenomenon often takes place during a general zeitgeist in society of dissonance and fear-mongering. The category might include events such as witnessed bullying, fat-shaming, racial profiling, street and community violence, the behavior of law enforcement officers, or the multiple sides of many conspiracy theories. While there may not be a question of whether a shooting or injury has occurred, especially in this era of cell phone videos, there may be disagreement as to who is at fault or responsible. For example, what happened on January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C. has been interpreted differently by different people despite video footage.
Knowing who is responsible for the traumatic events is a key part of healing and creates much of the concurrent emotional narrative in life and in dreams. Being believed and supported after a trauma accelerates the healing process. So, in addition to clear-cut public or private traumas, this third category is an indisputable public event that is cloaked in the ambiguity more often associated with private hidden trauma. Thus, it contains traumatic responses associated with both the public and private types of trauma. We might call this new category Ambiguous Public Trauma.
Correct attribution of blame and responsibility is key to the resolution of many types of trauma; knowing what someone truly is and is not responsible for affects the healing process. Many trauma survivors take undue responsibility for events or actions beyond their control, and the subsequent misplaced guilt, a subset of survivor’s guilt, can wreak havoc with their dreams and their life. How others respond to the event also affects the healing process. If the survivor is believed and their report of what they have experienced is validated, then they are much less likely to develop long-standing or complex PTSD. The nightmares that may follow trauma have a different flavor if the survivor is not in a position of trying to convince others of the veracity of their experience while simultaneously trying to heal from it.
PTSD refers to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It has almost become a colloquial expression these days, so it is useful to explore what it actually is. It has been defined as a mental health condition that may occur in people who have either witnessed or experienced a traumatic event such as a terrorist act, a natural disaster, a sudden death, a rape, or who have been threatened with death, violence, or injury. The first thing to notice about the term is that it is called Post Traumatic, which means that it is a series of symptoms and reactions that occur after the events, not necessarily during. Acute trauma response would be the set of symptoms commonly found during and immediately following a traumatic event.
Just as important to know is that experiencing PTSD is not a given following trauma. Not everyone develops it. Whether or not someone develops it depends on the nature of the trauma itself, its duration, what kind of supports the trauma survivor does or does not receive, and what is called their “pre-morbid” personality (which simply means what was their personality style and usual way of coping before the trauma occurred). Also noteworthy is the “D” part – Disorder. For something to become entrenched enough in the body/mind system to become a disorder, it needs to have a duration of about six months or more. If nightmares and other symptoms resolve on their own, then it does not become a disorder. That is, the pre-trauma life, coping skills, mood states, and dreaming style of a survivor return on their own pretty much to what they were before the trauma. If the symptoms do not resolve, or worsen, then we are looking at possible PTSD. Survivors will hopefully experience some relief after the first few months.
Here is one example of nightmares following trauma and the emergence of PTSD. For most of her childhood, Robin lived with a clinically depressed mother who was periodically hospitalized for severe depression. As an adult, Robin’s husband tells her that she screams out loud in the night, “F...k you” to unseen figures in her dreams. This is very out of character for her adult persona. In Robin’s case, her anger outbursts occur primarily in her dream life. She also has chronic dreams of her mouth being filled by taffy or gluey foods and needing to pull them out to clear her mouth to both breathe and to be able to talk.A. A person has been exposed to actual or threatened death or injury or to the threatened physical integrity of themselves or has been indirectly exposed in a chronic fashion (such as emergency room doctors or firefighters). It is also now recognized that individuals have different thresholds of response to the same stimuli, so there is a subjective component to this criterion as well.
B. They experience intrusive symptoms such as flashbacks and nightmares that can generate the mental images and the emotional and physiological responses associated with the original traumatic events. Ellis (2023) reports that there is a robust comorbidity between nightmares and PTSD. She shares that nightmares not only predispose people to PTSD, but that they speed up the progression of PTSD after trauma (Ellis, 2023)
C. There is an avoidance criterion whereby people develop behavioral strategies to avoid exposing themselves to actual or similar trauma-related events as an attempt to minimize their upset and distress responses. This can perhaps best be understood when examining phobias, and can manifest in more extreme cases as agoraphobia, where the sufferer cannot even leave their house for fear of being triggered.
D. Negative cognitions and moods reflect an altered state of self-assessment and unrealistic self-blame and shame for the events that occurred and the responses to them. In addition to negative self-cognitions such as “I am powerless,” or “I don’t deserve to be happy,” there are marked mood disorders of anxiety or depression or inability to feel joy, known as anhedonia.
E. Alterations in arousal or reactivity can show up as increased irritability, anger outbursts, difficulty sleeping, hypervigilance and heighted startle response. This heightened reactivity may also show up in reckless behaviors, lack of impulse control, and self-destructive behaviors. A great variety of sleep and dream reactions to trauma include difficulty falling or staying asleep, nightmares, sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, and talking or screaming out in the night. Since being asleep is one of our most vulnerable and unprotected states of being, it is no wonder that this area in our life is often so affected by stress and trauma.
One of the primary functions of dreams is that of memory consolidation. This happens when short-term memories of recent experiences are transformed into more permanent long-term memories. In his article on our “Wake-Centric Society”, Dr. Reuben Naimen (2020) states that our bodies and our minds “go their separate ways” during REM dreaming. The body gets a break from the ego-driven mind, and the mind gets liberated from the physical limitations and constraints of the body. During REM sleep, the upper executive functions become separated from the lower somatic functions, and if all goes well, the dreaming mind can then act as a second gut and digest the events of our day. If the body/mind system is functioning smoothly, the dreams can metabolize and process the events that have occurred during the day or past weeks. They help to analyze and consolidate our memories and provide a mood-regulation function. By doing this over time, the dreams can then reduce the emotional intensity and negative valence of the memories. This has also been referred to as a rinsing out of our day while we sleep.
Healthy dream digestion helps to sort through our memory networks and determine what will be released and what will be assimilated into long-term memory storage. Ideally, we keep the memories that feed and nourish us and release those that cause us distress or are toxic to our system. However, if our clients are struggling with an overload of difficult experiences or trauma in their lives, then this dream healing function may not be able to do its job, and they end up with unresolved and/or repetitive nightmares.
Neurologist and sleep specialist Dr. Guy Leschziner (2019) proposed that because of the extreme emotions of some dream experiences, people wake up during their dream before being able to finish it. Therefore, according to Leschziner, this means that the dreaming process is never truly completed, and that the emotional memory is never fully processed. Since one of the main tasks of dreams is to help process and metabolize things that have happened in our waking life, if the brain keeps getting interrupted in this process it will keep on trying to finish its nocturnal job. In addition, during normal REM sleep the anxiety-triggering chemical of noradrenaline shuts off so that one can revisit upsetting life events in a neurochemically calm environment. Walker (2017), hypothesizes that PTSD sufferers have reoccurring nightmares because their brains produce an abnormal amount of noradrenaline, preventing their dreams from having their usual sorting and rinsing and healing effect. When the dreaming brain is not able to reduce the emotional intensity attached to a traumatic memory, it will keep trying to return to the scene of the crime night after night.
This is when we may need to attend even more closely to working directly with our clients’ dreams. In line with Leschziner’s theory of the unfinished dream, one suggestion that I often make to a dreamer when working with a nightmare is to remind them that this isn’t necessarily where the dream ended but that this is just where they woke up. I continue, “Let’s see how you can dream it forward or continue the dream now to get a different ending or resolution.”
Memory re-consolidation is a recent neuroscience discovery that has revealed how to heal trauma at its roots by recalling a memory and then updating it with new information. Traumatic memories can then be paired with current non-traumatic cognitions, beliefs, and life circumstances. Dreams themselves help with memory consolidation, sorting into long- and short-term memories, and making nocturnal connections between things that we may not have been able to while awake. Part of dreamwork with nightmares involves a form of active memory re-consolidation.
Many dreams come couched in metaphor, but some are simply replaying the trauma over and over. Vietnam veterans often report this kind of nightmare; they return to the war theater over and over in their dreams and repeat the traumatic and soul-shattering experiences they were forced to participate in, sometimes against their own moral code. By many definitions, trauma is soul-shattering, even more so when during the traumatic events we are forced to do something that is morally abhorrent to us. If our clients have the resources in life necessary to heal, then ultimately these dreams fade away on their own. If they don’t however, they get stuck on replay without any relief or resolution. Becker, et al. (2024)speak to the importance of investigating the impact of trauma and stress variables in dreams and the value of dream exploration and analysis to the development of prevention strategies and therapeutic interventions in various healthcare settings.
My client Jay had this event-replay experience in his nightmares. As a young adult he was sexually assaulted while at a party. Away at college, a shy young man to begin with, from a family that did not “do feelings,” he told no one of this experience. After several weeks of deep depression, he pulled himself back together, finished his schooling and thought that he had put the incident behind him. Years later, with a solid marriage, two grown children and a successful business in high tech, he began to re-experience chronic nightmares. An avid runner, he was near the finish line when the Boston Marathon bombing took place, and that traumatic event triggered his memories of his assault. After that, they were often triggered by a movie or TV show with similar themes of rape or other story lines of vulnerability, helplessness, and victimization. (Sadly, these themes are all too easy to find in our media “entertainment”.)
In Jay’s nightmares, the original event simply replayed over and over, night after night and he would wake up in a panic and a sweat. He finally told his wife what was happening, the first person he ever told, and began therapy. He worked with a therapist for several years being heard, believed, and supported. The nightmares diminished in frequency but did not stop entirely. A few years later he watched the movie A Star is Born, and the suicide of one of the characters re-triggered his own memories of his deep-seated depression and suicidal thoughts of that earlier time. This time he returned to dream therapy to explicitly work on resolving these nightmare replays of his trauma. We will follow Jay’s dreamwork journey to healing in the section on the GAIA method and learn how he is now turning his own history of trauma into a source of healing for others.
Dreams store memories of emotional experiences, be they positive or negative. Our sleeping brain picks out the events in our life that have most strongly registered with us emotionally to provide our dreamscape with related themes and images. During REM sleep the hippocampus, the part of our brain involved in short term memory storage, moves the experiences and emotional material into long-term memory storage in the neocortex. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, which is our emotional brain. This will become important to remember when working to alleviate emotionally upsetting dreams and nightmares. Another part of the limbic system is the amygdala. This structure processes emotion. One metaphor or pneumonic for remembering which is which, is that the amygdala is the accelerator of our limbic system, and the hippocampus is the brakes. We need both the “go” and the “stop” pedals to be working well in our vehicles and in our lives!
Hartmann (1998), a dream and nightmare research pioneer who studied hundreds of dreams and dreamers, found that in general our distressing dreams follow emotionally charged life events. Our mind picks out the issues that we are grappling with and gives us an opportunity to get more information and resolution through our dreams. Our wise unconscious may then shift things around in the dream, add in dream-created characters, actions, and places, and thus dilute and mitigate the effects of the stress. Other dream functions include problem solving and inspiring creativity. By contextualizing the trauma in metaphor, or by simulating waking life but adding in their own unique dream-crafted elements, dreams help us to practice and rehearse new coping and survival strategies.
This contextualization allows us to experience mastery without having to encounter the saber tooth tiger or the difficult boss or the intrusive relative in the flesh. According to Hartman, this dream function helps us to adapt and heal. It surpasses the dream function of memory consolidation alone by broadening the memories through these neural cross-connections and weaving old and new experiences together, thus repairing and reorganizing our neural circuits and “knitting up the raveled sleeve of care.” Neurologist Amen (2015) wrote a book on healing our brains from depression, anxiety, obsessions, and anger entitled, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. This title captures the essence of strong dreamwork. We could paraphrase his title to read, Change Your Dream, Change Your Life.
Responses to trauma are individualized. They depend in part on the event itself, but also on the personal history and the absence or presence of support systems of the person who is experiencing it. It is our reaction and response to the events once we are no longer living through them that causes our distress. This is where we can intervene with our clients both in active dreamwork and in life. While we can’t change what has already occurred in the past, we can change our reaction and response to it. By our understanding and healing in the present and taking actions in the future based on this new awareness, we can redeem the past and make meaning out of it in our lives. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel chose to title his book Man’s Search for Meaning with this theme in mind.
Making meaning and finding redemption may be other words for paying it forward. We are hard-wired for growth and healing, so with proper support in resolving our nightmares and the sources of them, we can move forward to healing and wholeness. Dr. Eduardo Duran (2021) a Native healer as well as a psychologist, speaks of the need to make amends consciously and purposefully as an integral part of dream-healing to both the land and the people if we have harmed them in any way, including if we have harmed ourselves. This intentional give-back then becomes a gift rather than a loss.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2018) has a fascinating interpretation of this concept of healing the past via the future as he discusses the biblical character of Joseph the Dreamer. In Genesis, following his incarceration, Joseph is promoted to Pharaoh’s right-hand man by virtue of his dream interpretation skills. Later in the story, Joseph’s brothers’ journey into Egypt to ask the Pharaoh for help during the time of famine over the land. They are brought before their brother Joseph but don’t recognize him in his new role as advisor to Pharaoh and in his new life. After their pleas for food supplies, Joseph finally reveals his identity to them. His brothers then become afraid that Joseph will want to take revenge on them for their very bad behavior toward him. If you recall, their treatment of him culminated in throwing him into a pit, and then deciding to sell him off into slavery instead of just killing him because of their jealousy of him and his bodacious dreaming. By the time of this encounter years later, Joseph himself has made peace and meaning out of these traumatizing events in large part through his dream interpretation skills. He now has a different response to them.
His betrayal by his brothers and his many years in an Egyptian prison could have become life-defining traumas for Joseph. Instead, according to Sacks, Joseph was able to overcome and transcend them with the dreamwork that ultimately brought him to Pharaoh’s attention. He reassures his brothers that although they had meant to harm him, in the larger scheme of things their actions turned out for the good, saying, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” As Pharaoh’s steward, he is now in a position to save them and his father by inviting them to Egypt where abundant food has been stored as a direct result of Joseph’s dream interpretation skills: Joseph had been promoted out of prison when he correctly interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows, foreshadowing the famine and the need to stockpile grain in silos for the seven lean years that were coming. Paradoxically, because of all that happened in the past, even the traumas of expulsion from his home and family and years in jail, Joseph is now able to help his father and brothers. This new interpretation of their past actions helps to relieve the guilt the brothers feel over their actions and saves their family and their tribe.
Sacks points out that Joseph’s re-interpretation of the brother’s history and thus their memories of it “…changes one of our most fundamental associations about time, namely its asymmetry.” The commonly held belief about time is that we can change the future, not the past. But Sacks argues that in changing our understanding of the past, we can look back with new eyes and see how it all turned out. In doing so, we are no longer held captive by the past. He continues, “By action in the future, we can redeem much of the pain of the past,” which is a very similar message to that of indigenous healer Duram. When we can understand the events of our past with new eyes and resources and knowledge as Joseph did, by unpacking our dreams and nightmares to find new meaning and make potential redemptive actions, then in effect we too have transformed the pain of the past. This is an important insight to keep in mind as we help our clients to work through their nightmares.
Healing from trauma needs to incorporate all the elements of healing of the mind, the body, the emotions, and the spirit to be complete. We need to quiet our bodies to reduce the agitation so that our conscious and our unconscious dreaming minds and hearts have a calm resting place in which to be held. Traditional therapeutic approaches may excel at attending to the mind and the emotions but often neglect the body and the spiritual aspects of healing. To fully heal, we need to add these dimensions on as well. We do so in the integrated embodied approach to dreamwork.
Invite your client to think about any nightmares they are having. Make a list in their journal. Are they repetitive? Do any themes or events or emotions reoccur? Notice how big the emotional upset is in the dreams, and if it seems to be getting less, or staying the same, or getting worse. Write that down too to keep track.
Now invite them to make what Moss (2012) calls a bridge to life, a form of dreamwork that invites us to make the associations directly from our dreams to our life and see if they seem connected. Are their dreams connected to any traumatic or upsetting events that they can think of? See if there are any “aha” moments here. Without judgment, notice if the events that come to mind are recent, or from the past or from family history. Think also about the concept of epigenetics and comb the family history for any stories that seem relevant. They might ask their parents or grandparents for more family stories of ancestors that they may not have known about.
Begin to make a list of all the events or stories that somehow seem connected to the nightmares or anxiety dreams, even if they are not sure why yet. Invite them to trust their intuition here as they being to explore the threads of connection. Also take note of whether these traumatic events were private hidden traumas that happened without witnesses, or public traumas that were verifiable, or in the other category of ambiguous public trauma that happened in a public space but there might be disagreement about who is to blame or is responsible for the sequence of events. Take note too if there are any ancestors who can be helpers or healers for you now.
As we know from other treatment modalities that address trauma, it is important to also think about the resources they have in their life before moving forward. When working with nightmares, it is important to feel grounded, supported, and protected before going into dark places. Who or what could they turn to for support if they felt the need to? Make a list in their dream journal. List any people (alive or passed over, real or imaginary), pets, places, divine or angelic beings. Do the same for safe places, important objects, favorite stuffed animals. Who are the people, objects, places that help them to feel safe, secure, loved? What characteristics or traits do they already possess that they can rely on as a resource to help get them through tough times? For example, is their creativity or sense of humor or ability to persevere a strong suit? Invite them to be creative and know that they can call on these beings, places, and traits in their mind’s eye and begin the healing journey while feeling safe, grounded, and accompanied. This protocol is the beginning of the GAIA method to be explored shortly.
“To heal, we must remember.”
President Joe Biden 2/22/21 (The day the COVID-19 deaths reached over 500,000)
“I wonder sometimes if the thoughts that flock my nightmares are abandoned memories coming home to roost.”
(Danielle Teller, All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother)
This section will examine the phenomenon of dissociation and its function to appreciate how dreams can help to re-integrate the fragmented self that dissociation can create. This can then help us to knit up the lost pieces of our dreams and of our souls that the dissociative process has shredded and unraveled.
Pierre Janet (1889), the grandfather of trauma treatment, in 1889 said, “Traumatic stress is an illness of not being able to be fully alive in the present.” Dissociation is a complex topic and one of the most misunderstood and undertreated aspects of trauma. It refers to a compartmentalization of experiences and a splitting of awareness, and it is a break in the continuity of how our minds handle information. When someone is overwhelmed by a dangerous situation, or one that is perceived as dangerous, or one from which there is no escape, our mind in effect creates the escape by splitting off our consciousness from what is happening in our current environment.
Post-trauma dreams have some unique characteristics that differentiate them from non-trauma dreams. These dreams frequently activate the content and/or the emotional elements of the traumatic life events or circumstances. The trauma memories that are embedded in our neural networks are carried into our dream life and contain the difficult events that have not yet been fully metabolized or sufficiently processed. In a sense, these memories are still undigested by the psyche. In addition, they may bring into dreams the emotions that were originally connected to events that have been unremembered, or hidden from consciousness.
Sometimes, traumatic events are so upsetting that a survivor just cannot tolerate remembering them consciously. But the embedded memories of these events have to go somewhere. They may have been suppressed initially in the service of their ability to cope and function in life, and then later re-emerge in dreams as metaphors. These dream metaphors also have the emotions connected to them that were present in the original traumas. (For example, a hurricane in our dream may be a metaphor for feeling overwhelmed, swept away, or flattened by something, a snarling dog may be a metaphor for anger or fear of someone who wants to “bite our head off”, falling into a deep hole may be a metaphor for shame; when one wants to just disappear from view.) In its wisdom, the unconscious seems to decide just how much each survivor can cope with at once. Dreams may also contain the unique phenomenon of memory bursts whereby previously occluded memories may resurface in the dreamscape. That phrase, “memory bursts”, is reminiscent of the goddess Athena’s birth – she burst straight from Zeus’ head, a fully formed adult and the goddess of war and wisdom and crafts.
Trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (2015) says that dissociation is the key indicator of trauma. One of the ways he defines trauma is “overwhelmingly negative experiences which become lodged in the body beyond the reach of language.” As an expert on PTSD, he maintains that “The talking cure – the traditional psychoanalytic attempt to make a coherent narrative of one’s trauma – cannot sufficiently help patients, but embodied work such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy), mindfulness, and body-oriented methods such as yoga can. Dissociation implies that the memories of the event have been separated out from our conscious mind.”
As embodied beings, van der Kolk believes that trauma that is beyond the reach of language can be re-integrated into the wholeness of our beings when we engage with the body. This is a part of why an embodied approach to dreamwork is so important – our bodies hold clues that point us toward that wholeness both in our waking and sleeping life. Having a coherent narrative of the whole trajectory of our life is crucial so that each life hangs together as a unified whole, and all the parts of it are connected to each other. Re-creation of this coherent narrative is one of the core goals of trauma treatment, and therefore of PTSDreamwork as well.
People dissociate when they are in extreme pain or fear and no other recourse appears available. It is an autonomic process, not something that we decide to do. A long-term sense of overwhelm and unintegrated dissociation are two of the main impediments to healing from trauma. Untreated dissociation is strongly associated with vulnerability to the development of PTSD, and frequently is part of the source of PTSDreams or nightmares.
There is another form of short-term dissociation known as healthy or adaptive dissociation. Sometimes short-term dissociation can be adaptive. It can buy us some needed time to respond during the actual traumatic event. Many of our clients and we ourselves have had the experience of time slowing down as we watch an upsetting event unfolding, such as an impending car accident, or that out-of-body experience that allows us to feel as if we were floating on the ceiling above ourselves looking down. (Surgical patients frequently report this phenomenon.) If the felt experience of time slows down enough for us, then we might have the time we need to jump up, run away, or do something to get safe. One young mom reported that when she saw her toddler dash out into the street in front of an impending car, she somehow found the time to rush out and grab him back to safety before the car hit him, even though he seemed too far away. However, when this response continues past short-term periods of time it can then affect our sense of identity, our sense of time (i.e., struggling to differentiate the past from the present) and interfere with our functioning.
Dr. Martin Lowenstein describes functional dissociation as a way of organizing information under extreme stress. When the body is flooded with stress neurochemicals such as cortisol, it can develop the hyper-focus necessary to be able to respond. This narrowing of perception is like tunnel vision that eliminates distractions and is one of the elements of dissociation. During extreme stress emotions the spirit frequently splits off from the body, creating that sense of floating outside ourselves or feeling numb and frozen.
Shock is often our first response to sudden bad news and is itself a temporary form of dissociation. It is common, for example, when suddenly hearing of the death of a loved one, to go numb, feel frozen, or like time has stopped for anywhere from a few moments to a few days. This initial avoidance of pain and overwhelm are necessary survival mechanisms; it only becomes a problem when they persist longer than is needed for that survival. It is a brilliant temporary solution for coping with overwhelm.
But if this numbing strategy becomes entrenched and keeps the trauma unprocessed, then the trauma goes underground, so to speak, into the unconscious self. If it lodges itself there, it eventually sends signals to both our waking life and our dreams: There are ghosts from the past that need to see the light of day to be liberated. These split off parts show up through nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive memories. So, in a very real way, the split off memories of past events may first come back to consciousness in dreams.
It is always now in dreams, never yesterday or tomorrow. We live in the dreams in the present tense, so when memory emerges in dreams, whether it is consciously known or unknown to the waking mind, we re-experience it in the dream as a current reality. Quantum physics is now teaching us about the reality of this timelessness. Here is an exercise that will help to illustrate the concept of dissociation.
When trauma has occurred, this biological phenomenon of splitting between the events and the emotions that accompany the events represents an adaptive separation of the memories and the feelings in waking life to prevent overwhelm. It may be the same with some dreams. One can wake with dream images and story lines intact but not have any idea what they mean – no sense of connection to them. For example, Deborah dreams,
Crystalized spiders keep pouring out of my mouth. They are sharp and stick to my tongue. Then I notice that they are actually Swarovski crystals, beautiful and valuable. I feel scared and disgusted at first, and then kind of awed when I saw that they were crystals.
Deborah had many other dreams where things were stuck in or came out of her mouth but has not yet had connection to their meaning. These spiders were a strange stand-alone image, yet it also carried a repetitive theme. If it is a nightmare, then the emotions we wake with are unpleasant at best. Deborah’s dream had elements both of a nightmare and contained a transformative quality, or at least appreciation of value, even though the spider crystals were uncomfortable. Nightmares carry the seeds of redemption right inside of themselves, not always this obviously, but it is there if we work to unpack the dream and look for it.
Sometimes one can wake with emotions that have no story or images attached to them; these emotions and/or physical sensations are what remains of the dream. When I woke with a feeling of panic one day early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no storyline to my dream at all – just the raw emotion. The “feelings-only” dreams may be pleasant or unpleasant. If one wakes feeling inexplicably delighted, that was the dream. If one wakes feeling inexplicably anxious, that too was the dream.
Invite your client to write down the date in their dream journal and record the emotions they wake with as a part of their dream log. Don’t ignore or minimize the importance of these feeling-only dreams. They are just as valid as the big, long narrative ones. Also, if they wake with just one word, or just a sentence, that too is the dream. Record that as well. For example, they can write “Wednesday, January 22, woke with just the word escape in my mind”. Or “Sunday, February 5, woke with a lump in my throat and feeling like I wanted to cry but didn’t know why.” Later they and you can go back and work on these shards of dream to find the surprising layers of meaning they contain.
Many nightmares may represent a form of nocturnal dissociation. These dreams give the time and space to use parts of the brain that are off-line when awake in order to gather resources and let the functions of the dreaming brain do their automatic work on our behalf. Access to the deep limbic and right brain functions become more fully available to help with problem-solving, consolidating memories, rehearsing for potential future similar threats and practice in coping. Our natural REM dream state seems to mimic what happens in the brain when the trauma treatment method of EMDR is used. According to EMDR therapist Ricky Greenwald, (1995) “The EMDR procedure, although using a consciously selected starting point, can arguably be characterized as a focused, induced dream analogue.” Greenwald makes the compelling argument that dreaming itself is a therapeutic process, in which disturbing material is meaningfully selected by our unconscious which then repeats until the matter is fully processed and is no longer upsetting, much like the protocol of EMDR. Once metabolized, our nightmares can lead us to mastery both in dreams and in waking life.
The technique itself, created by Shapiro (2017) is predicated on bilateral stimulation of the two hemispheres of the brain, through purposeful guided back-and-forth eye movements while attending to the upset and the trauma. The method was later expanded, adding to the use of bilateral eye movements the additional options of bilateral tapping or auditory sounds. When the dreaming brains of our clients are not able to perform their functions of metabolizing the upset on their own, we need to step in with purposeful and active dreamwork and trauma treatment to assist.
Missing sequences, out-of-order narratives, exaggerated events: This sounds a lot like dreams. In both enjoyable dreams as well as nightmares, things often don’t make sense when we wake. We don’t know how we got from here to there – we just did. Many dreams lack a coherent narrative, there are random events seemingly popping out of nowhere, and even when there is a clear narrative, there are often elements to the dreams that would be out of place if we encountered them in waking life. We might even say that our dreams frequently present us with information in a dissociated fashion. In part, this is simply the norm for the way in which the nonlinear right brain and limbic brain offer information in the dreamscape. However, it may also be one way our system protects us from being overwhelmed with too much information at once following trauma. Van der Kolk (2015) and many other trauma experts tell us that trauma is not stored as a narrative with a well-ordered beginning, middle, and ending. Instead, it is usually stored in flashbacks, isolated images, and body sensations that have no context other than to give a voice of sorts to the unspeakable fears and terrors.
I have proposed that some dreams offer us dissociated memories in metaphoric or symbolic fashion, but also occasionally through memory bursts; those intrusive flashes of actual memory that may make their way fully formed into our dreams (such as the prior association to Athena who bursts fully formed from Zeus’ head.) Therefore, when doing dreamwork we want to also pay attention to the possibility that an actual memory of a prior event is being retrieved from its deep sleep in our unconscious in a Sleeping Beauty moment of our awakening. The dreamer then becomes their own prince who wakes their sleeping self from the slumber of unknowing with the kiss of a remembered dream.
This knowledge of dream memory can be useful information to have about life and help with the reconstruction of a coherent and meaningful life narrative. I would caution to tread carefully though. While considering the possibility that something may be true as dreamed, we should not jump to conclusions that could be harmful to the dreamer or to others in their life. Dreamed memories do not stand up as evidence in court. We know that memory can be fallible. Let the pieces and supporting facts emerge slowly and carefully. As always, it is up to the dreamer to decide if the dream resonates as true, not the guide. As a guide, be curious, not definitive.
During dissociation, events and emotions can become separated from each other, the survivor loses pieces of time and space. They experience a sense of floating or being out of their bodies until their system cues them that it is now safe to reconnect. Childhood abuse and other unsafe conditions in the home such as growing up with an alcohol or substance-abusing parent often leave the survivor with little or no other recourse but to “run away” in their minds, since there may be no other safe place to run to.
If our clients have experienced chronic ongoing trauma, there may not come a time until adulthood that feels safe enough to have all their feelings and memories in one place. In that case, either the feelings or the memories may become split off as discussed earlier. Years later they may still experience that sense of disconnect in their lives. However, to live lives fully and with equanimity, one needs to reconnect the disparate parts. Otherwise, the fragmented self-parts may continue to appear in an endless looping without a clear time sequence of past, present, and future. This occurs during intrusive repetitive nightmares.
One of the hallmarks of healing from trauma is that time is now re-ordered sequentially. When this happens, both the past events and the feelings connected to them are relegated to distance memories, and the survivor is free to live in the present and to hope, plan, and dream for the future. The mantra of “that was then, and this is now”, needs to become internalized as second nature when remembering past upsets and traumas.
When asked, “How do I know if this traumatic event is healed?” I respond, “When it is just a memory – nothing more.”
There is an energy-healing protocol called T.A.T. (Tappas Acupressure Technique, https://tatlife.com). It uses a body/mind approach that combines a cognitive protocol of seven steps with hand or fingertip placement on key meridian points while simultaneously attending to the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that arise with each step. One step asks us to focus on the statement, “It happened, and it’s over now. I can relax, I can heal, and I can move on.” In other words, we know what had happened, but it no longer has any hold on us or our emotions. It is in the past. When sufficiently metabolized, the dream or the memory is now neutral; no more rushes of anxiety or panic when recalling what happened. The AA slogan that it no longer “rents space” in our brain fits here.
When the survivor is finally in a safe space and in safe relationships, the body begins to cue that it is now time to put the pieces back together. The first signs of this may paradoxically be as nightmares. The presence of nightmares is actually a sign that the body is trying to move into healing, even though it may not feel like it at the moment. It is giving signals, saying, “Listen up! We want to get your attention here, work to be done!” We need to clean out the muck at the bottom of the well for the water to run clean again. The shadow revealed can become the gift that heals.
Survivors may start their remembrances and dreams with emotions and metaphoric content that only hint at the actual events behind the dream content until they gradually become stronger and more ready to hold the coherent whole. This is one of the reasons it is so important to go slowly when working with nightmares. We don’t want to re-traumatize the system and overload it again, sending those fragmented parts back into hiding in our deep unconscious. Please tread carefully, bit by bit with the big nightmares, and be sure that the dreamer has the resources needed to cope with what is uncovered. The GAIA method of nightmare healing is a system of careful yet active dreamwork that allows the dreamer to become well-resourced and safe before treading on the uneven or shaky ground of their nightmare narratives.
Invite your client to think about times in their waking life when they experienced a sense of separation betweenIf and their environment or emotions. Have they ever had highway hypnosis or spaced out in a lecture? What happens when you re-integrate and come back to the present fully? What do you notice? Can you see any connections between these states of being and your dreaming states?
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
– Carl Jung
The Guided Active Imagination Approach (GAIA) was created to facilitate safe and careful work with nightmares. The name GAIA is a fortuitous acronym for this method of work. As in dreams themselves, there are multiple layers of meaning in the acronym. The word itself contains associations to the earth-mother goddess Gaia. In addition, it refers to our complete living planet itself as a complex organism. Now commonly accepted, they proposed that the earth is a living, self-regulating being. We too are living, self-regulating beings, and dreams, including nightmares, are one of the ways that our systems help us to come back into balance.
This nightmare intervention is based on two primary approaches: one from the world of dreamwork and one from the field of trauma treatment. It has its roots in Jungian depth psychology and in current best-practice trauma treatment. GAIA has two parts: Stage 1 is all about creating safety before venturing into the belly of the beast, and Stage 2 then allows us to take the resources we have generated and created in Stage 1 to move into working directly with the dream material. (Schiller, 2014)
Because trauma interferes with the ability to be safe, to feel safe, and to create safety both during and after the traumatic events, the creation of a safe enough environment in which to do the healing work is the first order of priority. We want to go gently into that dark night, with supports and resources that were not there either when the traumatic events took place or in the nightmares that occurred following the event. Over-zealous attempts to move into the belly of the nightmare too quickly can result in re-traumatization. Treading carefully as we enter and exit this deep emotional territory allows us to avoid the extremes of our client getting too overwhelmed or becoming dissociated. In order to build up sufficient emotional musculature and resilience to be able to process the emotional residue, it is better to start building safety slowly and surely. We want to build in the capacity for the dreamer to be able to have emotional regulation as we approach the nightmare. The direct work on the dream itself that is done in Stage 2 of GAIA can wait as long as is necessary.
The two stages of the GAIA method and the Bridge in between are:
Working from outside the dream refers to examining various elements of the dream from the observer perspective, looking in at the story and the images from an eyes-wide-open in waking clock-time perspective. To work in this way, we invite the dreamer to use language such as, “When I think about my dream, I remember seeing myself in a dark forest. I remember that there seemed to be an animal lurking behind the trees.” Working from inside the dream means to climb back inside of the dream while awake and wander around the dreamscape in real time, re-experiencing it in the now of the dream. Here we invite the dreamer to use language such as, “I am walking through a dark forest. I am chilly and can smell the vaguely rotten, damp matted leaves underfoot. The hair on the back of my neck rises as I sense an animal lurking behind the trees.”
The first style is the external witness perspective, the other is the visceral felt sense of a lived experience. Neither is better or worse, just different styles of dreamwork. We can get different types of information about the dream from each method. Once the dreamer is ready and prepared, working from inside the dream also gives us access to the experienced felt sense of somata-sensory processing pioneered by Eugene Gendlin (1978) in his work on Focusing. With Focusing, we feel into the events that are happening in the dream and experience them in our bodies. As we invite our clients to attend to their bodies, our own felt sense can shift as well as we tune in, and we find different responses. By interacting with the dream characters and objects, we also gain the ability to change the events that took place in the original dream when we work from the inside. That is, we come into the time/space of the dream itself and then are able to make changes in the dream and in the outcome. This is part of the essence of Carl Jung’s active imagination, one of the two main principles upon which the GAIA method is based.
Active imagination itself can be defined as dropping down into the dream landscape in order to interact with the dream and the characters therein. It is a tool for transformation. We can use it to interact with and freely imagine the thoughts, feelings, and alternative actions that our dream characters may take. When our client meets a dragon in the dream during their active imagination, they can talk with it and hear how it answers. In utilizing active imagination, we maintain the connections with our waking consciousness, with our dreamed characters, and then add the active transformational possibilities that emerge when we merge these two states of consciousness to create a third new option or form.
It encourages the conscious and our unconscious minds to communicate with each other by directing attention and focus on that self-part; the dreaming and unconscious self that does not usually benefit from this direct attention. In active imagination, we have the opportunity to go back and interact with dream characters as Jung proposed; and can add with the dream objects, landscapes, and somatic responses in addition to Jung’s original formulation. Doing so creates the ability to change the actions that took place in the original dream by interacting with all the elements of the dream. We can go back and engage with various elements of the dream to dream it forward to a safer and more satisfactory conclusion.
This orientation to the healing of loss and trauma is that our own body/mind/spirit self-being is wired for healing, that it naturally wants to come into stasis and order. Connecting this to Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the Earth as a vast self-regulating organism, the underlying premise of deep healing both from nightmares and from what generated them is founded on the AEDP principle (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) that we all have innate capacities for healing. Diana Fosha’s AEDP approach uses moment-to-moment tracking of emotion and body sensation help to engage the attachment system that has been disrupted through traumatic experiences. This is also why as healers we pay exquisitely close attention to embodiment, movement, and the movement of emotion as we work through dreams. Both the tracking and the attention are part of the healing matrix we create.
The AEDP system itself is a therapeutic method also predicated on a safe and empathic relationship with a therapist. The principles of working with a connected and caring other, including a close friend or caring companion, can re-create the conditions needed for healing. There is always a part of each survivor that the trauma never touched: the spirit, the soul, the connection with the Divine. This is a key principle as well for healing.
When my client Elaine was setting up a safe place imagery prior to doing dreamwork, at first she said, “I can’t imagine any place at all that is safe to be in my body.” Finally, after much thought and negotiation, she was able to imagine a part of herself, her Witness or Spirit Self, watching out for her embodied Self as it immersed in warm, shallow water filled with glowing phosphorescence to light her way. The two parts were then surrounded by a bubble of light to keep them connected.
No matter what happened in the environment or to their bodies, the soul remains pure and whole. This idea itself can be hard for a long-term sufferer to fully grasp, but once grasped, they can reclaim this birthright. As therapists, we seize upon and highlight areas of health and hope in this method of dreamwork to fan the flames of generativity that are always present, even if buried. We also look for the Bright Ones in or around the dreams and inside ourselves to highlight hope and healing. In addition to a potential legacy burden of trauma from ancestors, we also can find in them a legacy of healing and strength. These nurturing and guiding ancestors then are our Bright Ones, to borrow Tirzah Firestone’s (2019) phrase, that we can tap into. Or as Mr. Rogers tells us, we need to look for the helpers. This forms the core of the GAIA method of nightmare work.
How might this style of attention to movement and emotional tracking look in dreamwork? In addition to the storylines and images, we attend to the movement patterns and emotions. The act of bringing our attention to the movement and the emotion in and of itself allows us to have a different perspective. Some dreamers have a plethora of easily available resources; others will need more help in generating them, which then becomes the Guided part of this method. Here’s an example of this process. Ericka dreams:
I have taken a Zodiac boat out into the water, but it has sprung a leak, and I am frantically bailing out the water. I wonder if I would be able to swim to shore if need be. I feel somewhat panicky and a bit helpless.
There are many ways to work with and approach this dream, but if we begin with tracking movement, here is what happened. First, I ask Ericka if she needed any resources before re-inhabiting this dream, a core principle of Stage 1 of the GAIA method. Because she is a good swimmer, she said no, she could “jump right in.” I notice out loud (tracking) that she used the word “jump,” an active and empowering word. That attention to her off-hand comment allowed her to feel more self-agency. Here is a resource that is already contained within her dream that she didn’t notice at first. I then invite her to pay attention to what it felt like to “jump right in” and she tuned into a feeling of strength and energy in her legs. Once in the boat, I ask her to really notice what it felt like to be bailing it out – the main part of the dream, and the most active part. The main part of a dream can also be referred to as the C.I., or Central Image, and often contains the core energy of the dream.
As she tunes into her body, I invite her to physically show me how one bails out a boat, and what muscles she needs to do this. She begins to dip her imaginary bucket into the water in the boat and demonstrates dumping it over the side. I ask what it feels like to do this, to really notice what parts of her body are engaged. She first focused on her hands and arms, noticing how they were getting tired. I then ask her to put her attention on other parts of her body as well. Now Ericka says that if she “puts her back into it” and uses her larger back and core stomach muscles, that she is less tired and has more energy to bail harder. When I remind her of her strong jumping-in legs, she adds those leg muscles to her back and core, and now feels that she has plenty of energy to bail out the boat.
As I track with her both her movements and her facial expressions, I remark that she has a very determined look on her face now, as opposed to the panicky one she had earlier. I ask if this is true, as I don’t want to assume or superimpose my opinion (it’s her dream), but she agrees and smiles. Finally, at this point in the work, I ask if she notices anything else now that she was such a strong bailer, and she replies, “Now that you mention it, I seem to have gotten enough water out of the Zodiac to see that it is really just a little hole, and I can stuff my plastic rain poncho into it to plug it up until I get back to shore to repair it.” Oh –a poncho! – here’s another resource that she found inside of the dream that wasn’t visible or available to her at first. While Ericka was able to generate internal resources pretty much on her own, with just a few questions to get her in touch with her innate strength and resourcefulness, many nightmare sufferers are not able to do so.
In this piece of dreamwork, with what started out to be a nightmare (using the definition of nightmare as a dream that contains upsetting, unpleasant emotions that are not resolved before waking), Ericka was able to transform it. By tuning into her body and her sensations, she was able to generate the internal resources she needed to feel assured that she had the strength to get to safety and be able to repair the boat. She transformed the original feelings of panic and helplessness into a connection with a more whole-body strength and creativity as she found a solution to patching the hole that was not originally available to her in her dream. In Ericka’s case she had all the resources she needed right inside herself, and just needed some guidance to find and access them. Tracking her progress physically and emotionally helped to sort out the narrative trajectory and move it toward repair – such a nice metaphor. By the end of this piece of dreamwork, she was confident that she could get to shore and repair her boat. What this metaphor means in her life might be her next step of the dreamwork.
Sometimes this is as far as you or the dreamer needs or wants to go. Once the dilemma is solved inside the dream, they may not have a need or interest to make the bridge to waking life that generated it. Healing at one level of being can transmute and carry over into other levels with or without our conscious awareness or connections. This is part of what makes dreamwork so powerful.
Following the cybernetics principle that a change in the part generates a change in the whole, sometimes we are done right there, keeping the dreamwork focused on the metaphor of the dream story. Other times, especially if it is a recurring nightmare, we need to continue to make the connections directly to the current and past life (or lives) to be able to generate the reparative actions needed in the physical word as well. Moss (2012) has called this subsequent step the Bridge to Life.
To explore this dream from another active imagination angle, that of interacting with the objects in the dream, I ask her to talk to the boat itself. In essence Ericka creates a dialogue with the boat and then speaks from the point of view of the boat itself. When Ericka enters the dream she asks the boat, “Who and what are you?” and it responds, “I am a small inflatable boat. I am named after the astrological configuration of stars in the sky known as the Zodiac. I think I am an Aquarius boat. I seem to be sinking. I am filling up with water and can’t carry out my purpose of transporting Ericka to the other side. I feel ashamed and embarrassed to have sprung a leak.”
This insight from the point of view of the boat gives us a whole new direction to explore. What is the boat part of her that has not been able to fulfill its purpose and is feeling ashamed and embarrassed? And is she an Aquarius (born in late January or February)? Whether or not that is her sign, what does she associate with Aquarius? I think right away about the astrological symbol of Aquarius: the water carrier. Most icons of this sign depict a figure carrying a jug of water and pouring it out. Here’s what I found when I Googled it and then shared it with her:
“The sign of Aquarius is represented by the water bearer. She is the mystical healer who bestows water or life upon the land. Accordingly, Aquarius is often depicted as the most humanitarian astrological sign. These revolutionary thinkers fervently support empowerment of all people, aspiring to change the world through radical social progress.”
This immediately resonated with Ericka; her career path is one of social justice reform. The new information takes us in yet another direction: The purpose that the Zodiac boat speaks about refers to both a career path and a larger mythical and transpersonal goal of somehow offering life-giving water. But she can only get there if her means of transportation is solid and intact. The message that Ericka now gets is that she needs to attend more carefully to how she is moving toward achieving her goal. Her dream takeaway thought is that next time she will examine her boat more carefully before setting out. In other words, to take her time and prepare carefully to avoid potential mishaps and the need to turn back for repairs once having set out.
When Erika first worked on the dream, she was very creative when the boat began to fill with water and used her rain poncho to plug up the hole. So, we already know that she didn’t go down with the ship. As she thought about how her dream connected to her life, she confessed that she knew that she tended to be impulsive and “jump into things” (there’s that word jump again with a different meaning this time). Here was a bridge to life for her. Moving more slowly and “checking for leaks” before jumping into a project would help move her career forward into more of the managerial position that she sought. That would allow her to have more power to make change and “get to the other side” as in her dream. Checking her documents for typos before hitting send was just one small real-world example of checking for leaks before getting into the boat next time.
In the 1970s there was also a surge in research and innovation in trauma treatments that coincided with the women’s movement. Now other forms of trauma, specifically those of rape and sexual assault, were also categorized as traumatic events that created similar post-trauma responses as the soldiers experienced. Rape Trauma Syndrome was thus added to this categorization. The new diagnosis of PTSD was added to the DSM III, (APA, 1980). The creation of the category of PTSD is unique in the framing of psychological disorders because it places the spotlight squarely on the external traumatic stressor rather than an internal factor of biology, neurology, or neurotic thought processes. This landmark change from blaming the victim for their own distress, to the recognition that the cause of the symptoms suffered lay in the external events that created the responses in the first place, generated a sea change in the understanding and treatment approaches.
Somatic therapist Babette Rothschild (2010) offers us a metaphor for creating safety. She tells us that the experience of emotional overwhelm is similar to that of a shaken bottle of soda. Inside the bottle is a tremendous amount of pressure. The safest way to release the pressure is to open and close the cap in a slow, cautious, and intentional manner to prevent an explosion.
Given that trauma can create unspeakable terror, we also need to attend to using nonverbal methods of creating safety until the words that can also slowly open the cap are once again available. Mindfulness, somatic practices like chi gung, acupuncture, yoga, and breathwork can all contribute to creating a sense of safety in the body. We can use and access these in our Stage 1 of creating safety in our dreamwork before entering the stormy depths of a nightmare.
Herman’s second stage of remembrance and mourning includes putting the power of words and language to the memories as much as is feasible, for using words allows us to be better able to mourn the losses, having the company and understanding of others on the same journey. Words also allow access to the more cognitive parts of the brain that help us to get distance and perspective from the more primitive sensory-only memories. We may certainly also recall and mourn through somatic practices like interpretive dance and art that allow us to tell the story without words. While still attending to safety, here the work is to integrate the trauma, the events, and the emotions so that it becomes metabolized and does not remain static. Attention to timing and pacing are crucial to avoid dysregulation.
Finally, the goal in stage three of reconnection and integration is to fully reclaim life, to create a new sense of self and life purpose that includes making meaning out of pain, having meaningful relationships, and no longer defining oneself by the story of the trauma. Empowerment of self, and possibly using their own hero’s journey out of trauma and suffering to help others, becomes the defining life narrative. Viktor Frankl (1959) titled his post-Holocaust book Man’s Search for Meaning. The ability to make meaning even out of an experience as horrible as concentration camp life allows for the possibility of redemption. A psychiatrist himself, he mined his experiences in the camps in the service of helping to heal others in the world. Post-traumatic spiritual growth is often recognized in this phase of the work.
We keep Herman’s stages of recovery in mind while working with traumatic nightmares. Stage 1 of the GAIA protocol focuses on the establishment of safety, and in Stage 2, as we work through the dream to a resolution, we also attend to the recognition of what happened to generate the nightmare, even if it is couched in metaphor. Moving forward to integration and connection with all the parts of the self may be the ultimate goal in resolving PTSDreams, as well as claiming the birthright of a peaceful night’s sleep.
Here is the protocol to use when using the GAIA method. Please make it your own and adapt the wording as needed for your dreamer and yourself. After walking through the stages will be an example of this protocol with Jay’s repetitive nightmares using this method.
If they want to share the dream, ask them if they are ready to tell it now, or if they need to do anything else before they share it. While this level of incrementally slow proceeding is not necessary in most dreamwork, it is immensely comforting to someone who has been terrified by their nightmare and/or their trauma experiences. Some dreamers need to gather in ways to feel safe even before they tell the dream, but in my experience, most will be ready to share their dream once they have told you that they had one, and then need to establish their protections before working on it or entering it.
This slow and careful approach is part of titrating the work. The phrase titration is used in trauma treatment, which in turn borrowed it from the field of pharmaceuticals. We use a medicine dropper to titrate drop by drop the correct dosage of a medicine. Drop by drop, we inch into the nightmare with our dreamer and check the response before adding more to the mix.
Once they have shared the dream, we want to respond empathically to both the emotional narrative and to the storyline content, and then to set the stage for the healing work. It is useful here to share with the dreamer the orientation that all dreams come bearing gifts, even the really frightening ones. This bit of wisdom comes from the Talmud, one of the holy books that serves to explicate and expand on the Bible. By sharing this orientation now, we are both setting the stage for the search for the diamonds buried in the chaos and rubble of the nightmare, but also making what is called in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programing) a presupposition. This presupposition of a gift to come through presupposes that there will be some learning or healing or wisdom in the dream but does not presuppose what exactly that will be. The discovery of the hidden gifts is part of the dreamer’s journey, but we can start out orienting our client and ourselves to seek out the buried treasure; be it in the form of insight, advice, memory, direction, a meaningful object, a guide, or an action. This begins the gentle guiding of the active imagination process.
Next, we can ask the dreamer to give the dream a title if they haven’t already. Encourage the dreamer to let the title just arise spontaneously from their gut, and not think about it too much. If they are surprised by it, so much the better, for that means it emerged into their consciousness from a previously unconscious place. The title frequently contains the core of the dream and its center of energy and power. Allowing it to surface early on in the dreamwork process can be a shortcut to the core of the dreamwork and a signpost pointing us in an important direction. In addition, after we complete a piece of dreamwork, we can then ask if there is a new title. We will often find a profound title change, which provides a practical and concrete way for the dreamer to see the progress they are making as the titles shift and change. The original title often contains a negative belief or some emotional distress, and the new title will then hopefully be in contrast after the healing dreamwork.
I coined this technique “Title and Re-Title.” While working on dreams in a dream circle on one occasion, a member who shared her dream titled it “Everything is So Dark and Unclear”. After we worked on it in the group for a while, Marcia asked, “So, would you give it a different title now?” Sure enough, the title had changed from “Everything is So Dark and Unclear” to “Deep Diving”. The feelings in and about the dream changed too from the initial feelings of, “I feel foggy and upset, this doesn’t feel so good, and I don’t understand what it means” to “Oh, now I have a new perspective; I can dive down into that water and discover what is there for me.” Excitement and curiosity had replaced anxiety and dread. Here are a few other examples of dream title changes from before working on a dream to afterward:
As these examples illustrate, the tone and energy of the titles all shifted from something that was originally dark, harsh, or frightening to something else that was clearer, positive, or hopeful.
After getting the title of the dream, use the SUDS method to rate the level of upset or emotional distress it causes the dreamer, with zero being calm and relaxed when sharing or thinking about the dream, and ten being the worst upset they can imagine. We hope to see this SUDS level go down after working through the dream.
Now we are ready to gather the resources and allies together before moving into the dream per se. At this point, ask your dreamer who or what they need or want in order to feel safe and secure enough to engage with the dream. Clearly not everyone who has a nightmare will need this kind of slow and intricate work, but we err on the side of caution and check first. Some folks are shy or reluctant or defensively competent and may not be able to come up with ideas on their own. Some trauma survivors hold back from asking for help or feel they don’t deserve it. Assure them that they deserve help and assistance even if they don’t believe it themselves yet. (“Yet” is one of my favorite therapeutic words – it gives permission to be where you are and offers the potential for change in three little letters.) So, with these and other ways of priming the dream pump, we set out to engage a posse of helpers, guides, objects, energies, and places.
Starting out with people, invite the dreamer to think about who they know who helps them feel safe and secure, that they would want with them to guard their back on a dark road or scary journey. Further explicate that these can be people from their current life or from their childhood; they can be alive in this world or already passed to the other side. They can be people who they know or know of, or fantasy figures or characters from a book or movie. They can also be mythical or spiritual beings: gods, angels, guides, or shamans. Invite them to tune into their own deepest wisdom to locate these guides, but if they get stuck and can’t come up with a list that feels sufficient, make suggestions. Sometimes this participatory co-creation of the list adds a felt sense of safety to the process. Write them down and ascertain where they want these allies to stand – beside, behind, or in front of the dreamer – before entering the dreamwork.
Invited guests and protectors over the years have included Gandalf the White Wizard from Lord of the Rings; the more contemporary Dumbledore, Harry Potter’s wizard mentor; Marmee, the mother from Little Women; and Jesus, Buddha, Moses, and angels of all kinds. One of the children I worked with invited Mary Poppins as her ultimate magical and caretaking protector.
Back to angels and spiritual beings, there is a lovely bedtime lullaby that invites the angels to surround us before we drift off to sleep. The song names in turn Archangel Michael on our right side, Gabriel on our left, Uriel in front of us, Raphael behind us, and Shechinah, the feminine indwelling presence of maternal love, hovering and sheltering us over our heads. Each angel’s name contains specific meaning. The word “El” is a name for God, so the angel’s purpose is reflected in their names as follows: Micha-el is the one who is like God (God’s right-hand person); Gabri-el is the strength, might, or protection of God (the root letters G. B. R. mean strong or boundaried in Hebrew); Uri-el is the light of God (Ur means light, (s)he is lighting the path before us); and Rapha-el is the healer of God (Ropheh means healer and also doctor in modern Hebrew). I like to think about Raphael, the healer who’s got my back.
My friend Patricia finds great comfort in St. Bridgit, a patron saint of animals and children, and St. Anthony, the recoverer of lost objects. It is easy to see why these two saints might be of particular comfort to a survivor of childhood trauma, to protect the children and to recover the lost parts of oneself. (I confess that when my friend told me that St. Anthony also helps find parking spaces [the lost space?], I have since invoked him for assistance in this endeavor to great success. She taught me to say, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come ’round, something’s been lost that must be found.” I definitely find parking spots faster with his help!)
While in the realm of spiritual or mystical protection, let’s not forget the protective embrace of an egg or bubble of light to surround the dreamer and maybe their bed or room. Ask your dreamer what color or colors feel right to them. One of my colleagues, Fran, puts on her protective blue-light suit each time we venture into the field of dreams. She zips it right up as she would zip up her sweatshirt. Adding the physical motion of zipping up helps her to feel it in her physical body as well as her spiritual body. Most of us also benefit from a physical gesture or movement to fully integrate it into our being. Inhabit and invite the body into the dreamwork for a fuller experience.
The choices are not limited to people or spiritual beings; encourage your clients to also invite animal friends and bring talismans or objects as well. Many people fondly remember a childhood pet that was their main comfort and connection, and/or a current pet that provides the same service. During the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, many previously pet-less people adopted animals for companionship and comfort. I have at least three clients for whom I truly believe their pets played a large part in preserving their sanity during the dark times of isolation and quarantine. Again, the safety posse can include real animals or pets and/or imaginary ones. Dreamers may dream through a totem animal that provides comfort and protection. Animal spirits can be strong guides.
Next ask if the dreamer would also like to bring any objects with them before working on the dream. Objects that have made their way into the pantheon of protection include my client Tonya’s warrior’s shield, Mike’s special stone, and religious talismans like a cross or a chamsa. A modern-day safety object as well as a means of connection was Valerie’s cell phone with all the intact features of calling, texting, GPS, and flashlight for wayfinding in the dark dream. Meagan, an enterprising twenty-something, also made sure to bring her portable charger along with her cell phone into the dreamscape. Finally, ask the dreamer how old they were in the dream and get safety and protection for the youngest parts there. That may be different from what the adult telling the dream needs. The young parts might want a teddy bear or blankie, and when working with younger children, these may be the first items on their list.
Once we have created the list of helpers and resources, get as thick a description as possible of them. Getting all the details of color, shape, size, texture, sound, smell, feel, etc., make them more real and therefore more available to the dreamer. Katherine brought her mother’s silver charm bracelet and described each charm on it. Jeremy described an old iron horseshoe that he once found while hiking. He had brought it home and hung it on the wall in his garage. It was heavy, really solid, and a dull pewter color with spots of rust. These details are important in order to have the object be alive and available to the dreamer, and possibly of greater significance later on when doing the dreamwork.
And finally, to complete Stage 1, we just keep asking, “Anything else? Do you need anything else to feel as safe as possible and ready to address the dream?” until we get a clear “no” from the dreamer. This is a crucial step and is a hallmark of both dreamwork and trauma treatment. Survivors often can’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable when journeying thorough pain and fear but should not feel unsafe again. Dreamers often surprise themselves when they keep finding and needing more resources as long as they are still being asked. The goal is a felt sense of safety, and there are no numbers to put on that. We want this to be a different experience than the traumatic events. There are no extra brownie points for gratuitous suffering. We back away from proceeding forward to Stage 2 until the light is green. Once it is, and our dreamer says, “Good to go,” we go forward to the dream.
An additional step that is a bridge between Stage 1 and Stage 2 is to invite the dreamer to peek inside the dream itself after completing the external gathering of resources and scan the landscape there. The purpose is to see if there is a resource that they may have missed noticing before or had neglected to mention that is already existing in the dream. Our wise unconscious and dream source provide us with more than meets the eye at first glance. On a second look, the dreamer may find a safe resource already there, one that can provide an even greater level of comfort and mastery than bringing one in from the outside does. Ericka did this earlier when she discovered the poncho inside her Zodiac boat that she previously had not noticed.
It affirms their own internal healing process to find something that already existed inside themselves. They might peek in from the outside of the dream, or step inside with the other resources and check out the scene from inside the dreamscape. They might find a source of comfort or solace in a small, soft animal hiding in the bushes; a calm, serene lake that reflects a moonlit sky; or a wise elder sitting so quietly that they seemed to blend into the trees before we looked more closely.
There are two options for approaching the direct nightmare work: from outside the dream or from inside the dream. Working from outside the dream, we stand back and examine the dream around its edges, asking questions about the details of the dream, clarifying the sequence of events, asking the dreamer if they have any immediate associations to the dream, and looking for a bridge to life. Is this dream connected to anything that they can recall right now? There is an element of guidance here, as we ask the dreamer these questions, but we are not yet engaging in the practice of active imagination.
That practice will allow the dreamer to interact with the dream from the inside, as if they were reliving it, and have the power and ability to ask questions and make alternate choices as the dream itself moves forward. This can be done more easily with active imagination methods and dream re-entry techniques, including image rehearsal therapy, Gestalt work, shadow work, and re-dreaming which are explored fully in the book PTSDreams,as well as further details of using the GAIA method and specific nightmare healing methods.
In general, in Stage 2 we invite the dreamer to gather up their resources from outside and inside the dream, and then find the best place to enter the dream to do the work. Sometimes we work a dream chronologically; other times we start at the place of either the least or the most energy, either the safest or the scariest part, depending on the dreamer’s sensibilities. We continue to titrate the work, using a variety of methods, often simply asking, “What happens next?” or “What do you want to happen next if this is a stuck and scary spot?,” or reminding the dreamer that this isn’t where the dream ended, it is just where they woke up, so they can continue to dream it forward now with active imagination. We work the dream until the level of distress is gone or very low, and the dreamer reports feeling calm or neutral.
Dreams are alive; we are not just having a dream; we are having an experience in an alternate reality. As Dorothy told her Auntie Em upon her return to Kansas at the end of her journey to Oz, “Oh no, Auntie Em. It wasn’t a dream – it was a real, truly live place.” We know this too, whenever we or our client has an emotional response in or about a dream. It moves us and we feel feelings, just as we do in waking life. Our dreams are real, truly live places both while we are inside of them and as we recall them upon awakening.
Once we have set the stage to avoid abreaction (an uncontrolled negative emotional response) and avoid exceeding the boundaries of the dreamer’s window of emotional tolerance for the exploration of dark places, we can prompt the dreamer to go forward toward or into the dream. A prompt now might be, “To learn what they need to learn to serve their highest and best purposes for healing.”
What follows is an example of using GAIA to heal from a traumatic event. We will follow Jay’s nightmare healing journey from Stage 1, setting up safety, through Stage 2, working first outside the dreamscape, and finally progress to guided active imagination inside the dream itself and the concurrent and subsequent healing in his daily life that occurred. As we learned previously, as an adult, Jay had been suffering ongoing nightmares in which he relived his experience of sexual assault in college. He had managed to put the memories of the assault behind him but was retriggered years later into a nightly nocturnal replay of this trauma after being near the finish line at the Boston Marathon bombing. Ernest Hartmann and Robert Stickgold’s studies indicate that this kind of unsymbolized direct repetition of the trauma is more frequently seen when there have been acute and clear traumatic events. For example, studies of Vietnam veterans show that many of the intrusive nightmares that followed the war were scenes of bombs going off, body parts, explosions, and attempts to save buddies. Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk discussed how many of the war veterans that he treated reported nightmares to him that contained the precise unadulterated images of faces and body parts they had encountered in battle. These dreams were so terrifying that many tried hard not to fall asleep. Some reported sleeping for years with a gun under their bed, “just in case.”
As is true for many triggers that stimulate recall, in this case nightmares of recall, for Jay the current triggering event was not directly connected with what had happened to him in the past. However, there were enough similarities, particularly emotionally, to activate the memories of that time in his life again. The waking-life similarities between his sexual assault and the marathon bombing were that they were both forms of attack, they were both unexpected, both involved two men as the perpetrators, and happened to innocent bystanders. Differences are that his own attack occurred at a private indoor party and was directed against him personally, while the marathon bombing took place on the backdrop of an enormous outdoor world stage sporting event with random bystanders as the target. His assault falls into the category of private trauma, while the Boston Marathon bombing was public trauma. But on the emotional level were the selfsame feelings of shock, vulnerability, helplessness, rage, and a sense of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The intensity and frequency of his nightmares began to disrupt Jay’s daily life as well as his dreams. Often haggard from lack of sleep, or from interrupted sleep and terrifying nightmares, his ability to focus on work and engage with his family began suffering as well. At this point he finally told his wife about it, the first person he ever told, and began therapy. The therapy helped him to get to the needed perspective that it was not his fault, and that he had been tricked into entering that bedroom at the house party under false pre- tenses. He got to a level of acceptance of this concept and his sense of self blame was greatly reduced and then he ended the treatment. The nightmares had reduced in frequency to once or twice a month at that point. Then more recently, after being retriggered by seeing a movie with a rape scene, the nightmares returned several times a week. This is when Jay sought out specialized dream therapy with me.
True to form with this type of nightmare, Jay was not able to tell me much in the beginning except, “That incident keeps replaying in my sleep.” Following GAIA Stage 1 protocol, I asked him if he wanted to talk more about it. He said yes but was unable at the outset to do more than say he was sexually assaulted by two men, and that was what he kept dreaming about. As I could see that he was emotionally distressed, I suggested that we back up and first set up some safety parameters for him rather than go over the details of the dream or the precipitating event so that we didn’t re-create the anxiety, depression, and helplessness that he felt both at the time of the assault and in each of these repetitive dreams. Even the suggestion brought him considerable relief, and he took a big sigh and visibly relaxed. He said that even so many years later the content of the nightmares still felt so real and present-day.
Hearing this, I suggested that the first order of business was to set up some safety for him within which to explore his dream, and to start with, to have a clear and concrete reminder of the passage of time between then and now. This is a common characteristic of trauma and subsequent nightmares – that the past and the present have become entwined, and part of the work is to untangle them. The goal for the dreamer is to make it clear “that was then, this is now” at an embodied and emotional level, not only at the cognitive level of understanding.
To help with this goal, I used a technique with Jay called the Associational Cue for the Present. I asked him what concrete, tangible object or thing, ideally something small that he could touch or hold, reminds him that he is now fifty-eight years old, and not twenty. After a bit of thought he came up with his wedding ring, which he always had on, and the knowledge that he loved and trusted his wife. This was a terrific choice for him; it hit all the criteria for this exercise. Other good choices people have used include their car keys, their diploma, and their cell phone with today’s date that shows up automatically whenever they look at it. One woman said, “My hands, because I can see that they are large adult hands now, not the hands of a child.” Anything that helps to ground the dreamer in the here and now of their life and has a positive or neutral association.
We are carefully titrating the work; going very slowly so as not to re-create upset. After we did this exercise, I asked him what his SUDS level of upset was, and he said it was now about a 4. Before that, just thinking about the dream he said it was an 8 or 9. Clearly this event still had deep tentacles in him more than thirty years later. He was now able to title it, simply, The Assault. His homework assignment was to look at his wedding ring daily, and when doing so to remind himself consciously where and when and with whom he was in current time and space. That was the extent of the dream- work for that hour – quite enough for now.
The next time we met I continued the GAIA protocol with him, asking him what else he needed to feel safe before revisiting his dream. Somewhat of a loner, he couldn’t come up with anyone or anything else and offered that he often felt randomly ill at ease or unsafe in his life whenever he was in new situations, as well as just before falling asleep when he feared he would have the dream again. Therefore, I switched gears just a bit and worked with him to create a safe space in his mind’s eye that he could bring himself to whenever he needed, including while preparing for sleep. This visualization technique is very similar to the part of the protocol of gathering people or objects, but here we are gathering in an actual space. Again, this safe space can be real or imaginary; a place they have been or seen a picture of or read about or seen in a movie.
Here Jay shone, and immediately remembered a place he had been to many times by the ocean north of the city. Here he sat on a large rock that seemed to have a seat carved into it by the wind. He named it his Armchair Rock. I encouraged him to give it the thick description from all his senses to make it come to life now with two goals in mind: 1) To have it be right there and immediately available for him to visualize and enter and 2) To be at least, if not more, real than the nightmare images. With some prompting of, “And what else?” Jay described the sight and sound of the waves crashing gently over the shore, the gentle warmth of the autumn sunlight, his comfortable running clothes and well-fitting sneakers, the salty smell of the sea, and the comfort in being alone there with no demands or schedule, stress free.
We anchored this scene by another method of trauma work called pendulation. Like the swinging of a pendulum on a grandfather clock, we swing back and forth between upsetting images and safety images, or between neutral thoughts and safety and comfort, to embed and anchor the safe space. I first ask Jay to tell me about something neutral or just mildly irritating, like the phone call he had with a client yesterday, and then swing back to the Armchair Rock and tell me when he was there. After doing this three times, Jay could easily get himself back to his rock in two or three seconds. Now we were ready to work directly on the dream.
Think about a dream or nightmare you have had. I recommend trying these exercises yourself to get comfortable with them before doing them with your clients. Do not pick your scariest one. Practice doing Stage 1 of the GAIA protocol. Standing back from your dream, begin to think about what you need to feel completely safe and protected before engaging directly with the dream material. You may want to get some paper or write your list in your dream journal. You may not need all the following resources: use what feels right to you, but be lavish – don’t skimp! The supply is eternal.
Ask yourself, “What do I need to feel safe enough to work with this dream?” Begin your list of resources, perhaps starting with the various categories of people you know or know of who are in your life today, or were ever in your life, real or imaginary, from a movie, book, or mythology figure. Be sure to check that they are completely safe and protective of you, and that you do not feel any hidden pockets of fear or uneasiness connected to them. You can ask yourself, “Is this being 100-percent safe for me? Is there any reason not to include them in my safety posse?” If they do not feel 100-percent safe to you – out they go! Pick someone else.
Next see if there are animals or pets or totem figures that are available, a current one or a pet from childhood, fantastic or imaginary creatures. If you have a pull toward a particular animal or animals, look up what their meaning and purpose is in totemic or shamanic cultures to see if there are special messages for you about this/these animals. Next go over objects: What, if anything, do you want to bring with you into the dream to be safe? Choose something symbolic or practical, whimsical or magical – the sky’s the limit. It’s your dream and you get to decide what feels right. Remember to acknowledge the age you are in your dream and get protections for the youngest parts as well.
Finally, if you haven’t already, see if there are divine, mystical, or angelic beings or guides to accompany you. Use the names of these beings that are right for you. Place them around you in just the right location for optimum peace and protection. Surround yourself or your bed or your room with light. Feel and see them in your mind’s eye, sense their warmth, and using the skill of synesthesia, feel or taste the color, the warmth, the protection inside and outside of your being. You (or your client) are now ready to go toward your dream.
This course orients you to understanding and working with the connections between nightmares and trauma. To gain a fuller toolkit, the use of the GAIA method, working with repeating dreams, and an integrated mind/body/spiritual approach to this work, please reference the book PTSDreams listed in the bibliography. (Schiller, 2022)
A final word here is the recommendation to find a spiritual reframe or re-association to negative images or nightmare figures. If we or our clients dreamed of scary monsters or mythological beasts, how can we re-purpose them for healing? With deep dreamwork they can become our allies rather than our enemies. A dragon in our dreams, for example, may not only be a fire breathing lizard/snake bent on attacking us, but also become our own source of power and flight and the fire in our bellies as we roar with strength and fearlessness as we embody the dragon. For example, Lorraine discovered that Sasquatch, her fearsome space Yeti, became a nurturing mothering figure who took her to a womb/cave for healing. She now uses that cave as her safe place imagery when doing EMDR work.
Trauma expert Levine (1999) tells us that, “The paradox of trauma is that it has the power to destroy and to resurrect” (p.10).
That can be part of the goal when working with nightmares: Not just to stop it from recurring, or even to simply understand it, but to resurrect its hidden powers of healing that are latent within.
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