WORK WITH DREAM IMAGES

Les Peto, author of The Dream Lover, compares dreams to the intensely real world of play in childhood. Like Jung, he recommends a wondering, childlike approach in working with them. He describes dreams as ‘feeling-pictures – almost entirely silent movies, which rely for their impact on striking visual images, larger than life, surreal and irrational situations.’

He suggests listing all the images, then taking each one and saying ‘This reminds me of . . .’, writing down everything that comes, even if it seems silly.

• For a different perspective try drawing each image instead of listing them.
• Visualise yourself as all the different parts (as you did in Chapter 3), characters, furniture, the building or landscape you are in – everything. What do they have to say? How do they see you, the dreamer?

Work with one incident

Draw what happened

Recall a specific incident from a dream. Who are all the people involved?

Where are they standing? Where are all the objects placed? What are the surroundings like?

Draw the incident, making the drawing as detailed as you can. It will be like a snapshot or a still from a film.

• Using the present tense, describe exactly what you see.
• Describe the scene from the point of view of each person or thing you drew.

Show what happened

As above, but this time the scene is acted out, either in person or using objects to represent all the elements of the dream.

Fellow tutor Pete (who came up with the ‘piglets crackling’ in Chapter 4) was fascinated by dreamwork and brought along a dream for the group to act out. He related it as follows:

‘I am flying around a Norman tower, which turns into a high-rise office-block. I stare in at the people working at their desks. I realise I am covered in gold. I am powerful. I am Mercury the Winged Messenger. The office workers run to the window, waving and cheering. I wave back. I zoom across the deep canyons between the buildings in New York, then suddenly I’m up in space, zooming around in blackness. I see a small black sphere with a bright blue aura pulsing around it and I land there. I see craters lit up by the blue light flashing intermittently overhead. Superman is there to meet me. He says ‘Welcome to Phobos’. I am not Mercury the Winged Messenger any more. I don’t know who I am. I’m confused and tongue-tied and shake Superman’s hand, my arm pumping up and down heartily, out of my control. I zoom off, back down to Earth. A voice in my ear says ‘A dangerous instrument!’ Somebody hands me a Barclaycard bill for 2 billion pounds – the cost of my trip. I tell them I can’t possibly pay – and suddenly I don’t care.’

We had a wonderful time with that one, Pete himself playing the confused Winged Mercury, Zubin as Superman, Karen as the black planet with Shamina as the blue aura, and other members of the group as various buildings, cheering office workers and planet Earth. David played the enormous Barclaycard bill, which I greatly enjoyed presenting, instead of being on the receiving end. Everyone derived their own insights from the parts they played, as well as contributing to Pete’s interpretation of his dream experiences. A lot of pretty wild writing was also generated as a result.

Take it on

After you have drawn or acted out your scene, draw, act or write the next scene.

Take it back

Draw, act or write what was happening just before that scene.

(Pete’s dream provided a lot of mileage for these two activities also. Perhaps you would like to contribute your thoughts as to how he came to be flying around a Norman tower in the first place. Perhaps you also have some ideas about what happened regarding the 2 billion pound Barclaycard bill.)

What is missing?

Sometimes who or what is missing can give insight. ‘I am looking for my glasses.’ ‘It was mid-day and the postman had not come.’ So – what would you have been able to see if you had your glasses? What would the postman have brought? Or – what has happened to the postman on the way to your house?

Explore the mood of a dream

Spend some time getting in touch with the dream again. What do you feel as you remember it? Do you have an image for that feeling? What shape is it? Does it have a colour? Where do you experience it in your body? Does it have a voice? What kind of voice? What does it say? Focus on the feeling again. What would the opposite of that feeling be? Work with the opposite feeling in the same way.

Work with the body language

Gestalt therapy pioneer Fritz Perls felt that the message of a dream was best discovered freshly from within the self, not from an external interpretation.

He would often work with the body language a person used as they related their dream. Some of the techniques he developed were:

• Do it more – make the gesture bigger, faster. Make that sound more loudly. (Pump Superman’s arm even more strongly.) This might help us to get the message the dream is trying to convey.
• Do the opposite – superman gives your hand a puny shake – how does that feel?
• Finish what you started – finish the kick, punch, caress, choked off scream, hair-raising car journey, or whatever.

What sort of dream is it?

The methods looked at so far will help you to get every last gram of value from your dream images.

It is also helpful to know what kind of dream you are dealing with.

In his book Elements of Dreamwork, Strephon Kaplan-Williams lists 24 major dream types. They include dreams which:

• reflect unresolved issues from childhood
• confirm the validity of our waking-life actions
• enable us to experience things not possible in waking life
• present issues to be worked through and resolved
• reveal accurately the dynamics of a close relationship.

Checklist

To get the most from your dreamwork:

• explore every image
• explore single ‘snap-shot’ incidents
• explore the feelings
• work with the body language
• think about what kind of dream you have had.