Feature Article:
Dream Tending
Cross-Cultural Dreaming:
Native Americans And Dreams
Celebrity Dream:
Rihanna
Reader's Dream Analysis:
Christmas Painting
Reader Comments:
From The Editor:
Season's Greeting and Gifts
==================================
Dream Tending
Cross-Cultural Dreaming:
Native Americans And Dreams
Celebrity Dream:
Rihanna
Reader's Dream Analysis:
Christmas Painting
Reader Comments:
From The Editor:
Season's Greeting and Gifts
==================================
This Month's Quote
Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions
—Albert Einstein
==================================
Feature Article
This is a rather long article. If you would rather download it and read it offline or at your leisure click here for the pdf file.
Dream Tending
Four to five times each night images dance and play inside our brains, weaving together ingenious stories. This drama of the night affects our daily experience, shapes our decisions and largely determines who we are and who we’re to become.
In the morning a person awakens and declares: "I had a dream." Who had the dream? Conscious ego, the one who calls himself "I"? "I" made up that story because I was in a situation that frightened me yesterday or because my boss criticized me, or whatever the residues of yesterday's events. Because of these past events, "I" created that dream.
The ego wants, and perhaps needs, to believe that it is in charge, that the conscious "I" is in control. As Swiss psychologist Carl Jung observed, this is particularly true during the first several decades of a human’s life. In order to sustain the illusion that the ego is in control, ego has to pretend everything else is static, nonexistent, or at least, less powerful. Each night the unconscious speaks in the language of dreams; each morning ego scrambles for control, announcing: "I had a dream."
But, if "I" didn't create my dream, who did? Most psychologists believe that a dream is a product of the human unconscious. But what is the human unconscious that it can construct these ingenious symbolic productions four or five times a night?
Dr. Stephen Aizenstat tells us that over billions of years life evolved into a variety of forms that we know today, one of which is the human being. We are born out of the essential, organic life process—made of the same stuff as is all life. Human beings are but one expression of nature. The psyche is an evolution of life energy within the natural world, and thus participates in the ever-changing patterns of evolving and dissolving life form.
The unconscious isn't created by "me." The unconscious is born out of the rhythms of life. The dream—one expression of the psyche—is located in these essential life rhythms. Dreams are expressions of a psyche that is grounded in nature. Dreams are alive.
How shocking might it be to come to the awareness that the world is alive and that each organism within the world has a life of its own, interacting with other life forms (like you and I). Imagine that you’re lying down in a beautiful meadow on a thick, green bed of grass. You’re just relaxing and enjoying the warmth of the sun on your face. You turn your head. Suddenly, you’re eye to eye with a fly. You brush the fly away only to notice an ant is crawling up your arm. Then, you see a worm emerging from the ground onto your hand.
It hits you: this is not outdoor carpeting! You’re lying in the midst of a living, breathing, changing ecology with millions of creatures crawling around and in and out and getting born and dying, right along with you. We’re not isolated living beings on a static and dead landscape; we’re participants, essential members of a living ecology. Our very existence is dependent upon our interacting intimately with other life forms.
The ego lying on the grass with all the other creatures is confronted with the realization that a human being is just one of the many players in this game of life. This holds true in the psychological realm as well as the physical realm. The person who calls himself "I" is one constituent member of the psyche. Aizenstat, suggests that imaginal figures are meandering around day and night, within us and without us, each with lives of their own. The ego is but one of many members of a living ecology of imaginal figures that compose a psyche.
A dream is an event in which some of the many imaginal figures (the symbols within the dream) of psyche reveal themselves. In the dream, the ego is often pictured as one of a cast of characters. Other dream figures (human or not) interact with dream ego, and, in the dream, they have lives of their own, physical bodies of their own, feelings and desires of their own. These images are members of life itself.
A dream is one manifestation of nature revealing herself through images. This revelation can reflect one's personal nature, our collective human nature, and/or the nature of the anima mundi—soul in the world.
In order to conceptualize the different functions of the psyche, psychologists define several levels. Most psychologists agree that these levels include the Ego (consciousness), the Personal Unconscious (subconscious), and the Collective Unconscious. Aizenstat adds a fourth level, the World Unconscious. I would call this fourth level the Universal Consciousness or Universal Unconscious.
Because dreams emerge from the psyche, they are shaped by all four of these levels, in what the alchemists of the past called "a gentle mingling between levels." Although a particular dream may reflect one level more than another, it’s important to listen to what the dream may say on each of these four levels.
The children's song tells us: "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." By the time a child sings this wise song, he or she will have some awareness of being the rower of the boat. "I," ego, am sitting in my life vehicle, holding the oars, rowing from one circumstance to the next.
The rower of the boat may be aware that the flow of the river, to no small degree, determines where the boat goes. We are born into this life in a stream, a particular stream of forces in our individual life circumstance. This stream can be said to constitute the Personal Unconscious.
It is the destiny of a stream to join with other individual streams into a river. In this metaphor, the river, composed of the many streams, represents the Collective Unconscious, a concept postulated by Carl Jung. Jung observed that individuals throughout time and across cultures seem to share universal psychological forms, which he called “archetypes.” The Collective Unconscious can be said to be the psyche of the human species, in which we each experience the nature of our species and its shared patterns of perception.
The Collective Unconscious is thought to be universal and transpersonal. The same archetypal imagery that appears in dreams can be seen in the motifs of age-old myths, legends and fairy tales found in every culture throughout the history of the human race. Jungian psychologists tend to focus on the dream in terms of the relationship between ego and the Collective Unconscious, hearing the particular archetypes presented and exploring how ego is in relationship to them.
Continuing in this charming metaphor, the river eventually joins with the deeper waters of the ocean—the source of life itself. The ocean locates us in yet another dimension of the psyche, one not often assumed by psychologists, but commonly perceived by poets and mystics throughout history as well as in contemporary findings of theoretical physics. In this oceanic place, which Aizenstat calls the World Unconscious, the unconscious is imagined as connected to an embedded and hidden order underlying all of reality.
The Universal Unconscious consists of the "subjective inner natures" residing in all the phenomena of the world. Therefore, it’s not limited to the personal or collective human condition. At the level of the World Unconscious all the phenomena of the world are interrelated and interconnected. These "inner natures" of the world's organic and inorganic phenomena make up the contents of the World Unconscious and they are reflected as dream images in the human psyche.
A dream heard from the psychological perspective of the Universal Unconscious gives voice to the phenomena of the world, speaking through dreams on their own behalf. For example, the image of "house" that appears in a dream may be talking about its experience in the world, its plight. Walls may indeed talk, and the tale they tell may be of their own making, located in the Universal Unconscious—not necessarily a mere projection of the human psyche.
The Personal, Collective, and World/Universal Unconscious inform one another and are in continual dialogue. Becoming connected to the inner life of our personal experience connects us to a larger sense of self than we knew before. The sense of being part of the shared human experience allows us to experience our species relationship to an even more fundamental process—that of the natural rhythm of life itself.
The various levels of psyche all express themselves in the form of images. It’s through understanding the nature of an image, and learning how to "tend" an image that we can experience the living psyche.
"I" am not in charge of "my" images. Images have lives of their own, and walk around as they choose, not as "I" choose. They inhabit the landscape of the dream, walking its ground, flying its skies, and swimming its seas. Images present themselves in the dream as living entities in an evolving landscape.
Nor do "I" create these images. They are not rooted in my personal psyche. Elaborating on this idea, archetypal psychologist James Hillman says, "Images come and go at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own field of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics.
. . . The mind is in the imagination rather than the imagination in the mind."
Each image has presence, substance, and imaginal body. To experience an image in written description only, as part of a narrative, is to miss the living, active, embodied creature that is the image. In "my" dream last week the elephant looking at me had wide flared ears, and its left tusk was broken off at the tip. With respectful distance and caution, I walked around to its rear side, seeing dirt and tiny rocks scattered over its thin-haired rump. Its tail was busy swatting flies from either side of its sagging hind quarters. This dream elephant, like all images, has body and exists in three-dimensional space.
Dreaming is not merely a human production; it is an ongoing activity in which we participate. It is as if the dream is a social event which "I" experience, yet which each of the other characters or objects also experience from their own point of view.
As they interact in the realm of the dream, images affect and change each other. When the elephant, as an embodied image, runs into another embodied image, say that of a hunter, it is a certainty that each figure is affected by the presence of the other. To understand the dream is to realize that each image is a participant in a living network of interacting images.
An image that meanders through one's dreamscape does not ask to be captured, tranquillized, dissected, labeled in Latin, and reduced to a statement about one's childhood or present trauma.
Nevertheless, this is an all-too-common psychological approach to images, and it creates several problems:
To experience the living nature of the dream is not, as Aizenstat has said, a return to the cause and effect methods of making meaning, but rather, requires a certain attitude, an approach he calls "DreamTending." To tend a dream is to attend to the dream images in the immediacy of their presentation, as if each dream figure were a guest visiting you for the first time. As host to these guests, you want to get to know them, tend to them. You listen to what they have to say. When you enter the territory of the living image, there are no established trails, no familiar landmarks.
The topological maps of ego no longer apply, for one is in a place much larger than ego. The navigational skills so useful and familiar in traditional interpretive approaches to dreamwork must give way to a new, more interactive craft. The causal logic of determinism gives way to the poetic language of metaphor.
As Ezra Pound reminds: "The leaves are full of voices." In the quiet of deep listening, the landscape reveals itself to the receptive participant. The sense of the poetic that lives between the participant and landscape comes into awareness, into life—each affecting the other, each dependent on the other. The landscape and the hiker are part of an aesthetic realm of experience which informs them both.
These same approaches are also at play in dreamwork. When we dutifully write down the dream, go into the analyst's office, repeat it in its linear, narrative form with the intention of interpreting its meaning, the dreamscape has stopped or become frozen—just like the shutdown of wilderness activity at the arrival of the intruder. However, like the hiker who pauses to be present to the possibilities of the wilderness, an analyst working with a dream can pause, wait and listen, allowing for the natural rhythm, the indigenous nature of the psyche, to again resume activity. Then the dreamer and the dream analyst can be in correspondence with the natural activity of the dreamscape.
DreamTending is an approach to dreamwork that respects the living reality of the dream. The dream analyst literally shifts her chair from the familiar face to face configuration to a somewhat more open side by side positioning, as if analyst and dreamer were sitting together to watch a movie or play. Seated beside the client, the analyst is not so immediately locked into the personal responses of the dreamer which—when one is looking straight across at the other—are so tempting to explore at each and every turn. In tending a dream, the analyst is concerned first with evoking the dreamscape, inviting the actuality of the dream into the room to be experienced. The analyst asks the dreamer to tell the dream in descriptive detail in the present tense. In the telling, the dreamer sees, hears and expresses the images as alive and active in present time/space.
To evoke even greater detail, the analyst asks the dreamer to look with increased focus at specific aspects of the image and to describe in vivid detail, the texture, coloration, movement or shape of the dream figure. For example, in the dream image of a giraffe, the dreamer may be asked to mindfully observe this particular giraffe, noticing its unique characteristics. The analyst can encourage the dreamer to look into the giraffe's eyes, into the inner world of this particular dream animal, thus bringing its live presence even more fully into dynamic relationship with the dreamer. The dreamer is encouraged to physically move her body to interact with the giraffe and to use her sensate functions of smell, touch, and even taste, to more fully experience the living reality of the image. Questions like: "How coarse is the giraffe's coat?" or "Can you smell the giraffe?" not only provide specific details but also allow the image to reveal itself in the here and now presence of the dreamwork.
The analyst empathetically enters the dreamtime with the dreamer, as well as keeping an analytical perspective. The dreamer and the dream analyst become located in the dreamscape, surrounded by it. The dreamer and the analyst enter the living experience of the dream. The craft of tending a dream differs significantly from the traditional practice of dream analysis in its initial orientation to the dream.
Most dream workers have been taught to ask: "What does this dream mean?" This question tends to freeze the dream within preconceived representations, or within one of a number of unnecessarily complex psychological explanatory systems, however imaginative and knowledgeable they might be. How different this is from tending a dream, where the primary question is, "What is happening here?"
The simple question "What is happening here?" locates the dreamwork in the immediacy of the present experience of the dream, looking to the image bodies themselves to reveal their purposefulness, their stories. The dreamer looks neither back to whence s/he came, nor forward to some dire or luminous future consequence, but rather down and around, noting what is just so at this particular moment in time in this particular place. To tend a dream is to recognize that in the telling of the dream the dream is already in the room—existing right now as a living imaginal process.
When a dream image evokes a memory of a childhood event, for instance, a dream analyst must ask why psyche presents this specific historical image in this dream now. The point is not the historic event itself or how the dreamer felt about it in the past. The point is that something about this past event matters now. What root image in psyche, what essential life rhythm within this particular dreamer, evoked that past experience? How has that image evolved in its life to the present time?
That "root image" is being felt again, in its relevance to present as well as future experience. The dream analyst can listen to the "root image" of the historic experience, particularly listening to the current living expression of the image in present time. In this way of working, the dream analyst is able to stay with the living image, traversing time in the context of the image, rather than using an image only as a vehicle to access, or work through, personal history. Thus understood, the image itself is the primary referent, not the historical incident evoked by the image.
The dreamer, a woman who has considerable experience in working with her dreams, relates a dream that she has already spent time considering on her own but feels somehow that she is missing something. She has a sense there is something more. Here is the dream as she first related it:
NotesIn the morning a person awakens and declares: "I had a dream." Who had the dream? Conscious ego, the one who calls himself "I"? "I" made up that story because I was in a situation that frightened me yesterday or because my boss criticized me, or whatever the residues of yesterday's events. Because of these past events, "I" created that dream.
The ego wants, and perhaps needs, to believe that it is in charge, that the conscious "I" is in control. As Swiss psychologist Carl Jung observed, this is particularly true during the first several decades of a human’s life. In order to sustain the illusion that the ego is in control, ego has to pretend everything else is static, nonexistent, or at least, less powerful. Each night the unconscious speaks in the language of dreams; each morning ego scrambles for control, announcing: "I had a dream."
But, if "I" didn't create my dream, who did? Most psychologists believe that a dream is a product of the human unconscious. But what is the human unconscious that it can construct these ingenious symbolic productions four or five times a night?
Dr. Stephen Aizenstat tells us that over billions of years life evolved into a variety of forms that we know today, one of which is the human being. We are born out of the essential, organic life process—made of the same stuff as is all life. Human beings are but one expression of nature. The psyche is an evolution of life energy within the natural world, and thus participates in the ever-changing patterns of evolving and dissolving life form.
The unconscious isn't created by "me." The unconscious is born out of the rhythms of life. The dream—one expression of the psyche—is located in these essential life rhythms. Dreams are expressions of a psyche that is grounded in nature. Dreams are alive.
How shocking might it be to come to the awareness that the world is alive and that each organism within the world has a life of its own, interacting with other life forms (like you and I). Imagine that you’re lying down in a beautiful meadow on a thick, green bed of grass. You’re just relaxing and enjoying the warmth of the sun on your face. You turn your head. Suddenly, you’re eye to eye with a fly. You brush the fly away only to notice an ant is crawling up your arm. Then, you see a worm emerging from the ground onto your hand.
It hits you: this is not outdoor carpeting! You’re lying in the midst of a living, breathing, changing ecology with millions of creatures crawling around and in and out and getting born and dying, right along with you. We’re not isolated living beings on a static and dead landscape; we’re participants, essential members of a living ecology. Our very existence is dependent upon our interacting intimately with other life forms.
The ego lying on the grass with all the other creatures is confronted with the realization that a human being is just one of the many players in this game of life. This holds true in the psychological realm as well as the physical realm. The person who calls himself "I" is one constituent member of the psyche. Aizenstat, suggests that imaginal figures are meandering around day and night, within us and without us, each with lives of their own. The ego is but one of many members of a living ecology of imaginal figures that compose a psyche.
A dream is an event in which some of the many imaginal figures (the symbols within the dream) of psyche reveal themselves. In the dream, the ego is often pictured as one of a cast of characters. Other dream figures (human or not) interact with dream ego, and, in the dream, they have lives of their own, physical bodies of their own, feelings and desires of their own. These images are members of life itself.
A dream is one manifestation of nature revealing herself through images. This revelation can reflect one's personal nature, our collective human nature, and/or the nature of the anima mundi—soul in the world.
In order to conceptualize the different functions of the psyche, psychologists define several levels. Most psychologists agree that these levels include the Ego (consciousness), the Personal Unconscious (subconscious), and the Collective Unconscious. Aizenstat adds a fourth level, the World Unconscious. I would call this fourth level the Universal Consciousness or Universal Unconscious.
Because dreams emerge from the psyche, they are shaped by all four of these levels, in what the alchemists of the past called "a gentle mingling between levels." Although a particular dream may reflect one level more than another, it’s important to listen to what the dream may say on each of these four levels.
The children's song tells us: "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." By the time a child sings this wise song, he or she will have some awareness of being the rower of the boat. "I," ego, am sitting in my life vehicle, holding the oars, rowing from one circumstance to the next.
The rower of the boat may be aware that the flow of the river, to no small degree, determines where the boat goes. We are born into this life in a stream, a particular stream of forces in our individual life circumstance. This stream can be said to constitute the Personal Unconscious.
It is the destiny of a stream to join with other individual streams into a river. In this metaphor, the river, composed of the many streams, represents the Collective Unconscious, a concept postulated by Carl Jung. Jung observed that individuals throughout time and across cultures seem to share universal psychological forms, which he called “archetypes.” The Collective Unconscious can be said to be the psyche of the human species, in which we each experience the nature of our species and its shared patterns of perception.
The Collective Unconscious is thought to be universal and transpersonal. The same archetypal imagery that appears in dreams can be seen in the motifs of age-old myths, legends and fairy tales found in every culture throughout the history of the human race. Jungian psychologists tend to focus on the dream in terms of the relationship between ego and the Collective Unconscious, hearing the particular archetypes presented and exploring how ego is in relationship to them.
Continuing in this charming metaphor, the river eventually joins with the deeper waters of the ocean—the source of life itself. The ocean locates us in yet another dimension of the psyche, one not often assumed by psychologists, but commonly perceived by poets and mystics throughout history as well as in contemporary findings of theoretical physics. In this oceanic place, which Aizenstat calls the World Unconscious, the unconscious is imagined as connected to an embedded and hidden order underlying all of reality.
The Universal Unconscious consists of the "subjective inner natures" residing in all the phenomena of the world. Therefore, it’s not limited to the personal or collective human condition. At the level of the World Unconscious all the phenomena of the world are interrelated and interconnected. These "inner natures" of the world's organic and inorganic phenomena make up the contents of the World Unconscious and they are reflected as dream images in the human psyche.
A dream heard from the psychological perspective of the Universal Unconscious gives voice to the phenomena of the world, speaking through dreams on their own behalf. For example, the image of "house" that appears in a dream may be talking about its experience in the world, its plight. Walls may indeed talk, and the tale they tell may be of their own making, located in the Universal Unconscious—not necessarily a mere projection of the human psyche.
The Personal, Collective, and World/Universal Unconscious inform one another and are in continual dialogue. Becoming connected to the inner life of our personal experience connects us to a larger sense of self than we knew before. The sense of being part of the shared human experience allows us to experience our species relationship to an even more fundamental process—that of the natural rhythm of life itself.
The various levels of psyche all express themselves in the form of images. It’s through understanding the nature of an image, and learning how to "tend" an image that we can experience the living psyche.
"I" am not in charge of "my" images. Images have lives of their own, and walk around as they choose, not as "I" choose. They inhabit the landscape of the dream, walking its ground, flying its skies, and swimming its seas. Images present themselves in the dream as living entities in an evolving landscape.
Nor do "I" create these images. They are not rooted in my personal psyche. Elaborating on this idea, archetypal psychologist James Hillman says, "Images come and go at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own field of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics.
. . . The mind is in the imagination rather than the imagination in the mind."
Each image has presence, substance, and imaginal body. To experience an image in written description only, as part of a narrative, is to miss the living, active, embodied creature that is the image. In "my" dream last week the elephant looking at me had wide flared ears, and its left tusk was broken off at the tip. With respectful distance and caution, I walked around to its rear side, seeing dirt and tiny rocks scattered over its thin-haired rump. Its tail was busy swatting flies from either side of its sagging hind quarters. This dream elephant, like all images, has body and exists in three-dimensional space.
Dreaming is not merely a human production; it is an ongoing activity in which we participate. It is as if the dream is a social event which "I" experience, yet which each of the other characters or objects also experience from their own point of view.
As they interact in the realm of the dream, images affect and change each other. When the elephant, as an embodied image, runs into another embodied image, say that of a hunter, it is a certainty that each figure is affected by the presence of the other. To understand the dream is to realize that each image is a participant in a living network of interacting images.
An image that meanders through one's dreamscape does not ask to be captured, tranquillized, dissected, labeled in Latin, and reduced to a statement about one's childhood or present trauma.
Nevertheless, this is an all-too-common psychological approach to images, and it creates several problems:
- In the move to explore the events of the dreamer's Personal Unconscious, the image itself is often lost;
- Reducing the image to a meaning renders the image dead; and, most problematic,
- When one affixes meanings or interpretations to an image, one has not addressed the image for what it is. The image is an alive, embodied expression of psyche—present to be experienced, seen, felt and heard.
To experience the living nature of the dream is not, as Aizenstat has said, a return to the cause and effect methods of making meaning, but rather, requires a certain attitude, an approach he calls "DreamTending." To tend a dream is to attend to the dream images in the immediacy of their presentation, as if each dream figure were a guest visiting you for the first time. As host to these guests, you want to get to know them, tend to them. You listen to what they have to say. When you enter the territory of the living image, there are no established trails, no familiar landmarks.
The topological maps of ego no longer apply, for one is in a place much larger than ego. The navigational skills so useful and familiar in traditional interpretive approaches to dreamwork must give way to a new, more interactive craft. The causal logic of determinism gives way to the poetic language of metaphor.
As Ezra Pound reminds: "The leaves are full of voices." In the quiet of deep listening, the landscape reveals itself to the receptive participant. The sense of the poetic that lives between the participant and landscape comes into awareness, into life—each affecting the other, each dependent on the other. The landscape and the hiker are part of an aesthetic realm of experience which informs them both.
These same approaches are also at play in dreamwork. When we dutifully write down the dream, go into the analyst's office, repeat it in its linear, narrative form with the intention of interpreting its meaning, the dreamscape has stopped or become frozen—just like the shutdown of wilderness activity at the arrival of the intruder. However, like the hiker who pauses to be present to the possibilities of the wilderness, an analyst working with a dream can pause, wait and listen, allowing for the natural rhythm, the indigenous nature of the psyche, to again resume activity. Then the dreamer and the dream analyst can be in correspondence with the natural activity of the dreamscape.
DreamTending is an approach to dreamwork that respects the living reality of the dream. The dream analyst literally shifts her chair from the familiar face to face configuration to a somewhat more open side by side positioning, as if analyst and dreamer were sitting together to watch a movie or play. Seated beside the client, the analyst is not so immediately locked into the personal responses of the dreamer which—when one is looking straight across at the other—are so tempting to explore at each and every turn. In tending a dream, the analyst is concerned first with evoking the dreamscape, inviting the actuality of the dream into the room to be experienced. The analyst asks the dreamer to tell the dream in descriptive detail in the present tense. In the telling, the dreamer sees, hears and expresses the images as alive and active in present time/space.
To evoke even greater detail, the analyst asks the dreamer to look with increased focus at specific aspects of the image and to describe in vivid detail, the texture, coloration, movement or shape of the dream figure. For example, in the dream image of a giraffe, the dreamer may be asked to mindfully observe this particular giraffe, noticing its unique characteristics. The analyst can encourage the dreamer to look into the giraffe's eyes, into the inner world of this particular dream animal, thus bringing its live presence even more fully into dynamic relationship with the dreamer. The dreamer is encouraged to physically move her body to interact with the giraffe and to use her sensate functions of smell, touch, and even taste, to more fully experience the living reality of the image. Questions like: "How coarse is the giraffe's coat?" or "Can you smell the giraffe?" not only provide specific details but also allow the image to reveal itself in the here and now presence of the dreamwork.
The analyst empathetically enters the dreamtime with the dreamer, as well as keeping an analytical perspective. The dreamer and the dream analyst become located in the dreamscape, surrounded by it. The dreamer and the analyst enter the living experience of the dream. The craft of tending a dream differs significantly from the traditional practice of dream analysis in its initial orientation to the dream.
Most dream workers have been taught to ask: "What does this dream mean?" This question tends to freeze the dream within preconceived representations, or within one of a number of unnecessarily complex psychological explanatory systems, however imaginative and knowledgeable they might be. How different this is from tending a dream, where the primary question is, "What is happening here?"
The simple question "What is happening here?" locates the dreamwork in the immediacy of the present experience of the dream, looking to the image bodies themselves to reveal their purposefulness, their stories. The dreamer looks neither back to whence s/he came, nor forward to some dire or luminous future consequence, but rather down and around, noting what is just so at this particular moment in time in this particular place. To tend a dream is to recognize that in the telling of the dream the dream is already in the room—existing right now as a living imaginal process.
When a dream image evokes a memory of a childhood event, for instance, a dream analyst must ask why psyche presents this specific historical image in this dream now. The point is not the historic event itself or how the dreamer felt about it in the past. The point is that something about this past event matters now. What root image in psyche, what essential life rhythm within this particular dreamer, evoked that past experience? How has that image evolved in its life to the present time?
That "root image" is being felt again, in its relevance to present as well as future experience. The dream analyst can listen to the "root image" of the historic experience, particularly listening to the current living expression of the image in present time. In this way of working, the dream analyst is able to stay with the living image, traversing time in the context of the image, rather than using an image only as a vehicle to access, or work through, personal history. Thus understood, the image itself is the primary referent, not the historical incident evoked by the image.
The dreamer, a woman who has considerable experience in working with her dreams, relates a dream that she has already spent time considering on her own but feels somehow that she is missing something. She has a sense there is something more. Here is the dream as she first related it:
I am walking along the edge of a seaside cliff. I walk until I get to the end of the path, and I become stranded. There is no place to go.
After listening carefully to the dream several times, she is asked to "associate" to the images or the predicament in the dream. Associations are useful in the beginning. They provide personal context as well as give the dreamer the opportunity to tell what she knows about the circumstance pictured in the dream. For the most part, associations are made to current or historic awake-life circumstances and are therefore limited to the contents of the Personal Unconscious.
Methods of Association are reductive in that all images are reduced back to personal circumstances. The dreamer reported the following associations:
Well, it reminds me of a place we visited on a family vacation once when I was ten. I used to walk along the edge of the cliff when I needed time to think. That was the summer my parents were fighting so much. I was afraid they would hurt each other. I guessed they would be getting a divorce, and I didn't know what would happen to me. You know, I'm feeling kind of the same way now. With all the turmoil and budget cutbacks at the agency I work in, I'm wondering if I have reached the end of the line as a staff counselor. I am experiencing a great deal of chaos and fear of possible separation.
In addition to asking about the dreamer's personal associations to the dream, she is asked to consider how certain dream images may reflect relevant material from mythology and/or literature. This method is known as Amplification and relates the dream imagery to the archetypal patterns of the Collective Unconscious. It’s a prospective approach in that the dream imagery is listened to as it pertains to the emerging process of the dreamer’s individuation. Extending the dreamwork beyond personal associations, a process of "amplifying" the images, evoked the following from the dreamer:
I've felt many times that I was on the edge of something which I could glimpse but not see or experience clearly. It’s as if I were on a path leading to somewhere important, like a pilgrimage or journey to some important place or "calling." I keep thinking of Penelope being stuck at water’s edge at Ithaca—waiting. As a woman, I often feel as if I have been stranded, waiting at the end of a path, waiting for my man to come home, waiting for that which is out of my control.
Both Association and Amplification reveal important insights for the dreamer.
Through Association, in working with the material of the Personal Unconscious, the dreamer had the opportunity to honour childhood fears in the presence of a caring analyst and to explore those fears in relation to her current work situation. Through Amplification, in exploring material of the Collective Unconscious, the dreamer became aware of archetypal themes relevant to her life.
The universal images of "water’s edge" and "waiting" were suggested as representing potentially important inner life struggles, both part of an individuation process now coming into increased awareness. In both instances, however, the dream images themselves remained frozen, not given the opportunity to reveal themselves as they currently exist and move. In both the reductive (association) and prospective (amplification) approaches to the dream, the dream was used as a fixed justification to either summon memories of the past or to forecast a vision of the future.
These kind of analytic investigations, however useful, are limited and invariably leave out the here and now reality of the dream experience. Not surprisingly, the dreamer in this instance felt that somehow the dream held something more, something yet to come alive.
For the third telling the dreamer was asked to pause and listen, to become aware of how the images of the dream fill the room. The mud of the seaside cliff, the smell of the water—all of the images—came alive. They became embodied. They had substance. They were visible. And the dreamer was really at that moment in the dream work. She was being moved and touched and informed by the images of the dream. As a result she felt a sense of ground, a sense of immediate connection to this natural landscape, and she experienced the pulse of the dreamscape move and work through her. She was now located in the dream, and, in turn, the dream had now located her in its activity.
By remaining stationary on the path (as actually pictured in the dream) and by experiencing the physicality of the mud and the marbled rock (as they made their presence known in the dream), the dreamer felt neither the regressive need to retreat backward on the path, nor the fear of what the future held. Both past and future are favored by traditional approaches to dreamwork—regressing into one's past or progressing into the next phase of individuation.
To tend a dream is to allow its activity, its rhythm, to return to its own landscape. To hear a dream deeply allows the dream its presence, its being, and its becoming. And as that rhythm returns and the dream again becomes alive, is it not true that we, at that moment, re-experience our natural place as constituent members in nature's psyche, reconnected to a deeply resonant ecology. Are we not in this experience, re-connected to our essential rhythm—sourced by the very pulse of life itself?
Dr. Stephen Aizenstat Founding president of Pacifica Graduate Institute, a core faculty member of the institute, and a clinical psychologist. His original research centers on a psychodynamic process of "tending the living image," particularly in the context of dreamwork.
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Cross Cultural Dreaming
Native Americans And Dreams
Dreams have played a central and determinative role in the formation of the religious and riritual worlds of most Native American groups. As early as 1623, dreams were recorded among the Hurons by the French Catholic Recollect brother Gabriel Sagard. These accounts were then expanded by the writings of the Jesuit priest Jean de Brébeuf, who lived with the Hurons around Georgian Bay (1634-36). According to these writings, young Huron and Iroquois men would fast for extended periods, either in a partitioned rear section of their longhouse or in a specially made shelter. These fasts could last as long as thirty days and were undertaken so that the young men would have a vision or powerful dream that would enhance their abilities in hunting, warfare, or healing. The records of Brébeuf also include dramatic accounts of dreams and visions that came spontaneously to women and played a role in determining those women's participation in various ceremonial rites.
If the dreamer was successful, he would obtain a vision of a dream spirit who would give him a specific ability or power and show him how to solicit that power through special songs and ritual activities. Among most native groups, the dream spirit would then become a lifelong protector and helper whose aid and abilities could be solicited through prayer and tobacco offerings. In dreams, the dreaming soul—that aspect of self that travels in visions away from the body—could contact the dream spirit and receive instructions. Dreams were considered by many native groups to be the most valid means for communicating with the spiritual powers and the primary basis of religious knowledge. Advanced dreamers who became religious specialists would interpret dreams in order to diagnose illness, foretell the death or return to health of the sick, predict the outcome of expeditions in hunting and warfare, as well as which objects could be substituted for those things appearing in dreams which were difficult or impossible to procure for carrying out dream induced rituals.
Many ceremonies were attributed to dream origins. Foundational dreams would be transmitted through kinship groups, who held an exclusive knowledge of the dream and of the correct ritual for its enactment. The dream was usually owned by the head of the family and passed on through special ceremonial rites. However, additional dreams, especially by those who were recognized religious leaders, could modify and change the ceremonial patterns. A unique aspect of the Iroquois dreaming traditions was the dream-guessing feast, when dreamers would join together and go from longhouse to longhouse in entranced states induced by their dream spirits. Handling red-hot coals and dancing and singing, each dreamer would ask that his or her "dream desire," narrated in the form of a riddle, be guessed by other members of the longhouse. When the riddle had been correctly solved, gifts would be given to the dreamer to satisfy the dream desire. A failure to receive the correct gifts could indicate the coming death of the dreamer.
Southeastern sources clearly show the centrality of dreaming in the religious worlds of most native groups in that region. Dreams were actively sought, both in regular sleep and in special fasting, and the songs and powers given through them became an intrinsic feature of the social and religious life of the dreamer. Dreams revealed the existence of a spirit world that had continuity with and similarity to the world of the living and that could be visited through dreams. Among the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, certain dreamers could travel to a village of the dead and there converse with their former relatives. Dreaming thus gave an experiential confirmation of the existence of other worlds, including that of the dead. Among the Cherokees, dream interpreters would seek out the "seat of pain" for those who were ill by asking them extensive questions about their dreams ranging back over months and sometimes over a period of years. Dream typologies were developed by means of which particular types of animals, actions, or various other dream images were given specific meanings and used diagnostically to predict future events or indicate cures that would bring the dreamer back into harmony with the dream spirits. The creation of the Cherokee syllabary by Sequoyah allowed many of the Cherokee spiritual leaders to record in the indigenous language a variety of formulaic prayers and ritual songs—most of which originated in dreams that had been passed on through oral tradition until they were written down by native practitioners in the old Cherokee language.
The most well known dreaming practices are those of the native peoples of the Great Plains. With her research, conducted in the 1920s, Ruth Benedict set the stage for interpreting Plains dreaming as the primary means by which a particular group reinforced its "culture pattern." Dreams were seen as stereotypical in reproducing similar content that supported the religious worldview of the dreamer. However, alternative research later done by many native ethnographers showed clearly that dreaming was not stereotypical, that every dream had many unique and divergent qualities, and that no two dreams were ever identical.
The distinction between dreams and visions was not considered significant; the primary criteria for evaluating the sacred power of a dream or vision depended upon the degree to which the subject could reproduce a visible, positive result as a consequence of his or her following either a dream had while sleeping or a waking vision attained while fasting or praying. Only those dreams or visions that resulted in a direct manifestation of power were considered sacred.
On the Plains, dreams were acquired in two basic ways: either they came spontaneously or they were sought ritually. A majority of the dreams and visions collected in the ethnography were spontaneous; acquired without conscious effort, they nevertheless made a lasting and lifelong impression on the dreamer. Spontaneous dreams were common for women under specific circumstances, such as during times of mourning for the recent dead, when Plains women would often slash their legs and arms and wander away from camp crying to the sacred powers.
Domestic quarrels and conflicts among close kin groups could also result in a woman's wandering away from camp and then having a remarkable visionary experience. Women who were captured by enemy warriors and later escaped to wander over the plains for many days without food, seeking their home tribe, often had visions. Dreams also came unsought during periods of illness. Such was the case with the famous dream of the Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk, which occurred to him in 1872 at the age of nine.
The more structured vision quest or dream fast was usually undertaken by Plains men, and sometimes women, during adolescence, but it was sometimes repeated among certain groups throughout life. Young men went to experienced elders, usually relatives, to receive instructions for carrying out a proper dream fast. They would undergo various purification rites and then go to a nearby hill, on the top of which they would either make a circle within which they remained or dig a pit in which they stayed throughout the fast.
Dressed in a minimum of clothing, with long hair unbraided, carrying only a pipe and a robe, they would pray continually to the holy powers to grant them a powerful dream. After as many as ten days of fasting, a successful dreamer might come down from the hill and relate his dream to elders in a sweat lodge. Or he might wait a specific number of days before approaching a leader of a dream society, whose members held rituals related to a particular dream spirit, like the buffalo or bear, and ask to join the dream society based on his successful vision.
Successful dreams were enacted, and the power of the dream had to be demonstrated for the dream to be accepted as an authentic gift from the dream spirits. Successful dreamers were expected to demonstrate remarkable or powerful abilities as a sign of a power-granting dream. Dreamers used a variety of objects to hold the power given to them in the dream, and would paint themselves and their horses according to dream experiences. The dream objects were kept within sacred bundles, which were unwrapped only under ritual circumstances, during which the dream was often narrated. In using the dream objects, dream songs were sung; these songs epitomized the heart of the dream recreation. Dream images were painted on tipis, robes, and other gear to empower those objects. Women would use dream images as a source for designs in crafts as well as in quill and bead work and other types of clothing ornamentation.
The designs of the famous Ghost Dance shirts used during the religious revival that began in the 1890s were all said to have originated in visionary dreams. In Plains culture, dreams were central and a primary means for innovation and change in religious and social practices.
Dreams played a powerful social role among Northwest Coast peoples as well as among many Inuit groups. Franz Boas (1925) collected an entire volume of Kwakiutl dreams, showing the rich and complex dream symbolism that completely pervaded the Kwakiutl spiritual world. Sometimes a dream spirit would embed a dream crystal—a valuable source of power—in the body of the dreamer. The possession of such a crystal was a sign of a dreamer's initiation into advanced dreaming practices.
Many flying dreams have been recorded; they signify the dreamer's ability to explore hidden dimensions of the religious cosmology. Dreams among Northwest Coast peoples as well as subarctic peoples indicate a strong belief in reincarnation. Many dreamers have claimed to know about their past lives through dream experiences, and there are records of women who dreamed of giving birth to someone who had recently died in the community. Certain dream spirits might send negative or frightening dreams, such as Stimsila among the Bella Coolas. On the other hand, certain dream spirits were regarded as protectors and accompanied the dreamer throughout life, revealing in dreams future events, matters pertaining to secret societies, and other critical life experiences.
Among the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches of the American Southwest, dreams were of much less significance. The highly structured ritual life of the Pueblo people and the complex healing rites of the Navajos did not normally allow for innovation through dreams.
Traditional knowledge was transmitted through learning the rites and songs of the ceremonies and not through dreaming practices.
Dorothy Eggan (1949) collected Hopi dreams and noted how they function in a personal way for the dreamer. But, she found, they are not usually connected to religious sanctions, nor are they considered necessary for becoming a participant in communal rites. However, Hopis evaluate dreams as either good or bad and take appropriate actions to counteract the effects of negative dreams.
Among the Zunis, dreams are also evaluated, and only bad dreams are shared. For the Navajos, dreams may determine what type of diagnostician the dreamer may become, and they play a role in determining the causes of illness.
References
Ruth Benedict, American Anthropologist The Dream-Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains "The Vision in Plains Culture," 24 (1922): 1-23;
Irwin, Lee, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994);
Barbara Tedlock, Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Celebrity Dream
Rihanna's Dream
Rihanna had a nightmare about watching a plane crash into a building and pieces of it landing on her brother. Naturally, she had no idea why she had this dream and worried it might be telling her something bad was going to happen to her brother.
On one level, the plane represents her career and how it's "taking off." However, it crashes in her dream which might indicate that she fears her career could come crashing down before she reaches her career goal. (Plane crash dreams are very common with celebrities, by the way.)
Rihanna and her brother are very close and she misses him very much. That made me realize that she's concerned her rising celebrity -- that has her jetting all over the place -- might harm the close relationship she has with her brother, the building representing that relationship.
On one level, the plane represents her career and how it's "taking off." However, it crashes in her dream which might indicate that she fears her career could come crashing down before she reaches her career goal. (Plane crash dreams are very common with celebrities, by the way.)
Rihanna and her brother are very close and she misses him very much. That made me realize that she's concerned her rising celebrity -- that has her jetting all over the place -- might harm the close relationship she has with her brother, the building representing that relationship.
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A Reader's Dream
Title: Christmas Painting
Date: Oct. 4, 2004
Time: 6:30 AM
Category:
Series: Christmas
Day: Monday
Sleep Cycle: 1
I was up late playing pool on the computer. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep so I got in the car and went to work with Mike. We drove down a hill. I then walked down stairs.
There was a cot, or rollaway bed at the bottom of the stairs. I laid down and fell asleep for awhile. The place was then Mike’s work and/or school, and people were coming down the stairs and walking past me. A girl I knew sat on the end of the cot. When I had laid down, I had taken my top off to go to sleep. I now sat up, with the blue, patchwork quilt wrapped around me. The girl that had sat on the cot beside me had also been topless and had to put her top back on. After she was done, she asked me if I needed a hand. I said, “I got it.” I pulled the blanket up around me and over my head, then put my bra and shirt on. After getting dressed, I was very warm under the blanket and figured it was because of my breathing. I came out from under the blanket. I laughed and joked with the young woman and I told her that I couldn’t fall asleep at home so I went for a drive with Mike. I laid down for a minute and fell asleep for 15 or 20 minutes.
Then there was something about Jeff (my brother). I think he asked me what I was doing there. He had been in some kind of auto race. He wasn’t impressed with it. It wasn’t a serious or professional race or something. I asked if it was a Nascar kind of race. He said it was just Busche racing, or amateur stock cars rather than the Winston cup. Another man, who had also been in the race, seemed happy about it and proud and was at a table with a young woman bragging (I think). The race was over, and the driver was now wearing a white short-sleeve shirt. Jeff said he better get back to work.
Then another young woman (reminded me of Anna from the OC) came up to me and we were talking. I said something about Wednesday, about having the car or being there again Wednesday because I had to get up and get the car. She said she’d probably pop in before then, to see me because she had some gifts or presents to drop off. Something else was said and then she said, “it’s all about others right?” She was then fixing or putting the finishing touches on a painting that was on the wall. It was a watercolour, or acrylic painting, and it was still wet. She used her finger and something else to blend and texturize the reds and greens of the Christmas painting. I think it was a painting of a poinsettia, and it was beautiful.
Then Kelso (from That 70s Show) was trying to fix, or touch up, a different painting on the other wall. He had a crayon or short pencil crayon and was scribbling and scratching or digging (etching) the wet paint. I told him he shouldn’t be considering being a painter. Then I told him that when he paints, his jaw drops and his mouth hangs open, making him look ugly and stupid. I was then walking up the stairs with Jackie (from that 70s Show) telling her what I’d told Michael. I said that (because of his vanity or ego) she should keep him from trying to paint anymore.
Analysis
There are three distinct parts to this dream, however they all have common elements and all tie together. The opening paragraph states what the dream is trying to impart to the dreamer, or in the case of Dream Tending, the ego. This dream is focusing on the dreamer's feelings that her life is going down hill. However, that is only one level of examination. The opening statement may also be telling the dreamer that she needs to look, or go, deeper into herself to discover the answer/s or solution/s to the dilemma or situation she is struggling with. The first statement may also be suggesting that it's time to stop playing games, get her act together and get to work.
The first part of the dream focuses on the dreamer's feelings of comfort and security. She is completely content in the cocoon of comfort and safety she has created for herself until the situation becomes uncomfortable ...stifling. The discomfort results in her emergence from her self-imposed shelter. Once she removes that which is hiding or covering her true self, her life becomes lighter, filled with fun and laugher.
The dreamer begins to question her life, her choices and decisions in the second part of the dream. Her perspective and ideals are brought to her attention. Her life, her goals and her successes (or lack of) are a matter of how one looks at them. She might not have the big prize yet, but every little success, every win, brings her one step closer. Change always leads to something new, something different.
The dreamer takes control of her own life, she's ready to take charge and take a chance. She is being told that her happiness comes from her creative gifts and that these gifts should be shared with others, that her gifts are beneficial to others. She now just needs to refine and then bring into the world her spirit of kindness, goodwill and generosity.
The third and final section reminds her that the past is in the past, that she was then a different person. She is being warned not make the same mistake again. She is being advised not to allow others to determine the course of her life, her choices and her destiny. The dreamer is in charge of her own life. If she takes back control of her own destiny, she will ascend, move upward and toward her goal.
Please note that this is a brief, one-dimensional analysis. If it were conducted via phone, email or in person it would be much, much more detailed and much, much longer. So for brevity and space' sake, I kept it very short and simple.
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Reader Comments
No comments this month.
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From the Editor
Hello friends and fellow dreamers.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS !
I would just like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for being a part of The Nocturnal Times and Dream Lady family. I appreciate your time and support.
Since this is the last issue of 2007, I also want to wish you all a very happy holiday, and a happy and prosperous New Year. And, of course, I have a gift for my dearest subscribers.
Christmas Countdown Ebook. For each day of December (up to the 25th) there is a different article about the rich history of Christmas, with recipes from over a hundred years ago, downloadable desktop wallpaper, and links to Christmas gifts and goodies.
click here to download your copy
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens Ebook. The original story that spawned numerous other pieces of literature, film and more.
click here to download your copy
Have a safe, healthy and wonderful holiday. I'll talk to you in the new year.
Blessed Be and Dream Well !
Terry
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