7 days of dreaming: deep listening
Here we are, on the final day of this journey. I hope you will continue to pursue dream work if you found anything of value here! If you are interested in further offerings from Inner Light Counseling Collective that incorporate dream work, contact me through the form below and I’ll reach out when we hold dream workshops or groups.
…And now let’s move on to our final dreamwork skill, the skill of deep listening.
Dreamwork Skill #7: Deep Listening
Imagine that a child you love very much comes to you sobbing so hard he cannot breathe. Once you have soothed and calmed him, he begins to tell you a story of how he was playing with friends on the playground, but another kid he did not know came and pushed him down.
Because of your attachment to this child, you might get angry and march over to the playground to confront that bully. You might feel overwhelmed and try to dismiss the child’s sadness, tell him “stop crying, it’s okay now” to try and make the pain go away. It is very hard to see the ones we love hurting.
And yet, if we can tolerate the distress of our own anger or sadness, we can sit with this child and listen to his story. We can listen deeply, noticing his feelings, his thoughts, asking questions about what this means for him, working with him to make a plan about how he wants to handle situations like this one in the future.
This is exactly the way we want to listen to our own dreams.
Deep listening means you don’t only listen for what is there, but what isn’t. If a friend tells you she is thrilled about her new job but describes it in vague, lackluster tones, you probably wouldn’t take this at face value. You would ask her what’s bothering her, and why her voice sounds so unenthusiastic when she claims she is delighted.
Similarly, if a dream shows you an empty room, you might get curious about why the furniture is absent. If a dream shows you scene after scene of night and darkness, you might wonder where the light is. If most of your family shows up again and again in your dreams but one family member does not appear, you might get curious about this.
Deep listening also means that you follow motifs and patterns. In listening to the child tell his story of bullying, we might ask if this has happened before, or if it happens at other playgrounds. In our dreamwork, we do this pattern-thinking by tracking certain symbols, characters, or settings that emerge again and again in our dreams.
Finally, we when are really listening, we want to make sure we are getting the whole story. We ask questions to illuminate our understanding of the situation, try to understand its origins and also collaborate to find solutions. In dreamwork, this might mean actively imagining what the next scene in your dream might have been had it continued. It might mean noticing the opening scene of a dream and wondering what happened immediately before to create this circumstance. It might mean “taking an assignment” from the dream, whether this is something as simple as wearing a shirt the color of the shirt your dream-self wore in your dream, or as complex as watching your dream-self behave passively and “taking the assignment” of acting more assertively in waking life.
Does all of this sound like a tremendous amount of work?
The reason I go to all of this effort with my own dreams and with the dreams of my clients is simple: it bears incredible fruit. Personal work that is too painful or hard to do in waking life feels much more accessible when we look at it with the distance that a dream creates. It is easier to notice the negative patterns of a dream-self than it is to observe our own patterns, because it feels less personal.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, this ability to take a step back from our own thoughts and view them at one remove is called defusion, and it is a core skill for psychological flexibility and resilience. Our dreams give us the opportunity to practice this skill daily!
Dream Practicum
The Spaghetti Restaurant
i. a woman and man are taking their children to a spaghetti restaurant. The owner says he is closing the restaurant down. The man is sad about this, but the woman is she is glad because she used to work here and they treated her poorly.
ii. the children are serving themselves from a buffet of spaghetti dishes. There are little spheres of tightly-wound spaghetti and meatballs, but every time the woman goes to serve herself there is no food. She begins to feel frustrated, angry, and forgotten.
iii. The woman tries to get a drink but the doors to the kitchen, where the ice machine is, are locked. She is screaming and pounding on the kitchen doors when a passing server gestures to a station nearby where pitchers of ice and water are all prepared, just waiting to be poured.
Pause here for a moment and imagine this is your dream. Pick a dream skill and practice it: tracking the dream self, finding the emotional signature, finding compensating characters, replacing symbols with their associations for you. What assignment might this dream have for you?
Deep listening means having a conversation with the dream that goes a little deeper than simply applying the dreamwork skills. If this dream were a person trying to get your attention, what message would it have for you? How might you respectfully respond to this message?
When the dreamer listened deeply to this dream, here is the narrative that resulted:
A Place Where I Can Be Fed
i. A part of me that is passive and a part of me that is decisive are both trying to get fed. The part that is decisive is sad when there is no nourishment, but the part that is passive feels glad because it feels like a punishment, and this feels like justice.
ii. Parts of me that are playful and a little bossy are able to feed themselves very well even though I am so tightly-wound and over-controlled. But the passive part of me can’t get nourished and feels so angry, even though life is presenting so many options to choose from. This feminine part that wants to receive is starving.
iii. . This passive part is trying to stay alive but cannot find entry into the place where creativity is. This part of me is screaming for attention and trying to burst through the part of her that keeps others out. A part of me that knows how to take care of me points out a source of nourishment that requires the passive part of me to take action and serve itself. Somehow I had never noticed that there is nourishment for me if I am willing to serve myself instead of waiting around for others to let me in.
When the dreamer took the time to listen deeply to this dream, she noticed that she was the only female character in the dream. Every other character—-the owner, the server, the children, the cooks—was male. As she allowed herself to grow curious about what assignment this dream held for her, she noticed that although the “masculine” parts of her had no trouble getting fed, the “feminine” part of her could not receive nourishment because it was unwilling to serve itself.
The assignment she created from this dream was to allow herself to ask for and receive the aid of others in the realm of her life that bore the emotional signature of the dream, which was her relationship with her career. She was surprised to discover that when she requested help from her co-workers, they were thrilled to offer it.
This dream is shared with permission; some details have been changed to protect confidentiality.
