7 Days of Dreaming: The Dreaming Self
Welcome to Day 2 of our 7-day dreamwork journey.
For most of us, there is a “Self” that watches and participates in our dreams. Our dreaming self performs actions, feels emotions, and engages with other dream characters much as we do in waking life.
This dreamtime version of ourselves has a lot to teach us. We can unlock some of that wisdom by practicing dreamwork skill #2.
Dreamwork Skill #2: Tracking the Dream-Self
Dreams can feel incredibly disorienting and odd due to one interesting trait of our dreaming minds: we tend to process the events of our waking lives while omitting the event itself. Our dreams may rehearse the characters, emotions, and values conflicts of a situation we are dealing with, without ever directly referencing it.
So, how do we figure out what issue our dreams are trying to resolve?
We track the behavior of the dream-self.
What is the “you” of your dream doing? How is she interacting with others? What is his communication style? What emotions are they experiencing?
Notice the dream-self’s behavior and ask yourself: Is this how I am behaving in waking life? If so, where in my life do I behave this way? If not, what can I learn from the way the dream-self is behaving? If the dream-self is acting in a way that embarrasses or confuses me, what might that have to tell me about how I would prefer to act, or how I am limiting my choices?
When you wake with some recall of a dream, write out the actions of the dream-self as though you were watching a silent film. Where in waking life are you engaging in similar actions?
Sometimes, the behavior of our dream-self will reveal our “personal mythologies” . Personal mythologies are strategies we have learned at certain traumatic points in our history that we continue to apply in situations where they are dysfunctional.
Observing the dream-self perform bizarre or embarrassing actions is often a first clue that we are living out a personal mythology rather than behaving rationally in waking life.
Dream Practicum
“In my dream I am walking to the end of a dock. I want to jump in the water and I see that the houses along the dock are all empty. So I start to take off my clothes and hang them on a fence, but just as I am about to dive in I notice a car pulling in to the house where I had placed my clothes. I panic and grab my clothes and run. I tell myself as I walk away that the water probably wouldn’t have felt great anyway, even though I had wanted to jump in more than anything.”
Before you read the section below, pause and imagine that this is your dream. What might the behavior of your dream self be telling you? Is this like you or unlike you? “Borrow” the dream to practice the Dream-Self skill.
In working with this dream, we used dream-skill #1 to notice the emotions in the dream. The feelings of excitement, vulnerability, and disappointment reminded the dreamer of a recent interaction with a friend.
We then played back the behavior of the dream-self as though watching a silent movie. Here is a woman walking toward something she really wants. Now she is looking around, aware of the presence of others. And now she is walking away without having completed her action.
Immediately the dreamer exclaimed “That is just like me, to back away from the thing I most want! And then to pretend that I never really wanted it anyway. Wow, how self-destructive!”
In her further work with this theme, the dreamer decided that this behavior — pretending she did not care about issues that, in fact, were deeply important to her — was costing her heavily and contributing to the decline of her friendship.
By recognizing the behavior in the dream as being self-defeating, the dreamer was able to identify places in her waking life where she was working against her own best interests. She applied this knowledge by speaking directly with her friend, stating decisively what she wanted instead of continuing to pretend she was satisfied with the status quo.
Although this was very difficult for the dreamer, watching her dream-self walk away from that highly-anticipated plunge felt painful enough that, for the first time, she was willing to risk it.
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Practice this skill on a dream you remember, or if you have been struggling with dream recall, use a favorite character in a novel or television show. What does the behavior of the character, and your reactions to that behavior, tell you about your own waking life actions?
As always, feel free to comment below or email directly with any questions or insights!
If you’d like to practice these skills in person or work a particularly powerful dream, join Lissa and Julie this September for a day-long dreamwork immersion. Learn more below!
7 days of dreaming: integrating dream wisdom into your waking life
Have you ever woken with a dream image that you just couldn’t shake?
Ever carried the emotional residue from a dream with you all day long, unsure of how to respond?
Regardless of what you believe about dreams, they impact our day-to-day lives. What if you could learn a handful of quick practices to help you engage with your dreams and gather wisdom for your personal journey? What if, in a few moments a day, you could build a practice of dreamwork that both deepens and enriches your relationship with yourself and your life?
This is what happened for me when I first started the practice of dreamwork, and this is my hope for you as we embark on this 7-day journey of working with dreams.
Every day for seven days, I’ll post a new skill on the blog and share a dream that illustrates how to apply it.
Whether or not you remember your dreams, you can learn and practice these skills by working with dreams you remember from the past, or with imagery that has popped up in waking life or in meditation.
You can share your dreams, and any questions or comments about the skill we are learning, either in the comments on the blog or directly by email at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
I hope that this 7-day journey will start you on a path strewn with personal treasure. Perhaps the skills you learn here will embolden you to bring your dreams into conversations with friends, or to incorporate them in counseling sessions as part of your personal work.
Let’s start right in on the first skill!
Dreaming Skill #1: Finding Emotional Parallels
When you first wake from a dream, even if the dream itself has escaped your memory, there is often an emotional residue that lingers.
Do you feel sad? Shocked? Angry? Frightened? Upon waking, rest for a moment with your eyes closed and notice any emotions that linger, whether they are attached to dream imagery or not.
If you have a few moments, write out the precise emotional signature of the dream. For example:
”I had a strong feeling of dread, deep in my stomach, and when I woke my heart was pounding as if in fear.”
“In the first part of the dream, I felt confused and bewildered, but then in the next scene I was proud and confident. When I woke I had a feeling of accomplishment.”
Now, look at what you’ve written. Where in your waking life do you experience this combination of emotions? What particular issue, person, or life domain brings up these feelings?
When you discover the part of your waking life that carries the emotional signature of the dream, you will have a clear understanding of what specifically the content of the dream is referring to.
Today’s Dream Practicum
“I don’t remember much about the content of my dream. But when I woke I felt extremely sad, almost as though there was a weight on my heart. Later in the day, I remembered one image from the dream; a girl in a blue dress was running away from me, and I had a feeling of loss. She’s not a real girl that I know, but she was about four years old and it felt like my heart was breaking.”
As this dreamer wrote down the emotional signature of her dream, she realized that the feeling of heartache and loss corresponded to a situation in her waking life in which she had decided to leave school to care for a family member.
As we worked with the imagery of the dream, the dreamer realized that she had started school 4 years ago, and the little girl walking away symbolized, for her, the loss of her dream of completing graduate school.
In our continued work with this dream, the dreamer explored the sense of heartbreak she hadn’t let herself acknowledge for fear of seeming selfish or uncaring about her ailing family member. As she allowed herself to feel these emotions fully, she realized she could be a compassionate caregiver and still take a course or two online.
As of this writing, she has completed her master’s degree. Her willingness to pay attention to the lingering emotions of an unremembered dream set her on a path that led to the fulfillment of a deeply-held but unacknowledged goal.
These dreams are shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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Set a journal and pen by your bed tonight, and practice the skill of finding emotional parallels upon waking.
And I’d love to hear what you find out! You can comment below with any questions or insights, or feel free to email directly at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
*A word about safety: If you find yourself battling strong anxiety, grief, or dread in the course of working with a dream, step back from it and call a friend, take a walk, or speak with your counselor. Dream work can get very deep very fast! Do not push yourself to continue unsupported. *
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If this journey inspires you and you’d like to work your dream in person, there are still a few spaces left in our intimate day-long dreamwork retreat this September. You can register below.
my life is out of control
by Lissa Carter, LPC
When my new client walked into the office her head was hanging so low, I felt concerned about the integrity of her spine. The speed of her speech infused every word with exhaustion.
“Everything in my life is out of my control,” she stated. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that every minute of my day is scheduled from 5 am until I drop into bed at 11. My mother is dying. My husband is having panic attacks. One of my children refuses to go to school unless we drag her and the other will go, but has stopped communicating with us. I think she might be taking pills, she is sleepy all the time, but I can’t even face confronting her because work consumes every waking moment and then when I do finally get home there are the dishes, the laundry, the yard, the homework, the dinner, the groceries, the dog needs a walk, the dental appointments, the leaking faucet. There is never enough money, never enough time, never enough breathing space. I know I should be exercising and eating right and journaling and doing yoga and taking care of myself and all of those things, and it’s just insult added to injury that I know what I need and don’t have time or money to do it.”
For the first time, her eyes rose to meet mine, and I saw the ghost of a sparkle there. “So…do you think you can help me?”
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Let’s all just take a moment and exhale. Were you holding your breath? I find I am, just writing this. And I certainly was holding my breath in that room, feeling my client’s exhaustion in my own hunching shoulders, in my own rapidly spinning mind, as I found myself frantically attempting to conjure some magical relief for her.
Taking that one breath, that one moment between stimulus and response, is often the only control we have.
In that tiny pause we can bring our consciousness to bear, we can apply our fierce intelligence and deeply-held wisdom to these moments of our lives.
But we don’t. Not most of us, not most of the time. Know why?
Because it hurts too much.
It hurts too much to be conscious, because when we are conscious we have to feel the loss of all the things we thought we would have by now that we do not have.
All the things we once had that we no longer have.
All the parts of ourselves that are longing to be seen and loved.
All the parts of ourselves that we actively reject.
All the sorrows of the world.
All the pain of our friends and family.
Staying busy serves us. There is so much pain we have to feel if we slow down for even a minute.
When we are fully awake to our lives, we are fully experiencing not just the joy and the laughter and the meaning, we are also fully experiencing the sorrow and the rage and the pain. Most of us prefer to dull that down. So we find ways not to feel. We go into autopilot.
And life spins out of control.
Because here’s the thing about autopilot: it never, ever leads us in the direction of growth and innate wellbeing. It leads us toward the next pleasure or away from the next pain, which is not the same thing at all.
The one thing, the ONLY thing we can truly control in life, is our values.
Our values are completely under our control. They are not contingent upon anything. My thoughts rise spontaneously, my eyes tear up without my deciding to cry, but my values are chosen.
So every moment that I can consciously take that pause between stimulus and response, and choose my action based upon my values, my life comes a little more under my conscious control. I begin to steer myself toward a life experience that matches what I long for.
I am choosing to hug my son for a full minute before I set the table because I value warmth and closeness.
I am choosing to drink chamomile tea instead of coffee this morning because I value a sense of calm.
I am choosing to take a deep breath instead of snapping out a response because I value compassionate communication.
And to do this, we have to let go of autopilot. We have to feel.
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In my client’s words, in her posture, I was reading the signs of autopilot loud and clear.
I took a breath. In the space of that breath, I contacted an old friend, the feeling of being an imposter. I contacted shame about all the times that, for some reason, I have been unable to help. I felt all of these things, and I reminded myself of my values of authenticity and openness. I let those values guide what I said next.
“I know from what you have told me that you are strained to the breaking point. And I know that the counseling journey asks a lot of you. It asks mindfulness of you, because we can only change our lives to the extent that we are conscious of them. And if you build the skill to change your life, you will simultaneously build your awareness of how painful your current life situation is. This puts me in a bind, because I am in this to help people. I know that helping you will probably cause you to experience more pain before things get better. So I am asking you: is that a bargain you are willing to make?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she nodded.
Burnout is not a sign of weakness. Burnout is a sign of strength, a sign of being way too strong for way too long.
Sitting in front of me was an exceptionally strong woman. We were on our way.
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What do you do to avoid pain? What do you do to keep your fears from whispering to you? How do these things get in the way of choosing to do what matters to you?
Meaning doesn’t need every minute of every day. Meaning just needs a portal, a moment of sweetness in which you can connect to what truly matters to you.
Meaning seeps through that portal and infuses the moments of your day and the days of your life with value and purpose.
If we are willing to open the gates of meaning— knowing that when it comes it will bring pain as well as purpose—if we are willing to make enough room for that, we will start to regain control of our lives. Moment by moment, choice by choice, word by word.
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What matters to you? How will you let that inform your choices today?
If you are struggling to find and nurture deep meaning in a life that demands a breakneck pace, join Lissa in December for a journey into the sacred space of dreams.
Our dreams are attempts to bring our lives into balance, to show us the neglected and unacknowledged parts of ourselves, to guide us toward wholeness. And many of us are too busy to remember them, let alone write them down or learn from them.
In this 4-hour deep dive into somatic dreamwork, we will slow down to the pace of our dreams through group dream imagery, expressive arts exploration, meditative movement, and guided dream journey. Bring a dream that has lingered with you, or harvest a dream-image from the guided meditation. You will emerge with a deeper understanding of your own wisdom and a renewed commitment to the sacred meaning of your own life.
Lissa is facilitating this intimate retreat in a private residence, and there are only 4 spaces left. If this topic is speaking to you, please reserve your spot soon!
This story is a composite of several clients to protect privacy. Many thanks to the brave, vulnerable, powerful clients who shared parts of their work in hopes that these stories will serve you.
We always love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below, or reach out to us via email at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
Can't fix you, you're not broken
Posted by Lissa Carter, LPC
My client seemed very small, almost folded into herself. We’d been working together for a while, but I’d never seen her like this. Even her voice had gotten smaller, almost disappearing into the air before it reached my ears. I had to lean in to hear what she was saying, and the words landed like stones: “I’m in so much pain today I almost didn’t come in. But then I thought, ‘maybe Lissa will say something to make it better.’”
I know this feeling. Both as a human being, and as a client on the other side of the counseling relationship, I have so often hoped I could hand my pain over into wiser, more capable hands for resolution. I have hoped that someone, somewhere, could simply give me the answers that would rid me once and for all of the nagging self-doubt, paralyzing fear, or insistent anxiety. Surely this is not too much to ask of a professional that we are, after all, paying for this service?
There is a reason I can’t say something in this moment to take away my client’s pain. And it can be a difficult one to understand—equally difficult, it turns out, to explain, especially when a suffering human being is looking at you with hope in their eyes.
The reason is this: if I remove your pain, I remove your humanity.
Pain is not bad. Pain is a messenger, and it has vital information for you. And you, as the unquestionable expert on your life and your journey, are the only one entitled to interpret your pain. The wise, capable hands you are seeking are your own.
It’s a hard concept to come to grips with, this idea that pain is important. Thinking of sadness, anger, grief, anxiety—the “symptoms” so many of us try to eliminate—as the enemy makes sense. They are uncomfortable, unpleasant, unwanted. But these are symptoms of something other than emotional pain: they are also symptoms of meaning.
Consider it for a moment. When do you feel anger? When a principle that matters to you is violated. When do you feel grief? When something or someone meaningful is lost. When do you feel anxiety? When something deeply important is at stake.
Our painful emotions are trying to tell us what matters to us. They are signaling to us that our meaning, our purpose, is involved, and they are asking us to pay attention, because what is happening is IMPORTANT.
How could I possibly take that away from clients that I am ethically bound to help?
The next question is almost inevitable: why, then, should I bother to hire a counselor? If you can’t take my pain away or fix my broken brain, what can you do for me?
Well, I can’t fix you. That’s true. I can’t fix you, because you are not broken.
But I do think you are important enough to have a witness, someone who can sit compassionately with you as you gently begin the process of listening to these painful emotions, deciphering their messages, and leaning into their wisdom to create a new relationship with yourself and your life — a life based, not on the avoidance of discomfort, but on the complex individuality of your own meaning and purpose.
That’s what I told my client. I told her I did not want to sell her short, I respect her too much for that. I asked her if, instead of taking her pain away, we could make a space together to listen to it, even to welcome it. My client closed her eyes and imagined putting an arm around this pain as though it was worthy of her compassion. And something shifted.
My client’s sadness was not gone by the end of the session. What had changed was the way she was relating to it. Slowly, gently, she had begun to listen to what it was trying to tell her about what was not working in her life. Slowly, gently, she had begun the process of deciding how she wanted to live her life in the face of pain.
We don’t want to know this—we don’t want to know that life is going to be hard, and that pain is going to be inevitable. We’d rather roll the dice and hope that this nutrition plan, that self help book will stem the tides and keep us on a magically protected path. But the truth remains, whether we want it or not. A life that includes meaning will include pain.
And as it turns out, facing that truth gives us the opportunity to make a choice: the choice of how we want to navigate our lives. We can’t make this choice if we are too busy looking the other way, too preoccupied with avoiding the pain.
In that sense, the work you do in therapy goes far beyond the addressing of symptoms or the healing of a disease. The work you do in therapy is life work. You are learning to be the doctor/healer of your own mind, the conscious observer and mediator of your experience, and this is a lifelong art.
Therapy isn’t going to fix you. You’re not broken. Therapy will teach you to engage differently with your own mind and your own life, as an empowered agent instead of a victim to circumstance.
And that feels more important than symptom reduction.
Thank you to my brave client for her willingness to share this vignette.
How To Stay Sane When The World Is Falling Apart
By Lissa Carter, LPC
This morning I woke with the fragment of a dream: a crow had been struck by a car in front of the house. Even as I watched it die, another crow lit on the window and cawed, and I thought “Crow is bigger than the life of one crow.”
I believe the world is calling for this now: the sense of self that is bigger than the individual. There is a call going out to the Human that lives beyond our own human lives as Crow lives beyond crow.
If you’ve noticed in yourself lately a tendency to grow irritable, frustrated, and overwhelmed—a tendency that spills over and ruptures your closest relationships---or, on the other end, a tendency to turn the volume down on life, to isolate and numb yourself to the world—you may be reacting to this call.
But this call is to the part of us that is larger than our discrete selves, so if we choose to answer with internal coping strategies like self-medication, dietary changes, or exercise, we are choosing the wrong medicine.
This is not to say that there is no place for tending the self—on the contrary, taking good care of our organismic selves with mindful habits of sleep, nutrition, and exercise is more vital than ever. But tending the self is not enough when the problem is bigger than the self.
Recently the American Psychiatric Association, following on the heels of the American Medical Association, divested completely from fossil fuels, stating that ‘climate change poses a threat to public health, including mental health’ and recommending engagement in efforts to mitigate adverse mental health effects of climate change.
The changing climate has a profound effect on our mental health: in terms of increased anxiety, trauma, and PTSD, but also in a marked decrease of our organismic sense of safety. Just as animals exhibit behaviors of stress, flight, and fear prior to an ecological crisis, we as animals have a sense of the wrongness of things. It lies below our language, possibly below our awareness—but just as surely as we are part of nature, we experience nature’s crisis as our own.
Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Institute, describes this ecological self as our “mythopoetic identity”. As I come to terms with the losses we are sustaining, I find that the proper medicine, for me, lies in two arenas. I find meaning and hope in the cultivation of my mythopoetic identity by seeking out the wisdom encoded in myth, story, and reciprocal relationship with other species. Then, I put that wisdom into committed action, actual feet-on-the-ground hands-in-the-dirt witness.
I recently presented at the North Carolina Counseling Association conference regarding the importance of these two arenas to the field of mental health. Too often, the counseling relationship begins and ends with the learning of coping mechanisms, better communication skills, and anxiety- and depression-reducing habits. But this ability to turn within and fine-tune ourselves means nothing if we do not then take these newfound skills and put them in service to our values by taking tangible action in the world.
Interestingly, work in these two arenas—mythopoetic identity and committed action--can actually lead to an increase in discomfort. For this reason, many clients who sought out counseling in order to feel better get worried that they are losing ground when they reach this step and old anxieties and fears re-emerge. I often talk with these clients about intentional discomfort: pilgrims and seekers of vision in the past would subject themselves to physical privations such as cold, loss of sleep, hunger, and long journeys. They knew that there was something in loosening the weave of comfort that allows new voices and visions to get through.
This is also true: life always exacts a price. If we choose to avoid pain, we pay in loss of meaning, because any life that is meaningful involves pain. Think about choosing to love someone---the minute you let someone in, you also let in the possibility of losing them. We can’t choose to avoid suffering. All we can choose is whether our suffering will mean something or not.
Last fall I heard Martin Shaw tell a story that helps me understand this. Here is the story:
When lions age, their teeth begin to fall out and their muscles weaken, but their roar remains loud and powerful. When a pride of lions goes out hunting, the older lions place themselves strategically out of sight near a grazing herd. The young, powerful lions hide on the other side of the herd.
The older lions open their toothless jaws and roar their terrifying roar. The prey, in terror, run in the opposite direction, fleeing for safety from the awful sound. They flee, straight into the jaws of the powerful young lions--and are devoured.
“Run toward the roar,” we are told, “if you want to survive.”
Run toward the roar. Walk into the thing that scares you.
Are you terrified of the cataclysmic loss of species we are facing? Run toward the roar—look up images of these species, say their names aloud. Walk out into the world and see if you can find them and offer a gift of water, or just a moment of quiet grief. Lost landscapes, lost species, live on in us. Remember them. Don’t run away. Nothing is gained by not looking.
Are you horrified by our current political climate? Run toward the roar—call your representative and ask for a face-to-face meeting. Share what you are feeling. Talk about your shame and your grief and your outrage, person-to-person. Not talking about it won’t make it go away.
Are you coming awake to your own privilege or complicity in the atrocities we humans perpetrate? Run toward the roar—talk to someone that does not share your privilege, and ask how you can help. Listen to perspectives that may be terribly uncomfortable to hear. Allow them to increase your understanding of the world.
Michael Meade reminded me, in a recent podcast, that creation is ongoing and continuous, and every bit as complex and flexible as the problems that we face. He reminded me that renewal is simultaneous with collapse. If we refuse to look away, if we continue to walk unflinchingly toward the roar, we are poised to change our relationship to ourselves and to this planet in beautiful and unprecedented ways.
I’d like to leave you with an image from my favorite childhood book, The Neverending Story. There was a moment in that book in which the entire world had come apart; everything and everyone had dissolved into nothingness. The little boy who was the hero of the story looked into that darkness and knew that all was lost. And at that moment, he spoke a name. He spoke name after name, calling back into creation everything he remembered, everything that had been devoured. And the world pieced itself back together.
Tend to yourself, tend to your community, tend to your planet. Rinse and repeat. In the end, it’s all the same thing. We just need to be wiser than what is otherwise happening. That is good enough. And I am here if you want to talk.
Hush—
There is a full world hidden
Behind the time it takes to go still
Your origin: as you walk
backward and around to whence you came
There’s a sea in the way,
And a transformation,
And the discipline of belonging.
It is a discipline
To belong
-4/28/19