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.
I appreciate each of you who has made this journey with me! When we make the effort to understand ourselves—our challenges and failings and patterns—we can more fully live into our potential. This is an incredible gift to everyone around us. So, truly, thank you!
As always, feel free to share your dreams and insights here in the comments or directly via email at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
I wish you a lifetime of profound, powerful dreaming!
If you are interested in exploring the imagery of your own dreams, join Lissa and Julie for a daylong dreamwork immersion this September. Learn more below!
7 days of dreaming: Symbols and Motifs
Welcome to Day 6 of our dreamwork journey!
We have acquired a solid toolbox of skills together: comparing the emotional signature of dreams to waking life situations; tracking the behavior of the dream-self for clues as to how we may be stuck in personal mythologies; titling and transcribing our dream-narrative; decoding the messages strange or unfamiliar Others may carry; and relating to friends and family as aspects of our selves.
You may have noticed that in this work, we have not veered too far from the waking life, and the commentary our dreams make upon it. My intention with this journey has been to give you tools that you can use to confidently and pragmatically work with your dreams. However, we are barely scratching the surface of the profound, mysterious healing that dreams can work on our spirits, our life narratives, and even upon our families and communities.
If this taste of dreamwork has piqued your interest, I highly recommend stepping into deeper work with a trained dream worker or counselor, or teaching yourself by reading the works of Carl Jung, Toko-pa Turner, Bob Hoss, Marion Woodman, and Robert Moss. To whet your appetite for this deeper dreamwork, I have added one of my favorite dream-stories at the end of today’s post!
Dreamwork Skill #6: Objects and Symbols
Have you found that there is a landscape you continue to return to in dreams, even if you have never set eyes on this place in waking life? Or again and again you dream of trains, even though the last time you were on a train you were 10 years old?
Marie Louise von Franz famously said “Dreams don’t waste much spit telling us what we already know.” If we combine this understanding with what we have already learned about everything in a dream being a representation of ourselves, it follows that objects and symbols in our dreams are representations of aspects of ourselves that are in need of our attention.
There are many fascinating ways of working with the potential meanings of dream objects, but one of my favorites is also one of the simplest.
Take the object that appeared in your dream and write down what its function is. For example, if I dream of an elaborate red hat, I might write:
The function of a red hat is to draw attention to the wearer.
I might then ask myself: is there a part of me that would like a little more attention? What parts of me really dislike drawing attention to myself, and how has that been getting in my way?
Obviously this is just one of many possible interpretations of the function of a hat—the important thing is that YOU, the dreamer, are the one defining the function, because it is your associations with these objects that your mind is tapping to create the messages in your dream.
Dream Practicum
The Exploding Oil Cans
i. A man is hiking with several friends and comes upon a clearing filled with men who are sacrificing a victim.
ii. The man runs away and comes upon a clearing filled with peaceful people selling colorful, silken clothes. There are oil cans all around, and the man discovers that if he looks at the oil cans hard, they will explode.
iv. The man is pulled into a fight to the death. In the center of the fight he notices there is a pile of oil cans. The man makes them explode by looking at them, but notices that the exploding oil cans are not killing anyone, and furthermore the combatants are noticing and realizing the man’s only weapon is ineffective.
Before we move forward with this dream, take a moment and “borrow” it. How would you define the function of each of the symbols in this dream? What might you imagine it would be saying to you?
In our work with this dream, the dreamer was particularly taken with the image of the exploding oil cans and the strong emotional reaction he had to their ineffectiveness as a weapon.
He defined the function of “oil can” as “to transport fuel for heating, or for getting people places.” He defined the function of exploding as “letting the pressure off, destroying the form of what is.”
When he combined these two functions, he had a moment of illumination. “I’ve been lashing out, wasting anger that could be a motivating force by taking it out on others instead of changing the situation I am in.”
The dreamer noticed as well that the oil cans were scattered around the clearing of peaceful people, not the clearing of violent men. He shared his understanding of this as “I tend only to lash out when I’m not actually in danger. When I’m really in danger, I freeze because I’ve spent all my energy taking my anger out on passive people that are not a threat to me.”
This was a powerful dream, with many layers of information. As he continued to work with it, the dreamer was inspired to confront the source of his problems rather than continue to lash out in ineffective anger.
Have you had any interesting experiences applying these skills to your own dreams? I’d love to hear from you—feel free to comment below or email me directly at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
See you tomorrow for the final day of this dreamwork journey, when we will put it all together!
In closing, I offer you this, one of my favorite dream stories:
Back when I was taking some prerequisite psychology courses at UCLA, I lost my keys. I was on my way out to the high desert to soak in wild hot springs, so I didn't let it bother me. I knew the keys would turn up when I got back.
But as I camped and hiked and soaked I turned the problem over in my mind. I'd checked the drawer, all my bags, the table, the counter...
Then, one night, under the clear stars of the desert, I had a dream. Carl Jung was crooking his finger at me from a chair near a window.
"Pssst," he said, eyes gleaming with mischief. "I know where your keys are." He pointed to the wardrobe, which flew open, and I saw my grey corduroy pants there, folded neatly. Of course! I had been wearing those cords the day before! The keys must be tucked into the pocket!
I was so excited the next morning. A personal message from Jung himself! I babbled excitedly to my friends as we hiked about how Jung's theory of the collective unconscious and the mysterious synchrony of dreams was always taking flak from the scientific community for being impossible to empirically verify. Well here I had the means to prove it. Should I return home and find the keys in the pocket of my cords, it would PROVE that there is a collective wisdom larger than ourselves that can transmit messages in dreams!
"Or," remarked one of my friends (whom I suspected had been hoping for a slightly quieter morning) "that some part of your brain remembered where you'd put the keys and, once the constant buzz of your consciousness was out for the count, was finally able to make itself heard."
I narrowed my eyes at him. He smiled at me and nudged my arm. "You have to think of all possible ways of interpreting the evidence, or you haven't proven anything at all."
Our journey came to an end, and my friends and I parted ways. I raced eagerly into my house, hurrying to the wardrobe to feel in the pockets of my cords. I was really rooting for Jung, here.
But--strike one for mysticism. The keys were not there.
I was disconsolate all day. So much for my personal connection with Jung. So much for dreams, and the collective unconscious, and a universal wisdom that surpasses our understanding.
Finally, I dragged myself to the table to study for my finals. I opened my Theories of Personality text to review the reading. And there, marking the place for the chapter on Jung and the Collective Unconscious, were my keys.
Want to join us this September? In a sun-drenched private office in Asheville, we will slow down to the pace of our dreams and work all of these skills and more to harvest dream wisdom through imagery, artmaking, guided dream-experience, and more!
7 Days of Dreaming: Compensating Characters
So, you’ve explored the identifications and amplifications of the mysterious Others in your dream.
But what about the familiar faces of friends and family? What might they be trying to signal to you?
Dreamwork Skill #5: It’s All You
One of the core precepts of dreamwork is this: everyone, everything, every object that shows up in a dream is an aspect of yourself.
It makes sense when you think about it: when our five senses are quiet, all the dream has to work with is your internal model of the world. There is no external data coming in; the dream crafts characters and settings from bits and pieces of your experience.
“We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.”
~Anais Nin, quoting the Talmud
This means that whomever you encounter in your dream—your partner, your parent, your friend—is a commentary on the aspect of you that relates to that person or, put more plainly, the attributes in you that behave/react as that person would.
These characters create a “compensatory narrative”, frequently showing us other ways we could approach the problem, other behaviors that we could try out, or storylines that compensate for what is missing in our current response to events.
For example, if I dream that I am quarreling with my friend Amanda, I could use dreamwork skill #2 to identify the behaviors and attributes of my dream-self (let’s say my dream-self is acting embarrassed, avoidant, and quiet) with the behaviors and attributes of my friend Amanda (let’s say that, in waking life, Amanda is a person with verve, presence, and outrageous brashness).
Now I might look at this dream, not as a sign that my friendship with Amanda is on the rocks, but as a signal that the part of me that likes to hide and fly under the radar is experiencing some friction with another part of me that wants to play big and be seen.
Dream Practicum
The Sisters
“A woman is in a boat with her sister. She is acting very warmly toward her sister and offering her some food. They feel really connected to each other.”
The dreamer who brought me this dream fragment was frustrated by the dream, assuming it meant that she should make peace with her sister, a woman she had only recently found the strength to set boundaries with.
As we explored this dream, the dreamer defined her sister as a person who represented antagonistic, alcoholic, and controlling qualities. She noticed that the boat, as a vehicle that passes safely over the water, signified a sense of safety for her, as well as a mode of conveying herself across difficult emotional terrain.
When she altered her view of the sister figure in her dream from that of a literal person to a representation of qualities of control and addiction, she stated the following:
“The way for me to proceed now is by making peace with the parts of me that are scared and want to run away from or avoid the hard parts of life. I need to nourish myself, listen to my fears and work with them, instead of cutting them off. That’s how I’ll get through the rough emotional waters of setting boundaries with my family without succumbing to addiction or over-control myself.”
this dream is shared with permission. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality.
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These skills build on each other—you may have noticed by now that you can use all of the dreamwork skills on a single dream to arrive at a more focused understanding of the information it has for you.
Keep a journal by your bed tonight and record your dream-impressions first thing upon waking. Allow yourself to practice all of the dreamwork skills so far—the emotional signature, tracking the dream-self, writing the narrative, observing Others, and decoding compensating characters. Play with allowing the techniques to inform and comment upon each other.
As always, I’d love to hear from you—comment below or email me at innerlightasheville@gmail.com with any insights or questions.
Tomorrow, we will take a deeper dive into the world of the unconscious as we explore symbols and universally recurring motifs.
If you would like to explore your dreams in person, join us for a daylong deep dive into dreamwork this September. Learn more below:
7 Days of Dreaming: Encountering Others
Welcome back!
I hope you are discovering some new insights, or an awakened curiosity about your dreaming mind…
In today’s blog, we are going to venture into the realm of archetypes. Carl Jung discovered in his study of dreams that the tendency to create representations of certain human characteristics—the Caregiver, the Trickster, the Hero—is universal and crosses culture, age, and history.
When you encounter an Other in your dream— a stranger or unfamiliar personage — this is your dreaming mind participating in this creation, the representation of universal human patterns through icons. It’s a sort of shorthand, a way to portray possibility or danger in a manner that is easily interacted with and recognized. Your particular archetypal images may vary from those of another person, but the instinct to create these images is a collective one.
Dream Skill # 4: Decoding Others
When an unfamiliar person or stranger turns up in your dream, notice how they act and how your dream-self reacts to them. Is the Other threatening? Nurturing? Repulsive? Troublesome?
After you have written out your dream, take each Other one by one and describe their character in a few words. Notice also your dream-self’s emotional response to their way of being.
Then, plug these associations back into your dream narrative any time the character shows up in the dream. This can decode the shorthand and help you understand what your dreaming brain is telling you through these unfamiliar personages.
If you’d like to take this work a step further, you can interview the Other who showed up in your dream. Robert Hoss’s work with dreams has elucidated a few key questions you can ask the Other that will help to clarify their archetypal meaning for you. These questions include:
“Who are you?”
“What is your purpose?”
“What do you like most about being yourself?”
“What do you dislike most about being yourself?”
“What do you fear the most?”
“What do you desire the most?”
I have found that this process works best if conducted much as one would conduct a real interview, speaking the questions out loud and answering them as the Other. It can also be accomplished simply by writing the questions down and answering them.
***The study of Jungian dreamwork is profound and time-consuming, and it is beyond my expertise to provide more than a taste of this type of dreamwork. If this methodology fascinates you, you may want to seek out a trained Jungian analyst or dreamworker, or read Jung’s work on the subject. ***
Dream Practicum
The Famous Stranger
“I was going to give a presentation to my team at work, but the table was crowded and everyone kept talking over me. Just as I was about to have the floor to introduce myself and my topic, a famous person arrived. Everyone recognized the famous person except me. He was tall and imposing. He was wearing a suit made entirely of blue beads. I wanted to talk to him, but I felt too intimidated.”
When we began to work this dream, the dreamer described the Famous Person as “imposing, powerful, and unique.” He described his dream-self’s reaction to him as “intimidated and shrinking.”
When we plugged these representations back into the dream, this was the result:
I Do Not Recognize My Power
“I was going to give a presentation to my team at work, but the table was crowded and everyone kept talking over me. Just as I was about to have the floor to introduce myself and my topic, intimidation arrived. Everyone seemed to have an understanding of being imposing and powerful, except for me. Everyone else seemed to have a relationship to these qualities that I am missing out on. I wanted to stand out and be unique. I wanted to interact with those qualities of power and uniqueness, but felt too intimidated.”
The dreamer felt a sense of immediate recognition. “Any time I am about to really step up and show what I can do, I get this feeling of being an imposter, like who am I to be in this position? I am not unique or interesting enough. And then I don’t step up at all, I back away. No one has any idea what I can really do. Including myself.”
When the dreamer interviewed the blue-beaded man, he heard the following:
“I am strong and I do not care what you think of me. I am here to be true to myself. I most desire that others will stand on their own feet and not rely on me to be the powerful one all the time.”
Through this interview, the dreamer realized he had been afraid to step into his power for fear that others would then perceive him as strong, and add to his workload. Once he realized this fear was holding him back, he was able to change his behavior at work.
He did not stop experiencing feelings of intimidation or the sense of being an imposter, but he did stop engaging in the patterns of behavior that kept him playing small, and he was able to communicate assertively when he felt he was carrying more than his share of the workload.
Later on, he told me that while giving an important presentation at work, he channeled the spirit of that tall, imposing stranger in an armor of beads. He began to cultivate a relationship with this “famous stranger”, the qualities of presence and power.
This dream is shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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One further note on interpreting dreams: regardless of what you may read about what an archetype “means”, or what a symbol “is known to stand for”, take these generalizations with a grain of salt. The only true expert on any dream is the dreamer, and all archetypes, symbols, and meanings must be interpreted through the lens of that dreamer’s experience. For this reason, take great care in trying to interpret others’ dreams for them, and in letting others interpret yours.
Feel free to share any comments or insights below— and if you’d like the chance to work a dream in person, join us this September for a day-long immersion into dreamwork.
We will work our dreams through art, writing, dialogue, and projective dreamwork, gaining not only profound insight into the dream you work, but also a toolbox of skills to harvest the wisdom of your dreams every day.
7 Days of Dreaming: Writing the Narrative
I hope you are enjoying the journey so far, and discovering the light your dreams can shed on the struggles and triumphs of your waking life.
Dreamwork Skill #3: Writing the Narrative
When you first wake and try to capture your dream on paper, you may be hunched over a scrap of paper in the dark, scrawling impressions before you fall back asleep, or hurriedly scribbling the gist of the plot as you hustle through breakfast.
However, when you return to your dream for a second look, the way you choose to write it down is important. Here are three considerations in the transcription of your dream:
Give your dream a title.
Titles should be simple and direct. “A Tiger Chases a Woman”. “A Man Encounters A Ruined Building.” These titles will help you find your dreams easily if you keep a dream journal, and will also enable you to track themes over time. Often the title itself can provide an “aha” moment!
Write your dream in the present tense, and in generalities. Don’t edit or sanitize.
Consider the difference between these two narratives:
a) “I dreamed of a train station, I was in a hurry and in the dream, people kept getting between me and the trains. I did not handle it well.”
b) “A woman is trying to get to a train, she is in a hurry, and she cannot reach her destination. She flails and lashes out at the people that get in her way, pushing some aside and even trampling one. The train continues to be out of her reach and she wants to scream.”
Which feels riper for interpretation and insight? If the behavior of your dream-self embarrasses or horrifies you, protect your dream journal and keep it confidential, but don’t sanitize your report. You can rob yourself of a great deal of insight doing that, and remember, your dream self is not you! The dream-self is a representation, just like all the other characters we encounter in dreams.
Break your dream into scenes.
Dreams tend to move fluidly and bizarrely through time, and sometimes we move from one setting to another with no continuity of character, location, or theme. For this reason, breaking a complex dream into scenes and processing each scene individually can be a more productive approach.
Dream Practicum
A woman I had been working with for a while arrived at her session in a state of agitation I had not observed before. She was reluctant to share what was troubling her, but finally disclosed that she’d had a disturbing dream the night before and could not get it out of her mind. The content of the dream was so disturbing to her that she did not even want to speak it aloud, but she did consent to write it down later that night and send it to me by email.
As we worked with the dream, here is the narrative that emerged, using the three guidelines above:
A Woman Has A Disappearing Child
i. A woman finds herself giving birth to a baby in the middle of a crowded room, even though she did not know she was pregnant and there is no biological way she could be pregnant. She is horrified and embarrassed.
ii. The baby is born and is perfect, and the woman holds it close and decides that it is not so horrible that it is here after all. The woman feels joyful and warm.
iii. The baby begins to shrink. There is nothing the woman can do. She cannot feed the baby and it gets smaller and smaller, despite the woman’s panicked attempts to save it, it disappears into nothing. The woman is consumed with grief.
Once the dreamer worked through her initial feelings of guilt and failure, she was able to let go of the idea that this dream was about neglect and literal death. She shared that, although the baby was newborn in the dream, it appeared to be about 8 months of age. We looked at what had been happening 8 months ago in the dreamer’s life, and she realized that 8 months ago, she had developed an incredible idea for a book she wanted to write. Although she had shared her idea with a few friends, their enthusiasm frightened her and she backed away from the idea.
Writing the dream in general terms enabled the dreamer to get enough distance to let go of the literal interpretation of the “baby” and realize that her “baby” was her unwritten book.
She began work on her book, motivated by the deep sense of grief she had felt in the dream for letting her idea wither away. She describes feelings of profound fulfillment that emerged once she began her work and have continued as she devotes herself to writing.
These dreams are shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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Perhaps you can practice this skill on an older dream, rewriting the narrative in general terms, titling it, and breaking it into scenes. Notice any insights that pop up during the process!
Feel free to share ideas, questions, or comments below, or email me directly at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
Want to go deeper? Join Lissa and Julie this September for a day-long deep dive into the imagery and meaning of your dreams. Learn more below.