Experiential Dreamwork
"It is good to interact with a dream, whether an interpretation comes or not… what is important is welcoming the dream, loving it, enjoying how imaginative it is.
- Eugene Gendlin, from Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams
A significant part of my work as a psychotherapist is to help clients strengthen their sense of self-becoming and activate their inner healing process. I often utilise working with dreams as a powerful way to help clients connect with their inner process and Soul’s longings.
Dreams are symbolic messages from our implicit, unfolding inner life. All dreams come in the service of our healing and wholeness. They have multiple meanings and layers of significance. Although they can be reoccurring or may feel familiar, all dreams are about something we do not know yet. They challenge us at times, and we may be tempted to avoid, ignore or prematurely think we understand what they’re about. We are richly rewarded if we acknowledge and "put aside" this tendency. Also, there is no such thing as a "bad dream" - only dreams that sometimes take a dramatically negative form to grab our attention.
Rather than asking, “What does this dream mean?” to interpret dreams, we can attend to the dream to get a felt sense of it. Through the felt-sensing process, we can get help from the dream and experience a felt shift and new energy, clarity, and emerging layers of meaning.
Working with your dreams regularly can help you in many ways. As a result of the experiential dreamwork, several things usually happen:
Your sense of self is enhanced by giving value to the complexity of your own inner world and its connection and interaction with the outside world.
Respecting your dreams, relating with them, and understanding them better restores your trust in your inner wisdom and guidance.
Dreams are like X-rays - they represent what is currently unfolding in your life and psyche without morality and judgment. That increases your self-awareness and helps healing of neglected elements within your psyche.
Working with dreams helps regulate emotions and expand self-awareness and resources.
Dreams often symbolise a conflict that is creating distress - understanding the dream helps you fully recognise that conflict and make necessary steps and changes.
Dreams encourage you to accept your own values, find what is ‘truly alive’ in you and become active agents of your own lives.
Dreams are creative and profound and bring a new, more soulful perspective on your life situation.
When aligned with your soul’s generative life force, the vitality you bring into personal and vocational relationships emerges.
Therapists may expect that working with dreams is very complex and requires coming up with some brilliant interpretations. However, you have the required tools to start – friendly curiosity and empathically attuned listening. When we work experientially, the dreamer relates to the dream and understands its symbology via experiencing it.
When therapists can help clients experience their dreams in a curious, open, Focusing-oriented way:
The client gains direct access to the dream’s tendency to carry their life situation forward.
Entering a dream experientially allows the dreamer to discover something new and how this often leads to a change-moment or felt shift.
Dreams point to the most relevant emotional concerns and bypass the client’s usual protective coping mechanisms (defences).
Dreams naturally bring to “the surface” something deep in the client’s psyche currently manifested in behaviour or body symptoms but without explicit memory.
This way of engaging with dreams is a creative shift away from the problem/pathology-saturated focus. It can become a natural ongoing undercurrent, both in dreaming and waking, that is always available and evolving.
My workshop, “Explore the fascinating world of dreams”, will help you learn how to work with dreams that integrate the Focusing method with Jungian depth psychology in an experiential and embodied way. It will offer you knowledge of Dreamwork principles, an introduction to a practical method and a direct experience of tending to the “living images” of dreams. When the wisdom of the dream comes to life, so do you. I invite you to take that journey.
“This is the secret of dreams
— that we do not dream,
but rather, we are dreamt.”
C. Jung
Art - Rassouli
PS – If you are curious about learning the Dreamwork but you usually can’t recall your dreams, I have a few suggestions.
Do not dismiss short dreams, not even a fragment or a single image from the dream. Even if you remember only a small bit of your dream, it often has holographic quality and touches on many aspects of your life.
Do not judge any of your dreams as not important (too ordinary or dull). The dream’s value is not in its appearance, but in the energy and connection, it opens to the larger dimension of our being.
Notice if a part of you is afraid of what your dreams may reveal. Being truth-tellers, dreams will challenge us. However, they provide us with the opportunity to come to terms with something new about ourselves and, in such a way, grow.
You can equally cultivate waking dreams.
Try this method of remembering dreams:
Begin by setting a conscious intention to remember your dreams
Place a pen and some paper next to your bed to write down the dream when it comes. As you prepare to go to bed, look at the paper and say, “Yeah, that is ready… I can reach it out when the dream comes”… It’s like inviting a dear friend to dinner - all they need is an invitation.
Use a gentle alarm to wake up in the morning (soft and soothing sounds or music). When you wake up, lay there with your eyes closed and let the dream linger.
Then, first thing in the morning, write something there, even if it is “nothing” or “something was there, but I can’t remember it yet”… Welcome anything, even if it doesn’t seem significant – even one image, a vague sense, or emotion you woke up with.
“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the psychic equilibrium”, C. Jung