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HARNESS THE POWER OF YOUR DREAMS
Modern life is filled with decisions-and with people telling us what
to do about those decisions. But, we don’t always need all that
outside advice. We could listen to the voice of our own experience,
and know exactly what to do. We could work with our dreams.
How?
Although dreams sometimes can present very literal solutions to
waking-life problems, they often illuminate aspects of ourselves that
we need to develop in order to solve those problems. Sometimes dreams
shine a spotlight on other people as a way to pinpoint a suitable
response that we are not yet utilizing. That screaming child in your
dream, for instance, may be telling you that you need to speak up more
about your concerns at work. In this way, dreams show us different
possibilities for thinking, acting, and reacting that are unimaginable
in our waking lives and provide us with a safe place to practice these
new behaviors. Eventually we can bring the new behavior out of the
dream scenes and into waking life. By practicing the following simple
techniques for incubating, mapping, and interpreting your dreams, you
can learn how to access your own deep wisdom, and also how to become
more flexible and more imaginative in your responses to the
predicaments that life tosses your way.
Dream Incubation
When you face a difficult decision in your waking life-whether or not
to change jobs or end a relationship, for instance-you can ask
yourself to dream a solution using a process called dream incubation.
First, write out your problem, formulated as a query. Gayatri recently
incubated a dream regarding her financial investments, which are going
topsy-turvy in these turbulent times. Her incubation note looked like
this: Is this the right time to sell my portfolio? Do I really feel
right about selling at a time when all my stocks are down? Should I
sell out now and accept my losses, or hold and wait to see whether
things turn around (knowing full well they might not)? Tonight I will
have a dream that gives me the answer to these questions.
It also helps to sit for a
few minutes and conjure up the feelings (anxiety, fear, excitement)
you get when you think about your problem. The process may take
several days. Each night before you go to sleep, read your note and
spend a few moments sitting with the feelings it brings forth.
Glancing at the note throughout the day can also help to melt it into
your subconscious. Then, upon waking, write down a detailed
description of every dream you remember. This description will be the
basis for mapping out, interpreting, and finding a solution in your
dream that you can apply to your waking dilemma.
Mapping Your Dream
1| Write it down. Though dream work can be done alone, you may
find it helpful to work with a partner; describing things aloud can
help you click more easily on a dream’s meaning. (For this reason,
even if you are working alone, you may find it helpful to talk out
loud.) Either way, when you wake up with a dream in your mind, write
down the dream story, leaving wide margins and plenty of space between
lines.
2| Isolate your feelings. After you’ve written a description of
the dream, write down the feelings you had during the dream on the
left side of the page, alongside the scenes where those feelings
occurred. Pay particular attention to any changes in your feelings
over the course of the dream, asking yourself how you felt at the
beginning of the dream, as different characters appeared and events
passed, and then at the end. If you are mapping someone else’s dream,
be sure to write down your partner’s exact words as he or she responds
to these questions.
3| Identify the symbols. Now isolate and circle each symbol
that appears in your dream description. Basically, any thing in a
dream can be a symbol, including objects, animals, and people. In
Melanie’s dream, for example, the stairs, the laundry basket, and the
giant man are all potential symbols. The task is to discover what the
symbol means to you, in your own unique and ever-evolving personal
dictionary. And the key to discovering your personal definitions of
these symbols is to pay attention to the feelings that they conjure up
in you. Take the common dream image of teeth falling out. For one
person, this dream might signify a concern over growing older or
entering a new phase in life. But for another, it may symbolize the
inability to control her feelings in a love relationship.
After circling the symbols in the dream description, ask yourself (or
your partner) to say a few things that come to mind about each symbol,
jotting down these comments next to the appropriate symbol. Describe
the image in detail, as if to a child or a person who has never seen
it, noting what it looks like and what it does in the dream. If the
symbol is a person, ask yourself for two or three things that come to
mind when you think about that person. Is she shy or straightforward,
or especially kind or selfish? Sometimes a person brings to mind an
incident, such as a shopping trip or an argument, rather than an
adjective. Write everything down uncensored, and do not try too hard
to figure out the symbol’s meaning if it does not come to you right
away-stick to describing the object and your feelings about it.
4| Notice the dreamscape. Now turn to the dreamscape. Where
does the dream take place? What is the first thing that comes to mind
when you think of this location? The second? You can write these
locations and their associated feelings in a separate column, or you
can treat them like symbols.
5| Plot the action. Finally, notice what happens in the dream,
putting a square around each action-or nonaction-that takes place. I
started running and I felt stuck and couldn’t move are examples of
actions/nonactions. What are you, the dreamer, doing in the dream-are
you in the action or outside the action, observing? What are other
dream characters doing? Write any comments or associations you have
about the actions in a side column or alongside the action noted.
Interpreting the Dream
After you map the dream, you can begin to interpret it. The way the
dream story mirrors your current life situation is the first layer of
meaning. The first step in interpretation is to try to see what
specific situation the dream is mirroring. At this stage, dreamers
often see the solution to a particular problem. Gayatri, who incubated
a dream with questions on her financial portfolio, dreamed that she
was in the middle of a severe monsoon storm, in charge of gathering
her nieces and nephews into the house for safety. From inside the
house, she said, the windows looked solid and protective. But when she
went outside to check them, she discovered that they were not very
secure after all. In the dream she wondered whether she should attempt
to move the children to a safer spot, but she was concerned about the
shattered glass that seemed to be everywhere.
Discovering the Solution
When Gayatri asked herself what she would do if she faced a real life
storm, her answer was immediate: “I’d wait out the storm. After all,
the house provides some security, even if not the best. And what sense
would it make for me to take the children out in the raging storm?
There was glass all around, and outside offered no protection at all.”
And that was the answer to Gayatri’s issue. As she put it. “I should
wait out the storm. I’d rather do that than sell all my stocks and
leave myself lost and exposed.” Gayatri’s experience is an example of
how a dream can solidify for you what your intuition is vaguely
sensing.
Going Deeper
Sometimes a dream’s wisdom is not so easy to find, and we have to
delve into what is called the second layer of a dream, in which we
look at each part of the dream as representing a different part of
ourselves.
Using this approach, we can sometimes discover the solution by taking
on the behavior of someone who appears in the dream and applying it in
our waking-life situation.
Here is an example given
by Layne Dalfen, a leading expert on dream analysis. A few years ago,
for instance, I wanted help in deciding whether or not to sell my
house, so I incubated a dream on this question. I closed my eyes and
let the feeling of confusion, dashed with a fear of the unknown,
surround me. Then I wrote out my query: Is this the right time to sell
the house? Do I really feel right about selling? Am I comfortable
moving on to a new space? Am I ready? Please give me a dream that
helps me find the answer to these questions.
Soon after, I dreamed that
I was in the office of my (real-life) financial adviser, but he was
not there. Instead, there was a man wearing a cowboy hat that was way
too big for him. The hat kept falling over his eyes, and the man
looked and talked like a buffoon. I was very frustrated at having to
deal with this stupid man, and I asked repeatedly to see the man I
usually deal with. Finally I told the man I was leaving and walked out
of the room.
Looking at the first layer
of the dream, I see that it took place in the office of the person who
invests for me on the stock market. In my personal symbolism, a market
is a market, whether it’s the real-estate market or the stock market,
and so this dreamscape was reflecting my current concerns about
selling my house. The solution, however, was hidden in the second
layer of the dream, in which the other people embody different aspects
of myself. The man I wanted to see is someone I consider a smart
investor. I could not find him in the dream because I could not find
the part of myself that is a smart investor. In my waking life, I was
acting like the buffoon in the cowboy hat, because I was too emotional
about the house and unable to think about it logically. Realistically,
the house (like the man’s cowboy hat) was too big for my husband and
myself, since most of our children had moved away. The dream gave me
an answer to my dilemma when it showed me walking out of the room.
Symbolically, I was walking away from the side of me that was stopping
me from making the appropriate decision. I was also walking out of my
home. We sold the house soon after and have never regretted it.
The most daunting part of dream work comes when we face those
particularly strange dreams that we all have from time to time, dreams
with a surreal jumble of locations, characters, and time periods. But
I believe that by moving away from the dream itself, and focusing on
our feelings about the people, places, objects, and actions that
appear in it, we can break through to the answers the dream holds for
us. For it is our emotions that provide our dreams with both power and
wisdom. Feelings don’t just disappear, after all, and if we don’t let
them out in our waking life, then they are bound to show up while we
sleep. Fortunately, our dreams give us the chance to acknowledge these
feelings, feel their power, and learn from their wisdom.
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