Processing Dreams

Gaining Insight Into Your Dreams

Below are described simple techniques that make it possible to quickly gain information from your dreams. They have been put as a series of questions. If you take time to consider and answer the question you will find your way into a new experience of dream understanding. At the end is an example of a man exploring his dream is this way – Example.

What is the background to the dream?

The most important aspects of your everyday life may have influenced the dream or feature in it. Briefly consider any aspects of your life that connect with what appears in the dream.

Example: “I have a plane to catch. I get to the plane but the suitcase is never big enough for my clothing which I have left behind. I am always anxious about stuff left behind. I wake still with the feeling of anxiety.” Jane. LBC.

When asked, Jane said plane flights had been a big feature in her life. She had moved home often, travelling to different parts of the world, leaving friends and loved one’s behind. This background therefore suggests Jane still feels anxious about all she has left behind in her moving.

If you find obvious connections such as that in your dream consider what that means in terms of the events and situations shown in your dream. For instance Jane’s dream shows her feeling anxious about what has been left behind. So she needs to acknowledge that and seek ways of understanding why she feels that way, and what is it in her present situation that she still feels has been lost or left. Methods will be given below that will help you do this.

What is the main action in the dream – what are you doing?

There is often an overall activity such as walking, looking, worrying, building something, or trying to escape. Define what the action is and give it a name, such as those listed or something like ‘waiting’ – ’searching’ – ‘following’.

To understand what your definition means, activities such as walking or building a house represent just what they show – going somewhere and building something new, or repairing something in your life. Walking can simply represent taking a direction in life or going somewhere, and building can be seen as creating something new or developing what already exists in your life. Picking something up can mean you are interested or involved in some way. When you have defined what you are doing, look for further information in the entries in the on-site Dream Dictionary, such as swimming, sitting, climbing, or working. Having considered the general meaning of whatever your dream action is, consider if it is expressive of something you are doing in waking life, and what the dream plot and characters comment on this.

A simple example of this is as follows:

Dreamt I was involved in having a prostitute work for me. Terry.

On looking at my dream and wondering why the prostitute was working for me it was obviously to do with love and sex. What it showed me was that I always try to use love and sex for personal gain. It always has to be on my terms instead of loving a person for their own sake.

Here is another example:

I had met a man, and he had asked me to visit him. I was looking for him in an enormous hospital. It was unlike any hospital I have seen, because of its patients. . I felt frightened/sick/nauseated being near these people. There was something wrong about them all. Many of them had blankets covering their heads so they could not be seen. This was because they were so awful to see.

The dreamer was looking at and visiting a new place. So the active things he did was looking and finding something new about himself. It was something difficult to see, and made him feel sick at the thought. In fact he was discovering his own inner sickness. Later in the same dream he sees that “all the people were in some way – not ill or injured – but malformed, distorted, I became less frightened. I understood from the doctors they had no treatment for them. Then I saw some of their faces. One woman walked by, and I could see that underneath her distortion she was beautiful. All these people, I could see, underneath were human souls in need of help.”

The action then is not only recognising his inner malformations, but also seeing how each one is either beautiful or worth saving, so a great transformation occurs.

What is your role in the dream?

Are you a friend, lover, soldier, dictator, watcher or participant in the dream? Consider this in relationship with your everyday life, especially in connection with how the dream presents it.

The different roles or themes you play in your dreams, such as actor, lawyer, soldier or cook, usually represent the different abilities, weaknesses or interests you have. We all have different roles in everyday life. So a woman can be cook, lover, mother, counsellor, businesswoman, accountant, etc. A man can be a worker, father, a gardener, a handyman or builder, a chauffeur, artist, and so on. What is important is to see if you can get at is why the dream is showing you in that role and how it is relevant to your life at the moment. Therefore define what skills the role has, and see what the dream is commenting on them in regard to yourself. Where possible, look for the entry on the role in.

Other characters in your dream will also suggest other roles that are worth defining in relationship with yourself. Using the approach suggested in Be a different character can help define these roles. Below is an example:

Feeling tired – exhausted – just lying drained of energy. I am conscious of people talking, saying I was ill. I thought I was just tired. Then asked what the matter was. I was told it was my heart, ‘dry and hard like a boiled egg’ they said. Found I couldn’t talk. Tried to write, wanted A. to know that I loved him, but the pen kept drying up. Finger and feet began to get cold. An icy coldness slowly spread all over my body. A liquid warmth was then all around me. I thought I was hemorrhaging. A needle was stuck in my left arm and my chest was being cut open – it didn’t hurt. There was a lot of activity. They said I had gone. I was trying desperately to let them know I was still there. Then I was in a bag and sliding off a table. The bag was tied above my head. Then from the confined darkness I was free. There was a brilliant light all around. I could still see the sack with a body still in it far behind me. I was incredibly happy and full of energy. Trish L.

Well, what do you make of the dream? What is suggested by Trish’s hard-boiled heart? What does it imply that Trish is ‘gone’ but still there?

There are several themes here that are worth noting. The first is the theme of tiredness. Then there is the theme surrounding her heart and the inability to express her feelings. Perhaps we can contain those two by saying it is about ‘emotional dryness’ or coldness. Then there is the theme of death/life, neatly packaged together. And something that we might miss is that overall an enormous change is going on. Trish changes from feeling exhausted and dying, to being ‘incredibly happy and full of energy’.

This gentle relationship with your dream is so important, let’s look at another dream just for practice. It is a dream told to me while I was the dream therapist with London Broadcasting Company.

I grew up in Barbados and lived with my mother in a shack. While I was there I started having a dream that I have had occasionally ever since. In the dream I was getting married and was at home dressing for the marriage, looking in a brown, peeling old mirror. The dream always ends here. Pam.

This dream is not quite as obvious as the previous one. I use it because it will help you see how dreams use certain means to depict a theme or attitude. Don’t get confused by details. Ask yourself what Pam is doing, what are the overall actions or situations?

Well, Pam is thinking/feeling things about marriage. So that is one of the themes. When Pam told me the dream I asked her if she had ever got married. She said no. So that is a further clue.

Sometimes it is helpful to consider how the word ‘I’ is used. For instance Pam says ‘I was getting married’. The ‘I’ word is used to denote something we connect with strongly. If I take some examples from other dreams, we have, ‘I could hardly breathe’ – ‘I was in a room with my brother’ – ‘I was really terrified’.

What Pam says apart from the marriage is, ‘I was …… looking in a brown peeling old mirror.’

What might be missed here can be grasped if you think of the dream as a piece of drama, like a television film. What Pam is enacting is looking at herself with thoughts of marriage. What sort of image does she have of herself? It is of a country girl who can only afford a peeling brown old mirror. So the theme here is self-image. It is about how Pam may be seeing or judging herself.

Looking at them in this way, take some time with your own dreams. Even this simple step can be very revealing, especially when used with a series of your dreams. Often great insights arise from this alone.

What do You bring to Your Dreams?

Something that is obvious as you watch not only your own dreams, but other people’s, is that that we take into their sleep and dreams all the fears, terrors, sexual questions and longings, as well as all their speculations and beliefs. The huge bear, tiger or frightening person they are terrified of is actually fears either inherited or are frightening experiences from the past. They are purely mental things that you haven’t faced, and therefore are the victims of – victims of your own fears.  Obviously that only applies to those dreams that are frightening, to the people whose sleep is disturbed by thoughts and fears and so can never sleep well. The number is of these is enormous.

But see if you can list what you take into the dream you are considering. Is it fear, inspiration, sexual feelings, something new, worry – whatever it is write it down. Then ask yourself what that means.

Here is an example of how a dreamer carries a mass of false information, beliefs and speculations into her dream.

In my dream I was in the hospital giving birth I could feel the strong pain medicine working and I assume I had been given an epidural. I held my same sex partner’s hand and she comforted me. Soon after I was handed a beautiful baby girl whom I decided to name Veridian my mom tried to convince me to name her something else but I refused. The child slept in my arms and my partner held my hand still. Then I woke up. It was strange because I was brought to tears upon waking up and finding the beautiful baby girl not in my arms. I have never had any desire to have children and I know it would be impossible to be impregnated naturally by my partner but yet I was so drawn to this child it was an instant bond and upon realizing it was all a dream I have been very emotional when reminded of the child. I am also in my teens so I have absolutely no need or ability to be impregnated because I would never cheat on my love.

The dreamer carried into her dream a fear that birth would be painful and she would need drugs to mitigate the pain. Then she carried in the feeling of disagreement with her mother. She also believes that the only way to have a dream baby is through sex with a male. Also she says that she doesn’t want a child, but her feelings in the dream and her emotions show otherwise.

An even bigger problem is shown in the girls dream. She has the body of a healthy woman, a body which is built and has inbuilt urges to create a child, yet she is totally unaware of this. Such a separation between her basic life urges and her conscious personality leads to tension and neurosis. Of course she could decide never to have children, but to block the natural urge entirely can cause troubles. Such splits in our nature put us at odds with ourselves.

Are you active or passive in the dream?

By passive is meant not taking the leading role, being only an observer, being directed by other people and events. It can also mean you are abused, bullied, or constantly end in unsatisfactory or unfulfilled situations in your dreams.

If you recognise these situations in your dreams consider if you live similar attitudes in your life. In other words are you passively accepting what happens to you and how people relate to you? Do you need to wait for other people to direct or give you motivation?

For the sake of research, a group of young women in a creative writing class was divided into two groups – those who were spontaneously creative in their written work and those who were not. They were then asked to record their dreams over a period of time. The non-creative girls had a large percentage of dreams in which they were sexually passive, accepted secondary roles and felt vulnerable. The creative girls had a high percentage of dreams in which they were actively satisfying themselves, creating non-conventional settings and experiencing open sexual encounters. The results show that habitual attitudes and responses to everyday life are reflected in what we dream.

Enormous change can be made in your life if you recognise an overall tendency in your dreams such as being passive. The change can come about by using the technique described below, of carrying the dream forward – in the section Am I meeting what I fear or dislike in my dream?.

What do you feel in the dream?

Many dreams can be understood simply by what you feel in the dream. If you take the images away from the dream and simply look at what is felt and look for those feelings in your everyday life, you can often arrive at understanding. So define what is felt emotionally and physically.

In the physical sense are you tired, cold, relaxed or hungry? In the emotional sense did you feel sad, angry, lost, tender or frightened anywhere in the dream? This helps clarify what feelings your dream is dealing with. It is important also to define whether the feelings in the dream were satisfyingly expressed or whether held back. If held back they might need fuller expression. See: Emotions and Mood in Dreams. Consider where the feelings of the dream appear in your everyday life, and what comment the dream is making about them.

What is the Relationship with any Human or Animal Figures?

Most dreams depict relationship in one form or another. Some dreams however, specifically show us in a particular relationship. Such dreams are usually highly significant in that they reveal aspects of what we are doing in the relationship that we may not admit or realise consciously. It can therefore be transformative to gain insight into any dreams that show us in relationship with present partners or lovers.

Example: I was with Lorna, a woman I was having a relationship with but not committed to. She told me she was pregnant. I said to her this was impossible and it couldn’t be my child. She looked at me and shrugged saying ‘Okay, I’m not pregnant’. N. C.

On exploring the dream N. realised the enormous feelings involved. He had not realised consciously that Lorna had completely offered herself to him in their relationship. The dream shows him rejecting this complete offering of her sexuality and womanhood, and her turning away when he rejected her. This had actually happened, but Neal had not been conscious of what was occurring between them. The dream enabled him to realise how he pulled away from a woman’s full flow of self expression, and begin to change this.

What is the drama in the dream?

Each dream is a little piece of life drama. Try to define what your dream is saying by looking at it as if it were a scene you had witnessed on television or in a film.

Example: I was in the basement of what seemed like a house I used to live in. I was perhaps washing up or tidying the place. I looked to my right where there was a door leading to old coal cellars. Through it walked the ghost of a cat, shining with a white light. Seeing the cat terrified me. I was so frightened that when someone walked down the stairs to my left, I was sure it was a dark shape coming to do me harm.

In the example it is deep fear that is dramatised. But the setting suggests the dreamer is in a known and easy place – his old home. But being a basement it suggests an area of himself he seldom frequents. It is ‘downstairs’ or in memories usually in the dark. The cat, despite being frightening to the dreamer, doesn’t harm him, and in fact is shining. So what is dramatised is a mixture of fear about something haunting him from his past experiece, and something with possibly beautiful qualities. In other words he is being ‘haunted’ by old feelings in his otherwise well organised everyday life. The dream shows the feelings originating from events experienced in a previous house or period of his life.

When you look at your dream in this way, take the setting first. This is like the backdrop of a theatre or the first scenes in a film. They tell the story of where and in what economic, in what mood or atmosphere, and what period of time the drama takes place. When you define what the drama is suggesting, see if you can link this with feelings or situations you face at the moment. If so what is your dream suggesting about those things?

The following dream illustrates a setting.

Dreamt I was in a large building in a room full of people. I was looking for the way. The building was like my old school and also a hospital. In looking for my way I went into another room. A class was taking place. There was a woman teaching who looked like a nun, but also a sister or matron of the hospital. When I saw her I felt very great respect for her, and saluted her as one might a guru. Somebody, perhaps this woman, gave me directions. It seemed to be a U shaped route- that is, an introverted U.

The first part of the dream is the setting. It is a situation involving the dreamer in contact with many people – thus social relationships. It is also a school and hospital, suggesting learning, or the dreamer’s past experience of school, and healing or sickness. The action of the dream is to do with looking for the ‘way’, his direction in life. Then the drama of the dream takes place. It shows an awareness of personal direction arising out of felt respect.

So the dream shows the person feeling lost, and thus looking for ‘direction’. This also means learning something and moving toward a healing or healthy change.

Is there a ‘because’ factor in the dream?

In many dreams something happens, fails to happen, or appears, because! For instance, trapped in a room you find a door to escape through. All is dark beyond and you do not go through the door ‘because’ you are frightened of the dark. In this case the because factor is fear. If this were your dream it would suggest you are trapped in an unsatisfying life situation through fear of opportunity or the unknown. Understanding the because factor can help you become aware of what is holding you back, or aiding your progress in waking life.

What is the because factor in your dream?

Looking at the ‘I’

If you have written the dream down, look to see where you have used the word ‘I’. For instance a man dreaming about running toward tunnels said “I had to decide which tunnel to enter.” If this is simplified we can see that the person is saying they were making a decision.

So take note of whatever is said after the word ‘I’ – whether I want; I was willing; I didn’t like; I left it behind, etc. – and consider what connection such things have to everyday life. What decisions in waking life was the man making who dreamt of tunnels for example?

Am I meeting the things I fear or dislike in my dream?

Because a dream is an entirely inward thing, we create it completely out of our own internal feelings, images, creativity, habits and insights. So even the monsters of your dream are a part of yourself. If you run from them it is only aspects of yourself you are avoiding – basically feelings you are unwilling to meet; memories you don’t want to face; talents and potential you deny. But you can never escape yourself, so you might as well find a way of internal ease. Through defining what feelings, events or situations occur in the dream you may be able to clarify what it is you are avoiding.

It is also helpful to replay the dream several times while awake and relaxed, and imagine facing or meeting the things you fear or are running away from. It is of enormous help also to rephrase, or rescript the underlying messages attached to your fears.

For instance you may have had very reasonable fears as a baby/child that your mother would abandon you – perhaps because you went into hospital and felt abandoned. So the original message might have been, “The person I love and utterly depend upon can leave me and I am powerless to make her love me in a way to bind her to me.” The new message might be, “I am not a baby any longer, and can actually survive alone, though I love having a partner to share love with. So I don’t need to feel complete panic when there is any sign of them withdrawing or getting emotionally distant.”

This needs to be done over and over again to develop a new habit of relaxed relationship or response to a life situation. Sometimes it is a shift of attitude you need. The following dream illustrates this.

I ran away from home because I was found out for skipping school. I ended up in a chip shop with some friends. I saw my brothers and a friend out of the window. They told me my older sister had died of a heart attack. Then with my sister’s boyfriend, who told me she was already buried, and only my mum had been at the funeral. Cathy – Teletext

Cathy makes the move of being independent in her dream, but does so to avoid problems rather than face them. Being independent – running away from home – means making your own decisions and being strong enough to live them. If Cathy did leave her family behind like this she would worry if any mishap occurred. It’s a big step to sink or swim by yourself, and let others do the same. So Cathy could try being independent using another attitude than ‘running away’. See: nightmares; Carryying the Dream Forward under peer dream group; spiritual life in dreams .

What economic, political, social or sexual situation does the dream show you in?

None of us exist in a vacuum. Like fish immersed in water, we live, sometimes unconsciously, in a social environment; in a paradigm that colours the way we see the world; in an economic situation; in a gender that relates us to other people and opportunities in particular ways; and sometimes within the boundaries set by religious beliefs, family attitudes or personal habits. These factors may not be shouting at you from the foreground, but it can enormously enlarge the information your dream portrays if you can see what background they give to the foreground of the dream.

What does the dream mean?

We alone create the dream while asleep. Therefore, by looking at each symbol or aspect of the dream, we can discover from what feelings, thoughts or experience, what drive or what insight we have created the drama of the dream. In a playful relaxed way, express whatever you think, feel, remember or fantasy when you hold each symbol in mind. Say or write it all, even the seemingly trivial or ‘dangerous’ bits. It helps to act out in imagination the part of each thing if you can. For instance as a house you might describe yourself as “a bit old, but with open doors for family and friends to come in and out. I feel solid and dependable, but I sense there is something hidden in my cellar.”

Such statements often graphically portray you. Consider whatever information you gather as descriptive of your waking life. Try to summarise it, as this will aid the gaining of insight. For further information on how to do this see Step Four in peer dream group.

When doing this remember that dreams are multidimensional in a certain sense, just like words in a sentence. Morton Hunt, in his book The Universe Within illustrates how words have an unusual dimension. For instance, what do you make of the following sentence? “Mary heard the ice-cream truck coming down the street. She remembered her birthday money and ran into the house.”

You have probably already got an image of Mary, her age, skin colour, an approximation of what she is dressed in, and what she is doing. You believe she is going to buy an ice cream and she is young. But where does it say this in the sentence? And if you change any of the words – say truck for bus or money for gun, an entirely new image of Mary arises.

The factors relating to how we extract meaning out of words and images is crucial when considering our dreams. In our dreams any one factor – such as Mary, alters enormously in its meaning because of its context with the other dream factors, such as objects, people, setting and plot or theme. Get a sense of this overall connection when looking at the various parts of your dream.

Can you amplify the dream?

You will need the help of one or two friends to use this method. The basis is to take the role of each part of the dream, as described above. This may seem strange at first, but persist. Supposing your name is Julia and you dreamt you were carrying an umbrella, but failed to use it even though it was raining, you would talk in the first person present – “I am an umbrella. Julia is carrying me but for some reason doesn’t use me.” Having finished saying what you could about yourself, your friends then ask you questions about yourself as the dream figure or object. These questions need to be simple and directly about the dream symbol. So they could ask – Are you an old umbrella? Does Julia know she is carrying you? What is your function as an umbrella? Are you big enough to shelter Julia and someone else? – and so on.

The aim of the questions is to draw out information about the symbol being explored. If it is a known person or object you are in the role of – your father for instance – the replies to the questions need to be answered from the point of view of what happened in the dream, rather than as in real life. Listen to what you are saying about yourself as the dream symbol, and when your questioners have finished, review your statements to see if you can see how they refer to your life and yourself.

If you are asking the questions, even if you have ideas regarding the dream, do not attempt to interpret. Put your ideas into simple questions the dreamer can respond to. Maintain a sense of curiosity and attempt to understand – to make the dream plain in an everyday language sense. Lead the dreamer toward seeing what the dream means through the questions. When you have exhausted your questions ask the dreamer to summarise what they have gathered from their replies. For more information about this see Step Four in peer dream group.

Summarise

To summarise effectively gather the essence of what you have said about each symbol and the dream as a whole and express it in everyday language. Imagine you are explaining to someone who knows nothing about yourself or the dream. Bring the dream out of its symbols into everyday comments about yourself.

For instance a man dreamt about a grey, dull office. When he looked at what he said about the office, he realised he was talking about the grey, unimaginative world he grew up in after the second world war, and how it shaped him.

See: Introduction to Dream Watching for full leads to useful features on exploring your dreams.

Carry the dream forward

Imagine yourself in the dream and continue it as a fantasy or daydream. Alter the dream in any way that satisfies. Experiment with it, play with it, until you find a fuller sense of self expression. It is very important to note whether any anger or hostility is in the dream but not fully expressed. If so, imagine a full expression of the anger or feelings. It may be that as this is practised more anger is openly expressed in subsequent dreams. This is healthy, allowing such feelings to be vented and redirected into satisfying ways. In doing this do not ignore any feelings of resistance, pleasure or anxiety. Satisfaction occurs only as we learn to acknowledge and integrate resistances and anxieties into what we express.

If there are resistances to changing the dream, these show there is a difference in what you want, and what you feel unconsciously, or what your core self wishes. If you can, relate to any feelings of resistance as if they are sources or voices of realisation and information. Do not push them aside, but let them unfold to see if you can understand where they are arising form and what their message is. Only then can you move on, having cleared a blockage within you.

This is a very important step. It gradually changes those of our habits that trap us in lack of satisfaction, poor creativity or inability to resolve problems.

Example: When my husband died, for quite a few times I had this funny dream. I was walking along a field and saw a lot of sheep guiding me, and I followed them. Suddenly they disappeared into a cave. I went in the cave and a row of mummies were there. One was wearing a medallion on a chain round its neck. The dream recurred quite often.

One day Tony came to me and I told him the dream. He asked me to sit in a chair and relax, which I did. Then he said for me to go to the cave, and in my relaxed state I went and walked to the mummy with the medallion. Then he said take off the bandage from the top. As I unwound it the face of my dead husband was uncovered. I screamed and screamed and came out of the relaxation. Tony then said now let him go. I have never had that dream since. Betty E.

Use the body to discover dream power

The brain sends impulses to all the muscles to act on the movements we are making while dreaming, but usually a part of the brain inhibits these movements while we dream. Occasionally however the action of the dream wakes us enough for these impulses to move or cry out to break through the inhibition and we observe ourselves thrashing about in bed, or kicking and shouting.

But there are more subtle sides of us that are seen or felt in expressions of our face and postures of our body. You can explore these by reproducing them on your face or body and hold them for a while. While doing it use the The Keyboard Condition and allow your feelings and body to express freely. To help with this you need to remember what you were doing n the dream, the posture, the movement is even the expression, and hold it or reproduce it while holding the image and feelings of the dream. See Life’s Little Secrets

The important factor is that a dream is more than a set of images and emotions, frequently it is also powerful urges to express physically and emotionally. These are usually movements and emotions we are not allowing ourselves to express while awake, otherwise we would not be dreaming them.

If we explore a dream sitting quietly talking to a friend, even if we allow emotions to surface, we may miss important aspects of our dream process. Through physical movement or reproducing expressions or postures the dream process releases tensions and deeply buried memories that are stored in our body. These do not release and heal by simply talking about them. Exploring a dream while awake appears to avoid the inhibitory influence and allows the spontaneous impulses to move.

It is often enough to realise this aspect of dream exploration is possible for such spontaneous movements to emerge when necessary. By being aware of the body’s need to occasionally be involved in expression of dream content, we may catch the cues and let these develop. Frequently all you need to do is to let the body doodle or fantasise while exploring a dream.

Jung suggested this technique for times when the person was stuck in intellectual speculation. To practice it you can take a dream image and let the hands spontaneously doodle, watching what is gradually mimed or expressed. When you have gained skill doing this, let the whole body take part in it. This can unfold aspects of dreams that the other approaches might no help with. See: Movements During Sleep. A fuller description of this process is contained in Life’s Little Secrets and Liberating the Body.

Example: Here the dreamer  takes up the posture or movement in the dream. I was a helper once with Dave who dreamt of a cop sitting astride a powerful motorbike. Dave had failed to understand this part of the dream using other methods. So we built a pile of cushions for him to sit astride. He sat there for a while and when we asked how he felt he said, “Powerful.” Dave had been feeling a lack of power to do things or to accomplish anything. As he acted out the posture and feeling of being on the bike he could feel the power in his body and the confidence in himself to do what he wanted. It wasn’t simply the dream confidence, it was Dave’s own strength that he could now experience. As is suggested with Dave, this acting out can be a group action. Non of us actually got in on the act with Dave, but sometimes it helps to get other people involved in the drama, as when you want someone to resist, or someone to hold.

Be a different character, or have a dialogue between two charcters or objects

Every part of a dream, whether an object, person or animal, is alive with your own intelligence. Each part has been created out of you in some way, and depicts some area of your own total being. You can therefore talk with a dream person, animal or object. Such dialogue is of great importance and very revealing.

To do this, imagine yourself as one of the characters, animals or objects in your dream, as described above. It may help at first to have two chairs – one empty and one you are sitting in. The character or object of your dream is in the empty chair. When you are ready to be that character move from your chair, sit in the empty chair and speak as that character. To answer or question the character from your own identity, move to the original chair and speak from your own character.

Be playful and curious in doing this. Question the character, and when you move to that role, let whatever your feelings are as that character motivate what you say and do. Exploring your dream in this way unfolds a great deal of information that would otherwise remain unconscious. It also enables you to make real changes in unconscious attitudes or habits, as you are literally dialoguing with areas of character patterning or programming, and can change them or learn from them.

People often say ‘But is what I am saying true or relevant?’ They ask this because they are worried that if they let themselves play they will confuse themselves or produce something meaningless. It doesn’t matter if what you say and do is complete fantasy. Everything you produce is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It either has relevance to your life and fits in by explaining something to you, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t explain anything, or fit into your life, put it to one side. The aim is to constantly consider what connection what you discover has with everyday life. This gradually filters out the amazing flights of fantasy we sometimes have about spiritual ideals, philosophy and hopes. The real bits of the jigsaw explain you not only to your own satisfaction, but are also to cynical strangers.

Example: When I spoke as the new born baby of my dream I really felt as if this was me, newly born. I had a difficult birth and my reaction was that I wanted nothing to do with life. I wanted to stay curled up like an egg, not getting involved in the exterior world.

My adult observing self could see how this baby part of me had led me to be withdrawn from social activity all my life, so I explained this to the baby me, saying – I need you to be ready to meet the world with me. You are a part of me and if you continue to withdraw I lack the enthusiasm to get involved with other people. So I really need you.

Back as the baby I felt totally vulnerable and didn’t want to take any risks, said, “No I don’t want to come out of the egg.”

As the adult again I said – “Look, if you remain curled up this is more of a gamble than actually getting out and taking risks in life. Just lying there anything can get you.”

As the baby this really got to me. I felt a change in me and a readiness to begin the journey of meeting life outside the womb.

This change really made a difference to my everyday activities. A lifelong habit of being introverted gradually dropped away. Trevor P.

An Example of Using Dream Processing

The night before last I dreamt that several of my capped/crowned teeth had broken or fallen out.

What is the main action or theme in the dream?

The main action is that I become aware of my crowned teeth being loose and falling out.

What did you feel in this dream – or what emotions or feelings were experienced?

I felt concerned that my teeth were falling out, but there was another major feeling of having to do something about the situation. In other words I would now need to go to the dentist to have something done to my teeth.

What is the main action or theme in the dream?

Apart from the fact of my teeth falling out it is a confrontation with something that needs doing or given attention to.

What is your role in the dream?

I am in the central role of the one experiencing what is happening. I suppose you could say I am the one meeting or confronting the experience.

Are you active or passive in the dream?

Well, I am passive in the sense that something is happening to me and I am the recipient, but I am active in the sense that I feel something needs to be done about the situation.

Are you meeting the things you fear in your dream?

I don’t think this question particularly relates to this dream, but I am certainly not in avoiding or running away from anything.

What is the background to the dream?

This is an interesting question because a few days before the dream I had visited the dentist to have a tooth filled as the filling had come out. Something memorable happened there in that there was only one another person in the waiting room. She was a young woman in her middle thirties, I guess, and quite attractive. I felt a real urge to talk with her, but struggled with my shyness, and so sat for a long time in silence. Then I managed to ask her if she had been waiting long, and if she were the next one to go in. I could see that she appeared to be in a lot of pain and was very restless. As soon as I asked her the question she was very friendly, easy to talk with, and with a bright lively mind.

I couldn’t help thinking that I would love to have a partner such as her, and wondered how I could meet somebody like her, and whether, if I did, they would be attracted to me.

Can you amplify the dream?

I think, from what has been written above, that I do not need to amplify the dream to get at its meaning. So I will leave this question.

Summarise

It seems very clear that the visit to the dentist was the foundation upon which this dream was built. The feeling in the dream of having to visit the dentist again, or having to do something about the situation therefore seems very relevant. For instance, the fact of my teeth falling out means that there is something missing from me, from my life, which needs attention. Linking this with the fact of meeting the attractive woman in the dentist’s waiting room, suggests that I had have a deeper need and recognise the need to give some attention to finding a partner such as the woman met in the dental waiting room.

Certainly I do not feel “right” when teeth are missing from my mouth, or being without a warm and loving partner.

If I am to put keywords to this dream, they will be – relationship; loss; confrontation; needs.