Interpretation, Passions and Core Experiences in Dream Work
Tony Crisp
My experience of exploring dreams has extended over nearly 40 years. My approach to dreams was not simply that of a professional therapist working with clients. It has also been, at times, that of a troubled human being seeking healing, and looking for answers. Because I started my dream exploration as a means of self-help, and because I was the sole breadwinner for my five children and could not afford professional help or tuition, I had to find my own way. Fortunately I did not have fixed ideas about how to approach dreams. I was a great reader at that time -- my early 20s -- and haunted the London bookshops looking for new bits to fit in the jigsaw puzzle I was gradually putting together.
My main drive was to find something that I could use, and would be of practical help in the physical pain and hopelessness I felt, and I wasn't particularly concentrating on the subject of dreams at the time. Fortunately I came across two books in the early days that gave actual examples of ordinary people such as myself, exploring their dreams and finding real transformation. One of these was The Way Within by Wyatt Rawson, published by Vincent Stuart in 1965. This gave detailed accounts of a group of lay people working together using an approach developed by P. W. Martin. The second book, by Leslie Weatherhead, was called Psychology in Service of the Soul. It was published by Epworth Press in 1929.
So my start was as a raw beginner searching through bookshops and absorbing everything I could. I went on to develop individual and group dream work: to establish one of the first human potential growth centres in the UK; to write a number of books on dreams; to become a media dream therapist; to teach dream and creative movement work in different parts of the world. (See biography).
I mention these things to give an idea of the various approaches and stages I have lived through. I hope this will qualify the things I am going to describe here.
Mostly, when people talk about understanding a dream, they often use the word interpretation. Perhaps it was Sigmund Freud who made this word popular in connection with understanding a person's dreams. It was certainly Freud who, in recent times, set in motion the view that trained professional men and women could "interpret" your dream. A great deal of Freudian analysis, and also some Jungian analysis, uses a great deal of interpretation by the therapist. In other words, the person who is seeking help and telling their dream is told by the therapist what their dream might mean.
Of course, this is not true of all dream therapists, but before we proceed, we need to understand what analysis and interpretation might achieve.
If we start with basics, the word analysis means a detailed examination of something; and interpretation suggests the explanation of something that may be obscure to us, such as a foreign language. In the case of dreams, and in connection with therapists, it usually means the professional considers the dream of the client and explains it in terms of their particular psychological theory. So for instance, if it were a Freudian therapist or psychoanalyst, the dream may be said to refer to infantile sexual needs, or some stage of growth defined by the theory, such as oral, anal, or genital. The dreamer may have no feeling of connection with this information at all. They may not be able to connect it with what they observe of themselves in their everyday life. Nevertheless, the unconscious is a huge and often dark land, and one needs some sort of map to traverse it.
Another sort of interpretation occurs when we look at our own dream in a particular way. For instance, recently I told one of my dreams to a friend via e-mail, and he wrote back saying what he thought the dream was about. A similar sort of interpretation can occur when a person tells their dream to a group, and the whole group comment on the dream.
Now, in this short article, I cannot hope to define and cover the multitude of ways the Freudian, Jungian, and the non-professional approaches to interpretation can succeed or fail. But to give some sort of idea of the range, I will use a rather black and white, or polar opposite, type of image to explore the subject. Therefore, let us say that at one end of the polar opposites there exists somebody telling you what your dream means without allowing you any real response or exploration of your own feelings and associations. At the other end of the polarity there is someone who acts as a sort of question mark, encouraging you to express your feelings and associations connecting with the dream, and letting you explore its depths.
As can be seen, there is room between those opposites to include all manner of approaches. But these opposites help to define something of importance. This is whether or not the dreamer has any opportunity to express their own feelings, their own ideas, and to discover their own internal power of healing. If there is no environment in which this can happen, then the dreamer is pushed into a relationship with the interpreter as a powerful authority figure -- perhaps even a sort of shamanistic healer.
I remember meeting a professional Jungian psychoanalyst while she was taking part in a peer dream group. That is, a group that supported the dreamer in exploring his or her own dream. After several sessions of working with the group, she said to me, "I am going home, and I am going to start a group like this. I am fed up with my dreams being torn to shreds by my professional associates."
Obviously, that is again one of the extremes. And we must remember, that within any approach, the practitioners, the quality, maturity and love they bring to the situation, can transform a poor format into a healing process.
However, the negative side of interpretation can be, as my Jungian friend suggested, a destructive process. If not that, we may simply be given ideas that might be quite interesting, even fascinating. Perhaps we are told things that dismay us, or massage our ego. But if you have ever really touched the core of a dream, you will know that those things are inconsequential. When you touch your core self, some degree of transformation always follows. That core is the fount of life. You cannot touch it without becoming wiser, and in some way healed or grown.
I will give some examples to illustrate what has been said. To start with here is a man's dream, Greg, experienced near the beginning of his interest in dreams.
I was walking down a hill, through the woods. When I came to the fields, they were so deeply flooded, that my dog and I could only walk on the path. I looked around for a stone to throw into the water for my dog to swim after, but could only find a tiny piece of bark. I threw it in, wondering in fact, whether he would follow -- he leapt into the water. When the bark hit the water, it looked as if a bomb had hit the water. The exploded impact area then turned into a whirlpool. My dog was dragged beneath the surface by the current.
Looking at his dream Greg described it in the following way:
My dog represents the ability to see in the dark, and roam far and wide in the night. He is unleashed instincts, sexual attraction, doubts, cynicism, animal certainty, but not intellect. The dream is possibly a response to the starting of my dream journal, and an explanation of the likely results. I throw what seems to be a harmless thing into the dream layer, and it explodes, causing a whirlpool. The ego is not threatened, but the instincts certainly are, and this is difficult to understand.
Greg ends by saying that it "it is difficult to understand". He is admitting that his interpretation doesn't really unfold the drama of the dream. It hasn't led him to feel the explosive and life-threatening forces the dream depicts. Maybe he is looking at them, but they are still at a remove. Remember that the dream is fashioned out of his own core emotions and passions. Therefore his admittance that he doesn't understand tells us he still has not met those passions.
Most attempts at dream interpretation are like that. Perhaps they are something like reading a book. We are involved, we are interested, we may even be educated, but we are not living the story. There is a difference between thinking about something and experiencing it. As I have said elsewhere, reading about swimming in the ocean, or talking about it, or thinking about it, are completely different to the experience of actually doing it. Getting to core feelings in a dream are the same as swimming in the ocean.
What Greg did however, is near to being one of the extremes of the polarities. And, as already said, there are many degrees of interpretation. This next example shows us what can happen as we get nearer to touching the core. This dream comes from another man, Alan.
I was with my wife who was sunbathing nude sitting in a deck chair. She wanted me to have sex with her but I declined. Instead I stuck my thumb in her vagina, but she said this didn't satisfy her.
Alan did not attempt to interpret his dream as Greg did. He was working with a dream group and said he would like to explore his dream. He started to describe his dream to the group, but as soon as he did so he began to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, and suddenly knew what the dream expressed. In a stumbling way, he told what he felt to the group, saying, "As I am telling this to you, I know what it says, and I feel embarrassed. It is saying that I am not really a man, and don't know how to have a proper sexual relationship. This because, sex for me is a sort of thumb suck, a comforter, rather than a shared meeting and merging."
Every dream we have is a very personal thing, and Alan, in talking about his dream, met very personal feelings. He was courageous enough to tell these to his group, and in doing so confronted what he felt about himself when seen in that light. This is very different to what happened with Greg. After a few days, Greg could only vaguely remember his interpretation. It had not touched him deeply. It had not etched itself into his life. Alan met something quite different. What he experienced was never forgotten. Also it was very new for him to recognise that aspect of his relationship with sex. I say recognise, rather than think about. Alan did not "think about" if he had an infantile relationship with sex. He was not told this by a therapist in a way that left him wondering. Alan experienced his own infantile sexual feelings, and knew.
Below is a fuller exploration of a dream in which the dreamer was supported in allowing full expression of what was felt and understood.
I was standing in an open space on sloping ground facing downhill. It had a feeling about it of the garden where I used to live in Piggots Orchard. There were differences however. There didn’t appear to be any fences, and any houses seemed to be nestling among trees and not crammed together. As I stood my attention was on a conservatory or summerhouse that was gently flying around the area, about a hundred or so metres up. I felt very happy watching, and with a smile, because in the conservatory, which was quite sturdily built, were an elderly couple who I knew. The man was not clear in my mind, but the woman I understood on waking, was the actress who played the part of the elderly woman in the film Green Fried Tomatoes.
I felt connected with the couple and felt love for them and laughter. I felt to myself something like - look at that couple of crazy buggers flying around in their summer house. They don’t give a damn what people think. They’ve got this magic that can lift them off in their summer house.
The couple signalled to me in some way to tell me to move my arms in a circle above my head in the opposite direction they were flying. I did this and the summer house then moved in a circle the opposite way. I feel it was going anti-clockwise and it turned to go clockwise. I could feel a connection with them, in a similar way one does when holding the steering wheel of a car. You can sense the energy or power of the car - not only through the wheel, but through the seat of your pants. In this same sort of way I could feel the movements of my arms connect with the movement and energy of the conservatory. As this happened I felt a particularly loving connection with the woman. I loved her crazy eccentricity, and that of the couple.
I was a bit anxious about working with the group as I hadn’t opened myself to them before. As I started though I felt okay and there were no hesitations. I told the dream and felt changes in my body and feeling state. I felt happy and laughing, and also a rising up feeling, an opening.
It was suggested that I be the flying summer house. This was a lovely feeling. I described myself as being well-built, built with skill and with strong material. Until recently I had been well fastened to the ground and a house. But I had felt filled with a lightness that had lifted me up. I had broken the connections that used to hold me anchored. There was something I felt deep in me about this that I wanted to communicate. It felt like a powerful feeling and at first came out only as a loud cry.
Someone asked me what had enabled me to fly. I immediately felt it as something generated by the couple. It was love, a sort of love that wasn’t locked onto one person, one place. It was a love that had the sort of easy, laughing eccentricity of the couple. At this point I began to feel a lot of emotion. It was very powerful, to do with the beauty of being free and mobile and uplifted.
Caroline asked me what it was like to be the couple, or something about the couple. I immediately identified with the man, saying something like - I am an old man. I have learned to love this one woman. Through the years of difficulty I have found my love for this woman. Through the changes of age I have found love, and the love has gradually changed me. It led to the death of love. But in its place something is growing. Something that is a finer love, a touch of the spirit. This was at the same time incredibly beautiful and painful. So much so at the beginning I could hardly breath. Energy was pouring through me and my body was shaking and my breath going through many changes of pace.
To understand what was said I explained that I had been married for a long time and recently my marriage had broken up so we were no longer together. For a long time I had been worried because I could no longer love in the same way. I felt a change was going on but was unclear. The dream was showing me that a much freer and broader love was emerging.
Basically though it was about love continuing through the face of its own death and the changes arising from old age. It was about love continuing in the face of difficulties, in the face of losing all the things that stimulate love in the everyday sense, in the purely sexual sense. It was about what I sense is emerging into my life through bearing with this direction and the strange stresses it has let loose in my life. I felt as if the elderly couple depict what I sense, or what my intuition tells me, can become of myself in my old age - a couple of eccentric old buggers who are silly enough to let life express through them, and therefore let the magic of life express in the everyday world.
Someone, Miche or Chris, asked me what it meant to move my arms about. This was even more deeply felt and took a long time to emerge. Again it was an intuition, or an encompassing sense I have of my life and what I do with my life, my hands, and my arms. I said something like - What one does with ones life, what we will from a good heart, is the will of life. We are life. Our actions connect with the larger life around us.
I felt as if my hands were not simply expressing my desires or will, but were also part of the larger life of which I am a part. I didn’t feel as if I were a special person or divine being, just as an ordinary person, connected, as everyone is, with the extraordinary reality of life - that our ordinary life is part and parcel of the extraordinary. The experience put me on the spot of meeting the depth of feeling about this, feeling how amazing this is, that each of us are inextricably linked with the immensity of life, but that often our vision is so circumscribed that we fail to see this, and therefore fail to feel the impact of this fact.
My hands were shaking and moving, trembling. Movements were made that I did not fully understand, except that they were exploring the sense of being both Tony as an individual, and being Tony a part of life. In the end I touched my body as a sort of blessing. This expressed the wonderful paradox. That one was a single independent entity, and yet one was never self-existent, but always nothing more, nothing less, than life itself.
I also felt that the action of moving my arms in the dream had in it the suggestion that what I do now with the activities of my life, what I express in my life at the moment, helps create the future that I face, the direction I go. I know this is pretty obvious, but because of the imagery and feelings of the dream, because of the beauty and love felt, it had in it great hope and wonder. The hope that my life and the life of the partner I am with can become beautifully crazy and offbeat - that our lives might demonstrate without any show of high social position or power, the loveliness of life and love, the power to exist without being tied to the material world exclusively. I suppose what I mean here, if I can define it, is that often we feel our survival depends upon holding fast to a relationship, a job, money and maintaining control of the direction of our life and social place. There was a nice sense of living from something else in the dream, of a loving connection.
Then I think it was Miche, asked about the summer house again, because I had left it before saying fully who or what I was as the summer house. This was a beautiful extension of things I had touched before. I said in this role that I was something Tony had built. That I was something that Tony found difficult to see. Tony finds it difficult to see what he has built with his life. Our life, Tony’s life, is not simply here and now, not simply this body, this place. It includes all the actions, all the things, all the people that his life has entered into over the years. What we build with our life has a life of its own. What we give of ourselves into the lives of other people, what we build in the way of objects or ideas, has a life independent of us. All of this is our life. What Tony has built is going on independently of him. I as the summer house show that he has built something that has windows, that let’s light in, something that is moving and being outside of him, and that he can still be involved in and continue to be a part of in the future.
I find it difficult to put into words the depth of feeling I had about this wonderful fact that our life is more than we usually grasp. It was an odd insight in that thinking about it I see that at birth we have a sort of beginning as a physical object in the external world, in the social world. From that moment on we enter into other peoples lives through our relationship with them. We also interact with our environment in a way to leave marks, or things in the world - a diary, initials scratched on a tree, something we make or create, such as a painting or poem. Over the years we leave a widening wake of such things and relationship events. So our ‘life’ becomes a sort of reality in the world apart from us, although we are may still be contributing to it.
At the end of this I felt that our life when given to others can extend on into infinity. In that way we enter into eternity in some mysterious and expanding way. I felt that by itself our life is nothing. It ends when it ends. But if it has been given away, it is lost in the progress of life. I felt I willingly gave my life over to that remarkable and wonderful mystery.
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