Posts Tagged ‘dream work’
Changing Your Life
The following is a quote from my book The Instant Dream Book.
The following is only an example of making changes in your life by imagining different outcomes in your dream. So in reading it you can make very different choices than those given; though it does seem very important to practice any changes you make, either in visualising them, or in practical ways. And remember that tests have shown that a group that did not practice the changes did not make any progress. The group that practiced the changes physically made a 100% improvement. Those who visualised themselves practising made 75% improvement. See also for further information: Peer Dream Group; Martial Art of the Mind; Opening to Life.
IN her book, Creative Dreaming, Patricia Garfield quotes the story of Margherita, wife of the Italian writer Giovanni Guareschi. Margherita suffered a period of deep depression during which Giovanni discovered a simple way of helping her. Margherita told him of her disturbed dreams in which she wandered endlessly alone through streets and felt imprisoned by feelings of unhappiness, desire and fear.
In response to this Giovanni suggested, much to her annoyance, that in her dream she get herself a bicycle – she did not know how to drive a car.
After only a few days Margherita actually began to dream of using a bicycle and told Giovanni that her dreams were in fact made easier by it, and she awoke less tired. However, after only a week of success she fell once more into her deep depression because she had a puncture, and had again to walk. Giovanni, in his urgent attempt to help her, told her to mend the puncture in somc way. Margherita said this was not possible as she was completely alone in her dreams and did not know how to mend a puncture. So Giovanni took her into their garage and taught her how to remove the tyre and mend the puncture. He helped her to practice this until she could literally do it blindfold In this way it had become a new habit.
It took three nights of dreaming before Margherita excitedly woke to tell she had successfully mended her puncture. Her new happiness and sense of independence, real in her waking life as well as in her dream life, lasted for several months. So much dependence had grown out of her dream success, that when her next problem arose she was cast down not only in her dream but also in her waking life. While riding a mountain road in her dream, she had slipped and fallen into a steep gully, where she lay injured. Giovanni tried once more to help her, studying books on rock climbing. Margherita felt, after attempting to use these techniques, that she was too weak and injured. So Giovanni pressed her to call him in her dreams . . . call him again and again to come and help her. ‘Don’t stop calling me’ he pleaded, ‘who knows, I may hear you.’
That very night while away from home he felt sure he could feel Margherita calling him. Hurrying home he found her calmly getting a meal ready. On asking her what had happened she told him she had slept and dreamt again of being in the ravine. This time she had called him continually, and at last he had appeared, thrown a rope to her -and pulled her out of the ravine. Margherita’s summary was, ‘I am not worried any more. I now know that if I am ever in danger and I call to you, you will hear me and come.’
Just as a dream can deeply influence our waking life by its fear or pleasure, so our waking activities and imaginations deeply influence our dream life. For instance, when counselling people who find it difficult to make friends or show affection, there is a way of helping them to examine and disperse their fears. They can practice, in the counselling situation, the process of making friends and actually physically reaching out to hold hands, hug and express their feelings. For them, the act of reaching their arm out to somebody else is usually like breaking through a powerful barrier. The barrier is actually made not of bricks or wood, but of anxiety, feelings of not being likeable or being different to other people. So strong are these walls of feeling that some people remain imprisoned in them for a lifetime. Breaking through them requires new action, a revolutionary new relationship with oneself and the world.
Bill, a man Hyone and I worked with, had felt since childhood that he was physically unattractive. He had developed this feeling about himself because his mother had never shown any pleasure in handling his body as a baby. All his childhood messes and dribbles had been treated as repulsive and dirty and these feelings surrounded him in his personal prison. We asked him to feel his need for making contact with us, and when he was ready, reach out for us, but not to do so as a mechanical action. For ten or fifteen minutes he could not move, his walls of negative feeling were so strong, but gradually and with deep emotion, he came to us and held us, feeling our pleasure in response to him.
Margherita and Bill were prisoners of their own feelings. Margherita managed to break out of her prison by first learning to feel more independent and capable through the bicycle; and secondly by learning to reach out for contact and help when she needed it. Her calling in her dream was as difficult for her to achieve as it was for Bill to physically reach out to share contact. In both cases a pressure of negative feelings, almost like a resisting gravitational force, held them back. And the important point is that although not everyone has the opportunity or cash to visit a psychotherapist to help them work their way through the wall of feelings and habits which imprison them, almost everyone has the chance to do it in their dreams.
Whether we learn to meet our problems and transform our life in waking or in dreams, the results are the same. Wherever we do it, we have met the negative feeling and passed through and beyond into a new area of expression. In fact, our dreams and fantasies give us a much more varied sphere of experience in which to practice meeting our fears, making love or exploring new areas of ourselves. However we practice, we gain confidence for real-life situations. After practicing making contact with us, Bill actually met and developed a relationship with a young woman that same day. The relationship lasted several months and enriched them both. See Secrets of Power Dreaming
Patricia Garfield gives examples of several people with a naturally retiring disposition who, after meeting a dream attacker with real aggression, were able to directly ask for what they wanted in waking life. One woman asked a man smoking in a non-smoking area of an aeroplane to stop, which he did. This followed successful positive action in a dream. Beforehand she would not have dared ask for such a simple request, but would have remained angry and unsatisfied.
It might help to understand how this action of changing a few images in a dream can change our life, if we realise something about a dream symbol.
The nearest everyday thing which can help us understand a dream image is a word. If I write the word SAUCEPAN, you will find it almost impossible to have any other view of it than as a cooking implement. If this is changed a little by writing – red-hot saucepan -something different is communicated.
If you are not used to dealing with dreams, you may believe a dream image can never be likened to a word. A word has a fairly precise and commonly agreed meaning. A dream image, you might believe, is a rather random thing. But if you had not developed words for communication but had to use mime, posture, environment, to express meanings, would you use the image of someone slouched in a chair smoking to depict happiness and creativity? Our sense of body language, scenery, situation, is so acute, thousands of people can watch the same communal dream – a TV film – and feel similar responses. So, without realising it, we have commonly accepted fairly precise meanings attached to particular images, body postures, clothing and so on.
Do You Dream
Tony Crisp
Do You Dream was my first published book on dreams. I had been working with individuals on their dreams for some years, and had read and sold – through a bookshop I ran – quite a lot of books about dreams. So I wanted to write a modern rendering of the old Victorian books on dream symbols which were almost total nonsense. Unfortunately there are books still printed that reproduce such nonsense.
But the book was more than this, it gave practical tools to lay people enabling them to gain insight into their own dreams. It was certainly one of the very first to have a non-Freudian dictionary of dreams. Now there are countless dream dictionaries.
Do You Dream is still available at Amazon UK and Amazon USA.
A review of Do You Dream by Touchheart from Bay Area, CA USA
I found this gem almost 20 years ago and my copy is worn to almost uselessness from loaning it out and my own use. Excellent for good solid guidance on dream interpretation. Rather than narrowly offering one method, Mr. Crisp educates the reader about the influences at work in the dream environment and the many angles dream interpretation can be approached from. It is then up to the reader to use their own intelligence and instincts to come to a conclusion. Mr. Crisp doesn’t claim to “have all the answers” and he is generous with the knowledge he does possess. Now…where am I going to find a copy for my friend who very much wants to own a copy herself? (Mine no longer leaves the house!)
Chapters
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1. What did you dream last night 2. What is a dream 3. Getting to grips with the dream 4. Seeking to understand 5. The dream mystery explored 6. The creative dreamer 7. Active imagination 8. LSD-hypnosis-meditation-the dream 9. Tests of analysis 10. After understanding-what? 11. Using your dreams 12. A dream sampler and sleep experience THE DICTIONARY |
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This was the original cover and was published in the UK in 1971.
Word analysis of dreams
People often look at the main word in their dream, look it up, and leave it at that. But usually a dream has a main theme and several other images, people, animals or things are mentioned.
I will give an example to show how to arrive at a dream’s meaning from use of the Dream Dictionary entries. It is important to first write the dream down as fully as possible. Don’t stint on the use of words. Be descriptive. Then take the very opening scene of the dream and look it up in the appropriate entry.
Example: I was standing in the back garden of a house – one of a row of terraced houses. Each garden was fenced and ran down to a large drainage ditch. It seemed to be raining and water was filling the drainage ditch. The water was backing up into the gardens because something was blocking the ditch. It started rising up my legs. It was quite hot. I realised this was because hot water was running out of the baths and sinks in the houses. I felt I must get out of the gardens. Not only because of the water, but because of how people might feel if they saw me in their garden. I managed to find a way into a farm yard where I felt relaxed.’ Ted F.
The first scene here is Garden. On a piece of paper separate to the dream, write Garden, with space for notes to be put beside it. The entry on Garden in the Dictionary says – ‘Your garden dream often reveals what you are doing with your latent possibilities. It is pointing out whether you have cultivated your abilities, or buried them. A garden is sometimes a place of love in a dream. In which case it can denote what is growing or dying in your relationship. Another garden theme is connected with activities we do in the garden, like pets we keep, or work done.’
The words Houses – Raining – Hot water – Fences – Farmyard need to be looked up and relevant comments written down next to each word. It is important to realise that the dream and its images are a story, not in words but in images with which we have personal associations with. So write down by each word the basic meaning that appeals to you – i.e. makes sense to you.
Houses – Other people. Raining – emotions, release of feelings. Hot Water – Strong emotions or facing difficult situations, such as social criticism. Fence or wall also suggests social barriers, the attitudes and feelings people express to keep others at a distance, to keep a separation between those of different social, religious or economic class. Farmyard – This usually has to do with your relationship with your natural urges, the basic drives, such as sex, survival, social hierarchy, parenthood, the down to earth side of yourself.
If we put them together into a story form, we have: I was in an environment with other people and was in hot water facing a difficult situation such as social criticism. I was also in other people’s space and felt that their fences, their attitudes and social difference were there to keep me out. But in returning to my natural feelings I felt at ease again
Making a story of it is an important step, and through you will probably even see what the message of your dream is. But in doing this with his dream, Ted took it further by adding his own associations and ended up with the following. But it is important for you to see what your feelings are and whether any of what is said applies to you. It doesn’t matter if the entry on garden doesn’t contain what is said in your dream. Instead you can say, ‘None of those things apply, but the entry has made me remember my dream garden is a place of pain where a terrible incident happened to me.’ See Working with associations
Ted arrived at and wrote:
Garden – The growth and changes occurring in my life at present.
Row of Houses – Other people.
Raining – Depressed feelings or difficulties; emotions which take away enthusiasm and act as a barrier to action; tears and emotional release – an outpouring; other people’s emotions ‘raining’ on me.
Hot Water – Emotions. In the Idioms is ‘hot water’ suggesting I have got myself in trouble.
Fences – Social boundaries.
Farmyard – Where my natural drives such as sexuality, parenthood, love or fellowship, are cared for or expressed.
When Ted added his own associations to this the dream became fully understandable to him and read like this:
I am going through a lot of changes at the moment – the garden. These are to do with allowing myself to have a warm but non sexual relationship with women. I have always been too dragged along by my sexuality in the past. Just a few days before the dream I was in a ‘growth’ group; I had made friends with a woman there, Susan, who I felt warm feelings for, but not sexually. The group work required some close physical contact, and I and another man worked with Susan.
It seemed to me to go without complications. But a while afterwards a woman in the group came to me and with evident emotion, said I had made love publicly to my lover, meaning Susan. I had certainly been physically close to her and had felt at ease, but the viewpoint and feelings of the woman’s accusations, coupled with her threat to expose me to the authority figure in the group, bowled me over.
This is the hot water in the dream. The fences are the boundaries people erect between their personal life and what is socially acceptable. For some days, up until understanding the dream, I felt really blocked up emotionally – the blocked drainage ditch all because of the criticism – hot water. I cut off any friendship toward Susan. When I realised that in the Farmyard – the acceptance of natural feelings without neat little boundaries – I could feel at peace, I was able to allow my natural warmth again. I also realised that the woman who attempted to damage my reputation had probably never had love or warm physical contact that was not directly sexual. Many people see any physical contact between a man and woman as having sexual overtones, probably because that is their own view of sexual relationship
After writing the comments next to each dream image or setting, add any personal memories, feelings or associations, as Ted has. Put down anything which amplifies what has been dreamt. For instance, a car is said to be one’s drive and motivation in the entry on car. But it is helpful to add what personal feelings one has about one’s car. Try imagining what the absence in one’s life of the car, or house, or symbol etc., would mean.
Another way to gain quick insight into your dream is to take the keywords and fill in the gaps.
To illustrate this we can use the following dream:
Example: I meet an acquaintance who tells me she is sick. I suggest ways that might help her. As I speak I become aware that others are listening and coming nearer. I apologise and say that I appear to be preaching, but they say, ‘Please go on we want to listen.’ As I continue I find that a rostrum has formed and lifted me two steps higher.
To use the technique of ‘keywords’ on this dream you would need to write down the most important words in the dream. Doing this you might arrive at the words – I meet an acquaintance – sick – I might help – as I speak – others are listening – I apologise – I appear to be preaching – I find a rostrum.
For the next step you ask yourself what you have recently met with in yourself or in life that might link with each of those words. It is something you are acquainted with, and that has to do with not feeling well, whole or satisfied with your life.
So you would ask yourself what you are acquainted with to do with not feeling at your best.
The word ‘help’ suggests you have information that will be useful. What is it?
You apologise for yourself, suggesting degrading what you know. How are you doing that in your life?
Preaching comes next. Have you been giving advice? If so, what is it, and is it relevant to you too?
And lastly, can you listen to your own advice given from a rostrum – higher level of viewpoint?
Having arrived at some associations with the major words in the dream, you next put them together in a way that explains some of the insights or ideas you arrived at. Filling in the gaps between the words you might therefore arrive at something like this:
“I have lately become aware of the feeling that I am ill at ease with myself. This connects with my lack of confidence about how I feel when talking with other people. The strange thing is that I know how to help myself with this. I was talking with a friend the other day, and the advice I gave them about something similar really applies to me. What I need to do is to stop apologising for myself and positively use what I know will help. I can see from the dream that I have a lot to share with other people, so I don’t need to feel I am preaching.”
What you arrive at using this keyword method will give you an excellent overview of your dream. It will take some practice, but persist and you will get very useful results.
The Trackless Way and Growth
Any serious and prolonged exploration of your inner world, yourself or dreams will lead to pronounced changes. Carl Jung called this psychic growth. He used the word psychic to refer to the psyche, meaning the whole realm of personal awareness and experience. Such psychic growth is natural and in most areas occurs spontaneously, how it does when we move from babyhood to childhood, childhood to adolescence. And of course, such changes are seldom purely psychic or psychological. They usually run parallel to physical change as well.
Many of these changes from one level of maturity to another are quite difficult. As with adolescence, the emerging trends often make it feel as if all that one is at the time is dying or being lost. What is emerging is unknown. It has never been experience before and so can even be felt as threatening. Such shifts through the levels of possible maturity are at the very core of human experience. Although our attention may largely be claimed by exterior factors such as relationships, education, the struggle toward achievement for success in one form or another, in many ways these are far less important than the processes of psychic growth that underlie any exterior event or participation in it. I believe that the great myths and religions of the world are in great part dramatisations, often in deeply symbolic form, of these huge transformations we face or are capable of. This may explain why religions and myths claim so much attention over such long periods of time. After all, the heroes and heroines of such myths are confronting, and giving examples of, meeting and dealing with the great dramas and trials of human experience.
Somehow I stood upon the Mount,
Standing upon the edge,
Looking into the abyss.
Turning, I gazed back
Upon the way I had come.
I could see
The ruined churches and mosques,
The libraries and schools,
Where people forever searched
Through the river of books,
Or the spoken word.
I called to them
As loudly as I could,
“Why are you searching
For the Real
In all these frozen words?
Why wander through
The never-ending labyrinth
Of emotions, thoughts and beliefs?
For they are like
Photographs of the Real,
Capturing only moments,
Fragments of it?”
And I could see
The people in those labyrinths,
Setting up the photographs
Those words engraved
Like holy icons.
They fought over them,
As if their photograph
Held in its fragment
More of the Real
Than any other –
Or sold them,
Like treasures,
One to another.
And I, turning to the abyss,
Emerged from my chrysalis,
Broke open the cocoon
Of words and beliefs
I had formed about me,
Spread my wings and flew,
Melting into the abyss.
Although, as already said, much of this psychic change is spontaneous, some of it has to be faced consciously, decisively and with personal cooperation and effort. The possibility is that of the stages of growth that the race has already met and successfully dealt with en masse, is now passed through largely without personal effort. But the frontiers of human maturity still call upon us in a different way. Two of these challenges are particularly relevant in present times, and comparatively few of us have successfully passed through them. This means that they are new ground, and although we have the literary and artistic records from other individuals who have faced these challenges already, they are still difficult.
The two that I have in mind are what might be called in mythological terms, the cleansing of the Aegean stables, and the entrance upon the Trackless Way — or what is sometimes called the Mountain Path.
The cleansing of the stables refers to consciously meeting and transforming the many influences, such as childhood traumas and inherited behavioural patterns, that block, twist and pervert the expression of our true potential. This is an area, often associated with psychotherapy in its various forms, which has a huge amount of literature dealing with it, along with countless practitioners. But any individual can undertake this journey without recourse to such professionals.
Example: Dreamt I was living in a mountain village in France or Switzerland. A group of us, like a yoga class group, were together doing something. I remember Margaret Strange in particular. Now I was cycling through steep hills; a bit like a cycle race, but not any road or track. It was hard going sometimes. I had to descend to gain speed to cycle over the crest of some hills.
Next, I was in a room with other people. They were the cyclists. One of my wheels had broken, apparently a new wheel was supposed to be in the room, which was like a spares store. I looked in a cupboard on the left of the room, but although other people’s wheels were there, I couldn’t find mine.
“This dream gives an excellent example of how wheels represent so much. The dreamer Roberto explored his dream and says, “This dream showed me what is now happening within the group I am involved in. It shows the things occurring at the heights of my awareness – in the mountain village. These things are not apparent at the everyday, valley, level of awareness.
The dream shows me aiding the group, but the last part of the dream shows my difficult journey along the trackless way – shown by cycling along a way without road or track. Remember that way was trodden by you long ago in other lives, I received that from a life I lived in France as a past existence. This next part of your life journey will be the remembering of what was already accomplished. But there comes even within this dream the meeting with difficulties.”
The second area, the entrance upon the Trackless Way, is much less represented in our times. This is strange, because the psychic growth that often comes about from transforming the traumas and behavioural patterns mentioned, leads to a meeting with the trackless way, or what in Christian literature is known as The Cloud of Unknowing or in Buddhist literature is often called, the Void.
In brief, meeting this new level of possible maturity involves the dropping away of the rigid self-images, personal defences, and unbending belief systems that are such a large part of earlier levels of maturity. For instance, for many of us our sense of self is almost entirely to do with our physical appearance, gender, and social standing. Perhaps it also relates strongly to the amount of money we have been able to command or accumulate. A self-image based on such factors is incredibly vulnerable. In the New Testament we are told not to build our house upon the sands. A foundation of sand does not resist change. Neither does a self-image based upon our physical appearance, changing so radically as it does with the ageing process.
The meeting with the Trackless Way is an introduction to the core of self. It is a meeting with a self that is formless, that is essentially without gender, that is not limited by concepts of time and space, that knows itself as an integral part of what lies behind the cosmos. In meeting such enormity, such freedom, a freedom that is or maybe at first disturbing. It may feel as if everything is being taken, or might be taken, away from us. For some the entrance is marked by an experience of death, this is either a deeply psychological experience, or for some an actual near death experience. For this is how it feels for many of us, that our ego, our self, is dying. See Core Self