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“Which Was the Dream?” (Apologies to Mark Twain)
Scene #1 - I slow to a full stop at the high-school
driveway and put on my left blinker. I check the rear view mirror and I see a little
red car coming up behind me. It disappears. Then I notice it out of the corner
of my right eye, and turn slightly to look. At that moment a huge impact sends my van
and me sailing through the air, crossing the northbound lane and landing on the lawn of a
house across the street. I wonder how the red car could still be going down the road
after it hit me so hard. Dazed, I sit up from the broken seat back and look back.
There is a school bus with a dented front fender. I look in front of me and
see that my car has landed between a rock wall and a tree. In shock, I try to clean
up the broken glass, after noticing the accordion-pleat in the body of the van.
Scene #2 - I and several others are in a car that stalls in the middle
lane of three high-speed highway lanes. I have to step out of the car, and I am conscious of the
other cars speeding past. We all get out, and I see a buckled pickup truck right behind us.
Cars are racing toward us in the
background. I am very afraid I will be hit.
I am relieved to see the crashed pickup truck behind us, as I think a speeding car out of control will
hit it and not me. But maybe the pickup will block clear sight and an oncoming car will be more
likely to hit us. One car screeches by dangerously close, and I panic and jump into the driver’s seat.
One of the stories above is a dream, and one is an event that took place during
waking reality. Can you tell which one is which? Suppose that you dreamed one of these scenes, and then the other took place an hour later? And suppose that you checked your dream journal and found that you had 4-5 recent dreams of car crashes or buses. Would that startle you as much as
I did me?
These stories are mine. The first scene actually took place in November of
1997 and the second was the dream that came to me earlier that same morning. Having such a dramatic
synchronicity between waking and sleeping
life caused me to reassess my soul’s journey in life, to
look at the ways I was stalled on my path, and ultimately to make the decision to leave a thirty-year
career as a high-school teacher.
What do you believe about dreams? Let’s take a look at some common misconceptions.
Myth #1 : Working on dreams is a “new-age” phenomenon.
Recorded
dream work goes back to Assyrian-Babylonian times and can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Bible
(over 700 recorded dreams and visions!). The Greek pantheon included the healing god Aescalapius
who was in charge of 300 temples dedicated to dream work. People for thousands of years around the
world in less “developed” countries have continued to rely on dream work for the health and safety of
the tribe.
Myth #2 : Dreams are just a product of random neurons firing in the brain. Some scientists
who believe this actually keep dream journals “just in case.” Humans are meaning-making creatures;
it is important to us to find patterns and connections. From these neural sparks have come an amazing
array of dream-inspired creations: this structure of the benzine ring, the sewing machine, many of Edison’s
inventions, the novel DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Handel’s Messiah, the song “Silent Night,” and more.
The Senoi, tribal people of Maylasia in Indochina, work their dreams as a family and as a community,
every morning. They have never been in a war and have little social conflict. There is a deep well
of creativity in all people, and it appears in our storytelling, our art, and our inventions
.
Myth # 3 : Some people never dream.
Everybody dreams, usually
5 dreams per night. The issue is not that you are not dreaming but that you are not remembering
the dreams. You can get better at it by setting your intention before you go to sleep, keeping a
dream journal, reading dream books, joining a dream group. Even if all you remember is little
pieces, fragments, those can be worked with -- they are like postcards instead of letters from the unconscious.
Myth #4 : Dreams have only one meaning (and you can use a news-stand
dictionary to find
out what it is).
To believe this does a disservice to the incredibly rich personal
experiences that each of us has had. Consider this: you are the writer,the director, the casting agency, the cast of characters, the scenery, the props, etc. of the inner videos you create every night! Like rich pieces of literature, fine art, or music, all dreams have many levels. Dreams are “pictures of feelings” and are enormously creative in their presentations to us.
Myth #5 : Nightmares come from eating too much, too late at night.
Nightmares try harder than other dream to get our attention. The messages they have to bring really
need to be attended to. That’s why nightmares are often repetitive. Like the monsters in the
book, THERE’S A
NIGHTMARE IN MY CLOSET, these dreams need to be welcomed and their messages heeded.
Myth #6 : Only analysts can work with dreams.
Curiously enough, in today’s psychotherapeutic
training, many mental health care professionals get little, if any, training in dream work. Working
with dreams is a learnable skill and people can practice this skill in small groups that are lay-led or
convened by trained dream workers. An ethical dream worker or group honors the dream and the
dreamer, and makes it clear that we are witnesses or mirrors for the dreamer, helping the dreamer see things
that s/he is uniquely blind to.
Why might you want to pay attention to your dreams in more than a cursory way?
The purposes of dreaming include: to contribute to the health and wholeness of the organism; to help us
to process the day, new information, and issues; to practice new behaviors or feelings; to bring
creative solutions; to serve as a self-mirror; to bring inner guidance; to highlight attitudes that need
to be balanced; to provide warnings; to contribute toward
healing.
If you had a best friend or lover who wrote to you daily, would you set aside the
letters, telling yourself that nothing much was in them, or that you would get around to reading the letters
someday? The Talmud says: “An unopened dream is like an unread letter.” So tonight when
you go to sleep, let “the dark buds of dreams open richly” (Mary Oliver) and gift you with the syllables
of answers tucked inside each petal.
Ellany Weston (author) and dream work partner Isobel McGrath,
both of Danbury, have a “Dream catching” practice, working with nighttime dreams. Ellany and Isobel
employ “if it were my dream” methods of group dream work practiced andtaught by Jeremy Taylor (UU minister
and author) and Montague Ullman (author, retired psychiatrist), as well as Jungian, Gestalt, and other
creative methods.
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