Quote 1:The Royal Road
The dream (The rabbit) Marc Chagall. 1927. Wikioo
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
Freud
Dreams are crucially important in psychoanalytic psychotherapy; they are coded messages directly from the unconscious about our hopes, our inner conflicts, our fears and our hidden, latent desires. Freud regarded dreams as reflective of the events of the previous day, and at the same time, he emphasised that they are linked to important, deeper past issues.
Their messages are coded in symbols so that they do not hit us too hard and create too much anxiety; this is a kind of self-protective mental censorship.
Some dreams feel like madness and are difficult to understand, but such dreams can be complex and intricately meaningful.
The Dream of the Fishes – Walter Gramatté. 1919. Wikimedia Commons
“ Dreams . . . are often most profound when they seem most crazy. ”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
Some medications can affect our dream-recall, others can make them more vivid or nightmarish.
Sometimes we cannot remember our dreams; we all do have them, but they may be too deeply hidden in our unconscious. We may unwittingly block out all dreams.
Shadow Text (Texte d’ombre) from the portfolio Emptiness and Shadow (Le Vide et l’ombre) from Phenomena (Les Phénomènes) – (Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet)
“People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.”
John Steinbeck
Within our minds, we all have an internal landscape, a vast and complex internal world of our own creation, both conscious and unconscious, a blend of many aspects, including memories, dreams, beliefs, imaginings, experiences, fears, thoughts and feelings.
Dreams give us an opportunity to understand what might be happening in our inner world. With the help of a therapist, and by allowing ourselves to think and feel about the dream, its effects and meanings, we may discover previously unknown aspects of our inner self.
Talking about fears, fantasies, dreams and wishes in therapy is a way of understanding what might be happening in our unconscious mind. This might be influencing us and our behaviour, affecting our life without our conscious awareness.
Quote 2: Repressed Wishes
Pablo Picasso, The Dream, 1910. Wikimedia Commons
“Dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realisations of repressed desires.”
Freud
Freud saw some dreams and dream-symbols as a way of expressing desires and wishes that we are fearful of admitting to our conscious mind. This is the way of the unconscious, to send up important, encoded communications that we may have avoided facing in our waking hours.
The bringing of dreams to therapy is very much encouraged. They provide a way of understanding and resolving conflictual feelings.
Landscape from a Dream – Paul Nash. 1936. Wikioo
“The task of dream interpretation is to unravel what the dream-work has woven.”
Freud
Freud termed the process of working through dreams as ‘the dream work.’ In psychoanalysis, this involves the patient ‘free-associating’ to the dream, that is, expressing as unreservedly as they can whatever comes into their mind in relation to it.
The therapist will not and should not interpret the dream without discovering what the symbols within it mean for the patient as an individual.
Dream interpretation without this knowledge is likely to be wildly inaccurate. Whilst there are archetypal symbols that can have meaning for us all, (see next week’s post), one has to take care that assumptions are not made in dream interpretation. We cannot interpret another’s dream for them without first checking what the symbols mean to the dreamer.
Popular internet sites and some books discuss dream symbols in a way that overlooks the individual, so that such symbols are dealt with in a sweeping, blanket, impersonal manner.
One online site describes, for example, that dreaming about mushrooms is related to spiritual issues and to ‘something magical that grows in the darkest parts of your mind.’ (dream dictionary.org) However, this is a vast generalisation; what must be explored is the personal meaning for the dreamer.
In the case of a client of mine *, her dream about mushrooms had a very personal meaning. In her real waking life, she was out for lunch with her mother, and they both had mushrooms. The client loved them, but mother really disliked them, hated the smell of them, and complained to the staff.
This spoilt the client’s enjoyment, but this spoiling was not just on a culinary level; she felt that her mother tried to ruin everything for her, and frequently succeeded in doing this.
That night, she dreamt that she was about to marry her long term boyfriend, but she could not reach her groom as she walked down the aisle because the floor was covered in millions of slimy, smelly and mouldy mushrooms. Her dress was soiled and ruined as she tried in vain to walk through them.
This was a clear and lucid dream, one that sent the client an intelligible message. After some thought and discussion in therapy, this dream eventually revealed to her that she tended now to ‘contaminate’ things for herself.
She had internalised this behaviour and was unconsciously repeating it in her everyday life. It was as if she had very porous boundaries, allowing others’ opinions to infiltrate her own thoughts, to instil doubt and anxiety in her and to overrule her in many parts of her life.
The phrase ‘spoiling your mushrooms’ became part of our therapy language, a code phrase for spoiling things for herself, as she had experienced her mother doing to her.
Quote 3: Nightmares
Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare, 1781. Wikimedia Commons
‘A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not “handling” anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep.”
Irvin D. Yalom
Nightmares are clearly explained in this quote from Yalom. Dreams are there to help us process and work through difficult feelings, yet sometimes this is, in itself, an overwhelming task, and the powerful dream content breaks through. Such scary dreams may recur because they still need to be understood and worked on.
For example, a woman kept having a recurring nightmare which caused her to wake up in a sweat, shaking and with rapid heartbeat.
This bad dream was about having an imminent examination, for which she had not been able to face revising, or even reading, a huge tome, a thousand-page book on the exam reading list. She realised that she had to try and read it in three days before the exam. Her friend had read the book and revised it well, making her feel even worse.
She found it impossible to read the book, for every time she started it, the words began to swim on the page. During the dream she experienced the panic and terror of being faced with a long and detailed exam question about a book she had never read.
In reality, there was no exam, for those were taken years ago, but now she faced a large amount of projects at work. However, the bad dream also connected to childhood fears of never feeling good enough, of things being spoilt, of disappointing others, of high parental expectations and of threats of punishment if she did not do things ‘properly.’
In therapy, people who suffer from recurring nightmares often find that, once they have worked through the original trauma, or whatever it was that that precipitated the nightmares, then they lessen and disappear.
- Lucid dreaming: the Senoi tribe
One method of working with dreams is practised by the remote Malaysian tribe of the Senoi; they consider dreams to be of particular importance for health and wellbeing.
A group of Senoi people at Mount Korbu, 1906. Wikimedia Commons
“They are famous for being free of crime and mental illness, showing virtually no signs of neurosis. Their secret? The less attention they spend on their material surroundings, the more they spend on their dreams…”
Every morning, the Senoi sit together in a group. The elders ask the children to share their dreams; the aim is to help the dreamer take control of what is, after all, their own dream.
For example, if they have dreamt that they are being attacked by a huge giant, or a fierce dragon, they can take time to think about the dream, and ponder about how they could change it, with the help of others.
Goya. The Giant or The Colossus. 1808. Wikimedia Commons.
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
G.K. Chesterton
In a dream, we can do anything we want, and, whilst planning how to deal with a threatening ‘menace,’ we could, for example, grow ourselves very tall, overcome gravity, attack from above and fly away, become more powerful by developing huge metal claws, fight the giant and kill him. Our imagination can run riot, it know no bounds.
Once this has been made to happen in the dream, then the dreamer will no longer be a victim, but a strong and empowered defender of themselves and others. Whatever outcome the dreamer wants can be meticulously planned, step-by-step, before going to bed at night.
This is a way of helping someone confront their fears and their inner turmoil. Dream dragons, giants and monsters that cause us terror in the night can be aspects of our selves, our ‘shadow side.’
The Senoi have discovered that their children’s nightmares reduce considerably with this method of exploring dreams; really facing their fears helps them. They do not have nightmares or mental health problems as teenagers.
Often now called ‘lucid dreaming,’ this kind of dream control can mean that the person is aware during the dream that they are dreaming and can make their dream end in a positive and empowering way, giving them control and agency.
Quote 4: Dreams, Creativity and Reality
Odilon Redon. Le Rêve, 1905. Wikimedia Commons
“What if you slept?
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?”Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems
Sometimes, a dream is so vivid that we night confuse it with reality. How often have you said ‘Did that really happen or did I dream it?’
Many people find their dreams so important and, perhaps, disturbing, that they write them down, or, like Van Gogh, they paint their dream.
Quote 5: Dreams, Writing and Painting
The Starry Night – Vincent Van Gogh.1889. Wikioo
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”
Vincent van Gogh
Writing about or painting a dream somehow concretises it, fixes it, so that it seems to be more a part of the real world. We can also more closely examined the dream to discover its hidden messages from our unconscious.
Dreams can help us with our waking life. Many people have discovered that, if they have a problem that seems insoluble, whether in life or in relation to some kind of creative project, during sleep their unconscious can provide a way forward. It can be that they wake up thinking about it more clearly.
In its own magical way, the unconscious works on our issues, sometimes by sending up a dream that is meaningful and helpful to us.
The following images and quotations illustrate this:
Portrait of Margurite sleeping – Henri Matisse. 1921. Wikioo.
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
John Steinbeck
“Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.”
John Steinbeck
June Stratton – Wisteria [2016] Gandalf’s Gallery. Flickr.
“My paintings are imagined blends of beauty and nature. These paintings are often intentionally idealised representations of emotional impressions from my dreams – entwined with elements of the earth, sky and water that surround my real world. I use symbols and my feminine viewpoint to tell a very loose, abstracted narrative. As in my dreams, my muses cannot see all things, are sometimes unable to speak and frequently appear to be floating.”
June Stratton.
The artist Salvador Dali had several techniques to encourage his own vivid dreams, which he then painted. (See this link)
Playing in the Dark – 1929. Salvador Dali. Wikioo.
“A well-read student of Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali – who never used drugs and only drank alcohol (especially champagne) in moderation – turned to a most unusual way to access his subconscious. He knew that the hypnologic state between wakefulness and sleep was possibly the most creative for a brain. Like Freud and his fellow surrealists, he considered dreams and imagination as central rather than marginal to human thought.”
Bernard Ewell.
Next week I will be writing about Jung and Dreams. See you next Tuesday- or in my dreams! Thank your all for your interest and support.
*Permission has been received from all clients to publish their dreams in this article.
© Linda Berman
waysofthinking.co.uk 