In my first newsletter I promised a more complete description of the dreamwork process I’ve been using, and now that holiday things are returning to normal maybe it’s time. While I’d been interested in a more or less Jungian approach to dreaming for a long time, it was an excellent book I read in November - The Kabbalah of Light, by Catherine Shainberg – that really got me started on actually doing the dreamwork.
Here’s a summary of the process described in that book:
Write your dreams down every morning when you wake up including as much detail as possible, especially about any feelings or sensations you remember. If you don’t remember anything at all, get your journal out anyway and write about how you feel (getting into this habit will almost certainly help you remember your dreams).
Challenge: paying attention and remembering.
Notice the major themes and “pattern” of the dream, mostly discarding details that seem like unremarkable reflections of your daily life. Themes could include things like feelings, numbers, settings, relationships, things that remind you of other things, and specific details that you find yourself paying attention to.
Challenge: not getting obsessed with specific patterns and giving too much weight to them.
Notice the question or challenge of the dream. If there’s a door, do you want to open it? A problem you want to solve? What would you do if you needed to respond in some way to whatever you see? Briefly close your eyes and imagine going back into the dream and responding to the most obvious question.
Challenge: feeling like a dream is meaningless or unworkable.
Another really useful thing I’ve learned about dreamwork (from the Jungian tradition, mostly, I think) is to think of everyone and everything in the dream as an aspect of myself. Even if something happening with somebody seems directly related to the actual events of my life, I often find it pretty interesting (and easier to address first) to notice that there could also be a part of myself that’s acting in a similar way.
Anyway, I’ve been applying this process – along with the commitment to do a project for every book I read – for about six weeks, and the results have been pretty compelling so far. In a way, these practices have felt almost like two sides of a single coin to me, since reading is also a process of interpretation and there’s a matching response step in both cases. Since one of the challenges of dreamwork can be really bringing whatever is useful about it to bear on waking life, having these matching processes also feels like a step toward that type of crossover, somehow, too.
I look forward to sharing more about how this combination of practices has been playing out for me in my next few newsletters. In the meantime, if you have any questions or ideas about dreamwork you’d like to share, please feel free to leave them in the comments, and I encourage you to give it a try!
ETA: an example
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