Working with Dreams

Montague Ullman, Nan Zimmerman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351601641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1979, this is a dream book with an outstanding difference: it takes the interpretation of dreams out of the realm of the professionals and gives it to the ultimate expert – the dreamer. Working with Dreams stresses the uniqueness of every dream and dreamer. With anecdotes and examples from their own dream groups, the authors show how to deal with the intimacy and honesty of a dream; how to explore its meanings without distorting them; how to let a dream tell us about ourselves and add to our understanding.

Dr Ullman and Mrs Zimmerman start with the question of what is in a dream – what is real and what is symbolic? – and then go on to explain what happens during sleep and the way a dream develops. They cover remembering and recording dreams and dealing with the imagery of dreams. They illustrate the many predicaments that dreams depict, the self-deceptions we practice in relation to our dreams, and then show how dream groups – whether a family or a group of strangers – can work together to uncover the meaning of dreams. And they enrich their book by discussing everything from the history of dreams to the possibilities of dreams across space and time. The result is a storehouse of information about the world of dreams.

1

What’s in a Dream?

Every time I, Monte, begin a new group in dream work, I ask what questions are uppermost in the members’ minds. So let’s start with those: the most common and the most general questions concerning the nature of dreaming. I will deal later with more specific questions.

Does everyone dream every night?

Yes. Every adult, unless interrupted, maintains a fairly regular sleep cycle every night. The first period of dreaming occurs approximately ninety minutes after we fall asleep and lasts five to ten minutes. The sleep cycle continues in ninety-minute segments, the dream periods getting longer with each cycle. The final one before awakening may last up to forty minutes.

Do children have the same sleep and dream cycle as adults?

No. Babies spend most of their time in that part of the sleep cycle that is associated with dreaming. The ratio shifts as the child grows.

Do animals dream?

All mammals studied thus far in the laboratory are known to have the cyclical physiological changes in sleep that are associated in humans with dreaming. Because we cannot communicate directly with animals we don’t know what their subjective experiences are during these periods. There is indirect evidence, however, that animals do experience imagery. Sleeping animals have been observed to move their paws, as in running, and even to growl as if they were participating in some sort of activity that seemed real to them.

Does color in a dream have special significance?

Most dreams have some color in them, but the color usually fades quickly when you awake unless you make a special effort to recall it. Everything in a dream, including color, is important from the point of view of meaning. A particularly vivid color or a color repeated in several images may provide an important clue to the meaning of the dream.

What kind of dreams do blind people have?

This depends on how long they have been blind, and whether or not they have been blind from birth. Where there has never been any visual input, there is no visual imagery. The blind person uses all of his other sensory modalities (touch, smell, hearing, sense of movement) to construct his dreaming experience. Perception of the dream environment as experienced through hearing, touch, or movement seems real to the blind dreamer. Helen Keller writes of “seeing” in her dreams much as she does when awake but, of course, with a much richer array of fantasy and imagination. In those not blind from birth, visual imagery tends to diminish over time.

What are the effects of drugs on dreams?

Both stimulants and sedatives, if taken over a long period of time, tend to diminish the amount of time spent in dreaming sleep. Alcohol, for example, depresses dream time.

What is the effect of hypnosis?

Hypnotic suggestion can extend or diminish the time spent dreaming, but only within narrow limits. The basic cycle is biologically controlled and is not easily manipulated psychologically. Hypnotic suggestion can influence dream content to a certain extent. It is as if a posthypnotic suggestion becomes operative at the dream onset.

Do dreams solve problems? Can we get answers from our dreams?

If the issue is one which genuinely concerns us and if, somewhere in our past experience, we had the resources needed to deal with it, we can, in our dreams, discover those resources and restructure them to highlight their bearing on a current problem. But the content of our dream is drawn from our real-life experience and so, if there is nothing in our past experience that can help us cope with the present issue, dreams may be able to do no more than call attention to that fact.

Can we use dreams to enhance our creativity and inventiveness?

I generally respond to this question by pointing out what a remarkably creative and inventive occurrence the dream itself is. Every dream is unique. The dreamer is expressing what has never been expressed before. He is effortlessly, but nevertheless creatively, transforming something vaguely felt into a visual display which both captures and radiates the feelings involved. Everyone has a touch of the poet in him, even if it only comes out in a dream.

Then too, there have been many reports about inventions, discoveries, poems, stories, and pictures that began with dream imagery. Some people with special artistic talent seem to be able to use the creative energies of their dreams. Our dreaming self responds to the concerns of our waking self—not as slave to master, but as a resourceful ally with a will and intention of its own. We cannot, then, ask command performances of our dreams, but we can count on them to help us, to link their natural creativity with our specialized creative pursuits.

Can we program or control our dreams?

No, not consciously. If we look upon a dream as a kind of natural resource flowing within us, if we liken it to a river, a river shaped by our life experience, then its flow will not be changed simply by having someone on the shore urge a new direction on it. But if the person on the shore does the work necessary to make a change in direction possible, the flow will alter as desired. The point of the analogy is that there has to be more than conscious intent to influence the flow. There has to be a genuine emotional investment. Our dreams are there to further our emotional investment in living, regardless of how we choose to make that investment.

How much can we find out about ourselves through our dreams?

The answer to this depends largely on how systematically and how effectively we work on them. There is something to learn about ourselves in each of our dreams although the importance and significance to our lives will vary from dream to dream. Our dreams tap into our experiential and emotional reservoirs and bring something new to our current perspective. Working with them increases our store of knowledge about ourselves.

What effect do remembered dreams have?

In other words, does just the fact that a dream is remembered influence our lives?

When a dream spills over into the waking state as a remembrance, the feelings that accompany it will certainly influence our mood and may do so very profoundly if they are intense or unusual in any way. They may leave us with positive feelings of wonder, excitement, and elation, or negative feelings of foreboding, dread, and fear. We can sense the significance of these feelings and their connection with things going on inside of us even when we don’t understand the content of the dream and sometimes even when we don’t remember that content clearly.

What is the effect of an unremembered dream?

Before the days of laboratory monitoring of dreams the answer would have been that we have no way of knowing. But in the laboratory we awaken a sleeper five or six times during a night and thereby listen to dreams that would ordinarily be forgotten by the morning. What we consider the effect of such dreams really depends upon what we think is the function of dreams. If we take the Freudian position, then, regardless of whether a dream is remembered or not, it serves as a kind of safety valve, releasing instinctual energies that have been stirred up. If, however, we think of dreaming as a time when we assess the impact and importance of recent events in our lives to determine whether or not we have the resources to deal with them without having to awaken, then the fact that the dream did not interrupt the cycle means that we have found some way of coping with the situation, and so that dream is less likely to be remembered than one in which more intense or unresolved feelings are mobilized.

Any dream, even an emotionally neutral one, assumes importance simply by virtue of being recalled, and thereby made available for the rewarding work that can be done with it. There are, of course, people who manage to recall a good many dreams every night, but even of their dream life, much is simply not remembered.

What are nightmares?

What are ordinarily called nightmares are severe anxiety dreams leading to one’s awakening in fright. The issues in the dream are too overwhelming to be contained while asleep and so awakening occurs. True nightmares, in which one feels caught up in an uncontrollably terrifying experience, occur in the nondreaming phase of sleep and often have very little remembered content. They are seen most characteristically in the night terrors of children where even after they are seemingly awake it remains difficult for them to shake off the terror.

Are there dreams that come true?

A dream dealing with an unresolved problem does not “come true,” but it is true as a symbolic depiction of a real-life situation. Its truth may subsequently be experienced by the dreamer and in that sense may be said to come true. But there are, in my opinion, two very special kinds of dreams which may be said to come true: the telepathic dream, which incorporates into the dreamer’s account a truth about another person that he would have no ordinary way of knowing; and the precognitive dream that depicts unexpected events that do later occur. I will deal with both of these further on.

Why do we sometimes repeat the same dream?

All of us have emotional residues from our past that we haven’t quite disposed of: particular areas of vulnerability that get bruised from time to time in the course of our lives. When this happens, we often have a dream which depicts the problem and shows where we are in relation to it. If we fail to make progress in the particular area that is giving us trouble, we are apt to encounter the same problem again in our lives and to dream about it in the same way. The imagery with which the issue was first depicted in the dream served us well in stating the problem and so, what we do on subsequent encounter is, in effect, to plagiarize the very images we previously used and reuse them to express the same situation.

What does it mean when, in a dream, you realize you’re dreaming?

That is referred to as “lucid” dreaming. Almost all of us have had a lucid dream at some time or another and some of us have them quite often. In any dream the setting is always involuntary; we do not will the opening scene. We experience it initially as an audience of one, witnessing the images that are thrust upon us. As a dream progresses, however, more and more voluntary or volitional elements enter the picture. We are in the dream actively or as a spectator; we are acting as well as reacting to what is taking place. As we become more and more aware of our own role in the dream we may suddenly experience the awareness that it is all a dream. Some lucid dreamers are able to take the next step and begin to shape the subsequent course of the dream, making it a playful exercise of fantasy and omnipotence, and some can even take an additional step and use the lucid dream experience as a stepping-off point for an “out-of-body” experience: can feel themselves separating from their physical body and can view themselves sleeping peacefully. Those adept at this feel they can travel considerable distances from the body they have left behind. But the reality of the out-of-body experience has still to be convincingly demonstrated in the laboratory.

Although the dreamer can influence the subsequent course of a dream once it becomes a lucid dream, the element of control occurs only within certain limits. An analogy might be Living Theater where, after the actors have created a certain framework, the audience is invited to influence the subsequent course of the play.

Are there universal symbols?

People often ask me: Are there universal symbols in dreams? Although both Freud and Jung respected the individuality of dream symbols, each in his own way gravitated toward a concept of universal meanings which they associated with particular symbols. Since repressed sexual wishes played so important a role in Freudian theory, he tended to regard all oblong objects as phalluses and all hollow structures as vaginas. Though Jung felt we use our own specific images to represent the contents of our personal unconscious, he attributed universality to the archetypal images welling up from the collective unconscious.

I myself always begin with the assumption that the meaning of a dream image is the meaning attributed to it by the dreamer. Dreamers can use the same image in many different ways, even though many people will give similar meanings to the same or similar images. We borrow the images in our dreams from society at large, and since we all swim in the same social sea, it should come as no surprise that we may use the same imagery to express the same meanings. Nevertheless even seemingly obvious meanings should never be assumed. A snake may mean a phallus in a dream interpreted along Freudian lines, and an archetypal reference to the fall of man when interpreted along Jungian lines. But neither may be the place the dreamer is at in his selection of a particular image.

It is important, therefore, not to lock any image into a general meaning without first exploring the specific ways the dreamer may have experienced that symbol. Take, as another example, a cross appearing in a dream. For an atheist it may signify emotionalism; for a Jew, discrimination; for a Christian, judgment or love or bearing troubles. But even these connections may overlook the dreamer’s meaning. He may be at crossroads in his life or attempting to cancel, that is, cross off, some problem. If the dreamer is traveling, there may be a connection with crossing the line: the equator. The Red Cross is important to a great number of people. Then there is the emotional condition of being bad tempered and cross. The possibilities must be considered in the light of the dreamer’s reaction to the image within the context of the dream, and then related to what he has been experiencing in his waking life.

With so many possible meanings, which one is correct? The only reliable guideline is the feeling response of the dreamer. Does the dreamer get a gut reaction to the meaning given an image? Does the particular meaning carry with it a sense of recognition and discovery? One sure guideline to the closeness and lightness of the fit between meaning and image is whether it has a liberating impact on the dreamer, leading to further insights about the dream.

Why do we dream in images?

Imagery is a primitive way of apprehending reality, one that, possibly, we share with other mammals. As humans we have learned to refine it, use it not to ref...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Montague Ullmaris Introduction
• Nan Zimmerman’s Introduction
• 1 What’s in a Dream?
• 2 A Backward Glance
• 3 From Freud On
• 4 Psyche Asleep
• 5 The Way a Dream Is
• 6 Guidelines to Dream Work
• 7 Picturing Our Predicaments
• 8 Dispelling Self-Deception
• 9 A Family That Dreamed Together
• 10 The Dream and Society
• 11 Dream Appreciation in Public
• 12 Dreams People Share
• 13 On the Practical and the Problematic
• 14 A One-Year Journey
• 15 Dreaming Across Space and Time
• 16 Toward a Greater Appreciation of Dreams
• Notes
• Index