Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images

The Invisible Storyteller

Erik D. Goodwyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815369349
• eBook ISBN: 9781351252591
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Salute mentale in psicologia

Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller applies a contemporary interdisciplinary approach to dream interpretation, bringing cognitive anthropology, folklore studies, affective neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory to bear on contemporary psychodynamic clinical practice. It provides a practical guide for working with dreams that can be used by both individuals on their own and therapists working with clients.

Erik D. Goodwyn invites us to examine key features of reported dreams, such as the qualities of the environment depicted, its familiarity or unfamiliarity, the nature of the characters encountered, and overall themes. This method facilitates an understanding of the dream in the full context of the dreamer's life, rather than interpreting individual, isolated elements. Goodwyn also introduces the mental process which orchestrates dreams, conceptualised here as the 'Invisible Storyteller', and explores how understanding it can positively impact satisfaction in waking life. As a whole, the book provides a collection of tools and techniques which can be referred to time and again, as well as a wealth of examples.

Exploring dreams as a natural source of clinical insight, The Invisible Storyteller will appeal to Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists, other professionals working with dreams with clients, and readers looking for a scientific approach to dream interpretation.

Chapter 1

Foundations

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

(Freud 1900: 647)

The problem of bodies and minds

The idea that dreams are somehow meaningful and important is an extremely ancient one. What may be a surprise is the fact that dismissing dreams as meaningless is very old, too. Through the ages, the debate has continued, but ultimately the debate centers on the question of what the mind actually is. Is it a mere side-phenomenon of neural networks firing? Or does it have some fundamental reality to it that goes beyond cells and atoms?

Most simply, a dream is an experience. Everything else is interpretation. It is an experience of being in an environment, interacting with characters, with plot twists and turns, none of which is consciously created by the dreamer. Notice how that description could be used to describe the experience of waking life, also. But aren’t there differences? Or should we wonder if we’re all locked in the Matrix? Or being deluded by some malevolent demon? Descartes found out that pondering this question for any length of time leads one straight into what is known in philosophy as the mind-body problem. Put simply: how does the mind interact with the matter of your body (usually meaning the brain)? Is the mind created by the brain? If you think so, that is “physicalism” (or materialism). If, however, you think that the mind cannot be reduced to the workings of the brain alone, then you are a non-physicalist. There are many, many different versions of both of these, and an entire book could be written simply on this question, and many have.

But a full exploration of the mind-body problem is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about. For our purposes, it is only an important issue because many of the theories that attempt to explain (or explain away) dreams rest on physicalist assumptions that dreams are “merely” the workings of such-and-such (usually “malfunctioning”) brain mechanism and nothing more, with zero remainder. But this is simply not a settled matter. Thus, until that vaunted day when philosophers decide once and for all which philosophical position is true, however, we are going to have to work with what we have while trying to remain out of that quagmire. Therefore, the important things for our purposes are, what characteristics does the dream experience have? Can it teach us anything about ourselves, others, or life?

For ultimately, even if dreams are “merely” random neural firings and we are not finding but inventing meanings for them, those meanings can still cohere with our lived experience as conscious beings and enrich them. I, along with a significant number of others in the scholarly community do not think that dreams or the mind are reducible to whatever brain molecules bouncing around, but rather that when you have an extraordinarily complex, non-linear system such as the human brain and body, the behavior you get must be looked at holistically as well as reductively.

But enough of that. We are concerned with dreams as interesting experiences we can learn a great deal from, and we will assume that there is more to dreams, and indeed to life itself, than the mere mechanical, reflexive operations of nerve cells. Put another way, until given sufficient reason not to do so, we will assume that the whole is greater than a simple sum of the parts acting in isolation.

This may be the most important lesson about understanding dreams I can offer: that the whole – that is, the context – of a dream is far more meaningful and important that any of the parts, to include isolated dream images and all the way down to nerve firings. For a dream, it’s this particular dream, dreamt on this particular day by this particular person at this point in her or his life that gives us the most complete understanding of the dream.

Overview of this book

In general, when reviewing dream theories and methods, it appears there is an overall need for and underutilization of dream material in various kinds of psychotherapy (Pesant and Zadra 2004). I hope to help correct that with this book. Toward that end, in this chapter we will look at a brief background on the art of dream interpretation, and in so doing also explore the subject of symbolism and why dreams can be usefully thought of as largely symbolic expressions.

Dream interpretation in the modern era begins with Freud, and afterward it has been expanded and revised a great deal by those who came after Freud. Freud’s main accomplishment was in showing just how important and meaningful dreams can actually be, even if many of his more specific assertions about dreams have not held up quite as well over the years. But even in light of the shortcomings of his theory, it was a huge accomplishment, and opened the door to a great deal of fascinating work on the subject. Following Freud came many other thinkers; most notable for our purposes was his one-time student Carl Gustav Jung, who though nowhere near as systematic as Freud made a great deal of observations about dreams that have stood up remarkably well over time when compared to the huge amount of research into the subject of dreaming that has commenced since his time.

The present work, however, is not a review of “Classically Jungian” dream interpretation. It is rather a synthesis of many approaches to dreams – though Jung and his followers play a large part in my approach. It is a combination of classic psychoanalytic approaches to dreams (Jungian and otherwise) combined with and compared to empirical laboratory studies on dreams, as well as a healthy dose of clinical experience – my own and that of my students and colleagues working as therapists. Though I would label the present method as a “dynamic interdisciplinary” approach – following the name I call my approach to rituals in therapy as explored in Healing Symbols in Psychotherapy (Goodwyn 2016) – it could also fairly be labeled as “Neo-Jungian”.

After taking a look at the background on psychodynamic dream interpretation, I will cover some of the common objections to the practice of it as well as the theory that dreams may be “random” and hence meaningless images. We will then look into the subject of ineffability and a general discussion of the relationship between dreams and mythology, after which I will give you what I think is the quickest and easiest way to understand a dream: I call it the “Number One Dream Hack” (meaning the key principle that can be used to understand a dream). Finally, in this chapter I will introduce what I am calling the Invisible Storyteller (IS), the hypothetical character we all have that puts together the dream story as if commenting on our current situation. To show more what I mean by this I will provide some examples from clinical practice.

In Chapter 2 I will explore the imagination and a way to look at it that will help parse out imaginary experiences that come from the conscious will vs. the rest of the psyche (including the Invisible Storyteller), along with the research that helps us understand why we should pay attention to it and what functions it may serve. Next, in Chapter 3 we will take a deeper look at how dream images, myths, and folktales are connected. Here I develop the idea of psychological resonance to help us figure out what to attend closely to in a dream. Resonant themes and images are “sticky” and can be found world-wide in myths and folktales. They represent powerful tools not only to understand the dream but also to engage the dreamer with her or his own “rest of the psyche”.

I continue this concept in Chapter 4, where we look at the precise “nuts and bolts” of resonance as well as a number of other critical features that dreams have. These include not only resonance, but context, characters, setting, scope, storytelling features, level of conflict, overall intensity, and integrative features. We will go over Jung’s thoughts on these subjects along with the more recent dream research that modifies the classical viewpoint. We will see that dreams can be measured along the various scales I introduce in this chapter and can be used as a way to understand dreams more thoroughly in a systematic way. Next, in Chapter 5, I explore the way traumatic dreams unfold in most cases, and how this helps us understand non-traumatic dreams as well, particularly with respect to the apparent “purposefulness” of the Invisible Storyteller’s craft in dream-making. Contrasting this, in Chapter 6, we will look at lucid dreams (dreaming while one is aware one is dreaming), for more clues about the overall dreaming process as it relates to the dreamer’s conscious will.

In Chapter 7, building on the previous chapters, we will begin to see the overall progression of dreams as aspects of the integrative process that occurs across the lifespan, and how dreams reflect this process in a way that can be illuminating. Finding an overall unity even within the fractionated multiplicity of trauma and dissociative identity disorders can show us how this process works and how dreams can be used not only for diagnostics about our life, but moving forward as powerful images that the dreamer can hold in consciousness to make progress toward one’s mental health goals.

In Chapter 8, we will look at the relationship between dreams and spirituality. As throughout the ages dreams have often been ascribed a mysterious and/or divine quality, we will look at what this means given our modern understanding of neuroscience and psychiatric practice. We will explore ways that dreams can be used to develop one’s spirituality if one so wishes.

Finally, in Chapter 9, we will wrap up everything covered and review the principles I have introduced here, and I will recap the methods along with some techniques you can use in therapy to take advantage of dream material and the unique strengths it has.

The talking bunny rabbit and other mysteries

In this book I will present a number of dreams for illustrative purposes so that you can get an idea of how I approach dreams. When I do this, I will present the dream in italics, then in the following paragraphs we will get into the meaning of the dream. The dreams I present in this book are gleaned from real patients in clinical practice, however, in order to preserve anonymity, I have changed certain details. This disguising of clinical material is standard practice in writing about patient care, but a curious thing happens when you do this with dreams: even changing one detail can change the overall “feel” and “texture” of a dream. That is due to the holistic quality I was referring to earlier. Since dreams are remarkably resistant to reduction to “merely this and that”, it should be no surprise that changing even one detail can actually change the whole interpretation because each detail is important.

Why? Because, as I will explore in greater depth later, “meaning” itself derives from context. The same imagery dreamt by a different person in a different situation can have a different meaning because the meaning is an aspect of the whole person-image-context system. That’s why “dream dictionaries” are usually a waste of time. They unwisely assume the same image has the exact same meaning regardless of context. The importance of this dream feature will become clear as we continue. Suffice it to say, therefore, that I had to constantly be aware of this issue when disguising the dreams I present in this book. I only mention it now for the sake of transparency.

That said, this is not to say that analyzing dreams in terms of various categories, parts, themes, etc., provides no information. Quite the contrary, and despite my earlier misgivings about dream dictionaries it should be said that there are universal symbols – or at least universal symbolic themes – that recur over and over in dream imagery and other spontaneous mental imagery. I just want to emphasize here that we should always try to strike a balance between what a strongly recurrent dream element tends to mean universally, and what a particular dream element means for the individual dreamer. Both are important aspects of dream interpretation.

Perhaps it would be easier for me to demonstrate this fact with a clinical example. Let’s take a look at our first dream, from a 37-year-old female:

I have had this dream since I was a child. It’s a recurrent dream that has haunted me for years. I’m a small child being chased by a cute bunny rabbit, but I find the bunny terrifying and run away from it. Eventually I hide under the bed. It searches around and then finds me, saying “gotcha!”. I hate this dream so much I have avoided going to sleep to avoid having it.

This dream was presented to me in case conference by one of my resident physicians in training. The resident was genuinely perplexed by the dream’s meaning, which is certainly understandable. At this point I had been given no other information about the patient other than her age and gender. Upon hearing it, however, I told the resident that this patient had an extremely rigid character structure, that she was most likely severely abused or molested, that she was excessively serious and humorless most of the time, had a strong aversion to being playful and creative, and that all these things caused her a great deal of suffering. I was right on all accounts.

So how did I do that based on so little material? Well, first of all, there isn’t a small amount of clinical material here. The “trick” – if you will – is that the material is in “dream language”. In fact, the reason this seems like a trick at all reflects a typical approach to dreams encountered in the Western world: in other words, we tend to dismiss them as mindless, random, or zany gibberish. So using dream material to deduce clinical material seems like “magic”. But it’s not really a trick. It’s a clinical skill you can develop, and it has even been demonstrated in empirical work (Bulkeley and Domhoff 2010).

It starts with the fact that we are being given clinical material by way of the dream, and the details are important. For example, she has told us that it is a recurrent dream. Moreover, it’s not just recurrent over a few months but a lifetime. There is also a lot of emotion in it – terror – and it is emotion that doesn’t make very much sense on the surface. Why be afraid of a cute bunny rabbit? You should always take note of strange, seemingly illogical or “bizarre” aspects like this because they are not random, and they are often used to make a point. In this case the point seems to be the fact that she is running away from a harmless animal. If she was chronically running away from a demonic monster, that would have quite a different feel to it, and it would actually seem more logical! In particular, we need to look at the dreamer’s behavior. She’s running from something harmless, and even goes so far as to hide under a bed. This is very important for understanding patterns of behavior that are pervasive, because what we tend to do when we are awake is what we tend to do while we’re dreaming. It’s simple enough: we usually don’t know we’re dreaming, so we just carry on as we normally do. So even with just that little bit we know that running from harmless things is something she typically does, and moreover it’s something that she has done all her life.

The part about her being abused was an educated guess. Why else would she be so afraid of cute and cuddly things? One very common reason encountered in clinical practice is that she early on learned not to behave that way because it would be punished. And in fact I learned afterward that this patient had suffered physical abuse from a parent, sometimes beatings so severe as to cause broken bones. Likely enough she incurred the wrath of the abuser when she did something silly or childish (as children naturally do), and came to loathe and fear such impulses because they were punished so harshly.

All that from one dream. But actually there is a lot more. And as we go I will refer back to this dream several times to illustrate different points about it that show how I was able to deduce things about the patient based on a single dream report.

General thoughts about dreams

Whenever I’m giving lectures or workshops about dreams I always encounter people who want to tell me their dreams. I have to stop them and give them fair warning: “telling me a dream might tell me more than you want me to know about you”, I say. They laugh … and then they always tell it to me anyway. Upon some reflection, it seems to me that this is likely due to one of two possibilities. Either they trust me completely, which I find unlikely since they rarely know me, or, like many of us raised in largely Western “civilized” cultures, we tend to think of dreams as empty fantasy or funny, goofy brain malfunctions. Even among people who presumably take dreams more seriously – like those who attend conferences or lectures about dreams, there’s still a strong sense of that legacy, and sharing dreams can feel like a parlor game.

Maybe this is because dreams often seem bizarre and funny with their unusual and sometimes grotesque/comical imagery. But often dreams seem “funny” because of our tendency to take them literally. I strongly advise against this because it will lead to all sorts of absurdities. Instead, think about what is happening in the dream and take it to a more abstract level: what is the general process that is going on? For example, one very common dream is that you are in a public place but have no clothes on; everyone has yet to notice, but you’re afraid they will. Taking this literally, you might wonder whether the person has repressed exhibitionist fantasies (a Freudian approach). But this interpretation is almost never confirmed by other clinical material (the litmus test for any dream interpretation). Instead, try abstracting this event – what is “being naked” about? What meanings might it have for the dreamer? Usually it’s about being “exposed”. That is, feeling vulnerable, unprotected, or like everyone can see the person that you usually hide from everyone. This interpretation is typically confirmed clinically. And for good reason: worrying about what others are thinking is a part of human nature.

In any case, dreams often make plays on words like this – meaning feeling “exposed” being depicted as physical nakedness – and it’s because, though we normally don’t notice it, most of our thought and even language is very metaphorical in nature, and since in a dream we don’t think in words but in pictures, what is really a metaphorical idea becomes a pictorial representation (I explore much of this in Goodwyn 2011). If we feel we are at “a crossroads in life” and contemplating a difficult choice, we will often dream about actually standing at a crossroad somewhere.

The art of dream interpretation: Freud, Jung, and everyone else

So from the outset the method I advocate for here has some measure of predictive validity to it. This lends some credibility already. But how did this evolve in the modern era? The science and/or art of dream interpretation has a very long history (Van de Castle 1994) and has been a part of every culture known in some measure or another (Brown 1991). But for our purposes the modern art of psychodynamic dream interpretation began with Freud’s now-famous The Interpretation of Drea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Foundations
• 2. The imagination – a no nonsense look
• 3. Dreams, myths, and everyday life
• 4.Nuts and bolts of understanding dreams – order out of chaos
• 5. Traumatic dreams – fighting iron forests of dragons…
• 6.Lucid dreams – and soaring to Asgard
• 7. From suffering to integration – the storyteller’s map
• 8. The king of Annwn
• 9. Conclusion
• References
• Index