Think of it this way: The one psychological function that we all have in common and that we engage in every night is dreaming. Okay, maybe you sleep during the day so that’s when you dream. Or maybe you don’t sleep at all and those hallucinations you’ve been worried about are your way of dreaming. The fact is that we all dream, and our REM activity happens everytime we sleep. It’s an important biological and psychological function. It helps dissipate all the stimuli we take in on any and every day ( radio wave exposure from cell phones and other electronic devices, and in if you live in Manhattan, you know about stimuli). In that way, it’s a stress reducer. Dreams give us relief from some of the difficulties we face in life. They also remind us of those difficulties, sometimes in ways that are unnerving, painful, and occassionally downright scary (nightmares can certainly ruin our sleep and make us only too glad that our eyes are open and we are able to say, “what was that?”). But dreams are also a wonderful tool for self-reflection, awareness, deep understanding of our unconscious, but important, desires and needs. They are also a vehicle for personal and relationship growth. Dreams may also tell us important things about our present and may even portend our future. That’s right, we can do some fortune telling through our dreams by predicting events, or at least warning us about something that might happen. An example: A client of mine had a dream is which she was on her way from her bedroom on the second floor of her house to her kitchen on the main floor. She reached for the bannister. It collapsed, sending her headlong to the landing below. When we discussed the dream it seemed that none of the typical ways of addressing a dream in therapy resonated with her. On a hunch I said, “Why don’t you check it.” “Check what?” She asked. “The bannister. Why don’t you check the bannister.” She did and called me the next day thanking me that she hadn’t fallen like she had in her dream. The bannister was indeed broken. I told her to thank her unconscious mind because it had noticed something her conscious mind hadn’t and in a way predicted a serious event in her life. She averted that future by fixing the bannister.
So “dreams” is the topic and we are going to do some dream weaving. Dream weaving works like this: You tell me your dream. it can be a complete dream, a fragment of a dream, a feeling or sensation from a dream, or a memory of a dream you had a while ago. As you report your dream I’ll weave in music and impressions and you can do the the same for yourself and for other posters. The hoped for outcome is that we all have fun with this and that we learn something about ourselves. I’ll also weave in some dream techniques that you can use to help you understand your dream more deeply.
We start off our musical set with “The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, Neil Young’s “Dreamin’ Man,” and The Everly Brother’s classic “All I Have to do is Dream.”
