Dream Work as a Tool in Counselling - by Liani Kruger

“I have no theory about dreams; I do not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a ‘method’. I share all your prejudices against dream interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it.”   (Jung, 1966)

Dreams, with their enigmatic and often baffling nature, have fascinated humankind for centuries. For as long the purpose and meaning of dreams has caused controversy. Some believe that dreams are divine and supernatural messages to be interpreted by the gifted; others dismiss them as a biochemical products of the brain at rest, while yet others assume that dreams process information compiled during the day.

Both Freud and Jung, regarded as the fathers of modern psychology, saw dreams as important tools in psychotherapy. According to them dreams can provide invaluable insights into the client’s image of self, defense mechanisms and core conflicts, and research findings show this to be true.

However there are many different approaches to dream interpretation – how to decode the meaning of a dream, how to interpret it and how to use the insights it provides. These approaches are as different as the diverse schools of thought that birthed them, and counselors are encouraged to explore these many different approaches to find one that best suits their style of counseling.

For those who have neither the time nor resources to undertake such an investigation, the approach used by Gendlin, an experiential therapist, could prove a useful starting point. His approach contains important aspects of the three main theories underpinning our modern understanding of dreams and dream analysis.

Freud described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious mind” (Freud, 1913) and that the meaning of a dream could be found in the events of the day preceding the dream. However, those events could have aroused emotions and associations that the dreamer finds unacceptable or have repressed, and so in the dream they would be disguised or veiled in strange images and puzzling happenings. The work of dream analysis was to unveil these hidden desires, impulses, emotions and associations.

Jung believed Freud's notion of dreams to be too simplistic. Dreams, he said, were far richer and more complex and in fact had their own unique language – the language of metaphor. The task of dream analysis was to decode that language and so have access to the wealth of insight they contained.

Perls viewed dreams as a spontaneous expression the parts of the personality that are being left unexpressed. He believed that the goal of dream work was to re-experience in the here and now the content of the dream so that these disowned aspects of the personality could be reintegrated (Coolidge, 2006). True to the Gestalt approach dreams are re-lived in the session with the client acting out parts of the dream by using tools such as the “empty chair technique”.

Incorporating aspects from these theories, Gendlin held that dreams could only be meaningfully interpreted by the dreamer (Gendlin, 1986) and so the best way to begin analyzing a dream was to encourage the client to engage with it. He used the Freudian technique of free association, Jung’s theory that each image or person represented an aspect of self, and the gestalt approach of re-experiencing the dream in the here and now, including Perls’ “empty chair” technique in which he invited the client to enter into a dialogue with a particular dream character or element.

Once the client had explored and expressed the key emotions and issues in the dream, Gendlin would then encourage an exploration of how the dream and its associations related to the client’s current challenges or conflicts.

Key to Gendlin’s approach are questions designed to lead the client into exploring the dream material more fully and more meaningfully, namely:

• What thoughts or feelings arise when thinking about or visualizing the dream? 
•  When last did you feel this way? 
• What does this feeling make you think of?
•  What do you remember about yesterday? 
• What occupied you internally?
• Summarize the story of your dream. Ask yourself: “What in my life is like this story?
• Think of each person in the dream, or the central characteristic of the person, as a part of yourself.
• Does the dream make sense if you understand it as a story about how you feel about that part of yourself?
• Look at the important objects in your dream. What is it? What is it used for? 
• Replace the object with the general function, place this in the dream and see if this brings insight.
• What in your dream is different from the true or normal situation? What meaning could be attached to this?
• Can your dream connect to a memory, feeling or experience from your childhood? 
• What current themes exist in your life regarding your development or growth? 
• Can the dream or characters in it be about something that you are still developing or that you should work on?

(Gendlin, 1986)

Guidelines for using dream work in therapy

In order for dream work to be meaningful, the therapist must firstly believe in the significance of dreams and find an approach to dream work that fits into the therapist’s overall theoretical approach.  Secondly, dream work should always be rooted within the broader therapeutic process since the individual’s psychological functioning at the time of dreaming is as important as the content of the dream itself. Thirdly, therapists are advised to take an inquisitive stance towards their clients’ dreams and to act as facilitators only, helping the clients explore their own dreams. This approach is especially important in the South African context with its rich cultural milieu, where a therapist may lack the cultural information that contextualizes the clients’ experiences. Dreams hold multi-faceted meaning which is greatly impacted by cultural norms and traditions and create a unique and valuable meeting place for Westernized psychology principles and African belief systems.

Finally, rather than immediately focussing on “finding the meaning of the dream”, clients must be encouraged to write down the dream after waking, since this should produce the purest possible version of the dream. Interestingly it seems that dream journaling improves the ability of remembering dreams over time.

Concluding remarks

It is unlikely that consensus will be reached on the meaning of dreams. However theorists seem to agree that disregarding the significance of dreams is to disconnect ourselves from a part of our awareness and in doing this, disowns a part of ourselves. Perhaps the key to approaching dreams is to leave behind dichotomous thinking that forces individuals to decide on the meaning of dreams. Humans are body, soul and mind and perhaps dreams should be viewed as complex experiences that are products of our holistic existence. In fact, some therapists suggest aiming to integrate dreams instead of purely analyzing, stating that to purely view dreams as a message is to underestimate them.

Encouraging an awareness and curiosity about dreams teaches openness for the infinite complexity of our unconscious, as well as consciousness, and in this the positive impact of dream work may reach much further than insight regarding dreams.

References

Coolidge, F. L. (2006). Dream interpretation as a psychotherapeutic technique: An introduction to Fritz Perls' dream interpretation techniques. Milton Keynes: Radcliffe Publishing.

Freud, S. (1913). The interpretation of dreams. (A. A. Brill, Trans.) New York: The Macmillan Company. (Original work published 1900).

Gendlin, E. T. (1986). Let your body interpret your dreams. Wilmette: Chiron Publications.

Jung, C. G. (1974). Dreams. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1966). The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and other Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

About the author: Liani Krüger is a registered clinical psychologist currently employed by the South African National Defence Force. She is passionate about applying psychology in the South African context.

The author can be contacted via e-mail: lianikruger@gmail.com

Love your Shadow - by Claudia Davidson

We all know what a shadow looks like – a patch of darkness in the shape of whatever is standing between it and the light coming from behind. They are simply there and we give very little thought to them unless they lie across our putting line on the golf course, fall across what we are trying to photograph or make it difficult to read a book.

We really only become conscious of shadows when they block out the light we need to complete a task. When that happens we have a number of choices – we can switch on or create light, we can move to where the light is brighter or we can postpone our task until there is better light available; sometimes we can also choose to muddle on anyway and just hope for the best.

This is also true of our inner growth. Each of us will often have encountered a person, a situation or a set of circumstances that hinders us, blocks us, and/or frustrates us. Most often it is a person – a boss, a colleague, an acquaintance, even a family member. Just the thought of that person is enough to make our hackles rise, our blood pressure shoot up and heated words to flood into our minds and mouths! And no matter how hard we try to get round this, work through it or simply try and ignore it, we find we cannot.

Carl Jung shed some very interesting light on this phenomenon (pun intended! J). According to Jungian psychology we all have within us a Shadow made up of those parts of ourselves that we don’t wish to acknowledge as being part of who we are. Sometimes we are aware of our attempts to block those aspects of ourselves – and so we decide to make a concerted effort to be more understanding, or be more patient, or to be more tolerant. We strive to control our temper, to be less critical or to act more calmly. We seldom succeed by will power alone. Despite our best efforts, there comes a time when we “lose it” and find ourselves back at square one!

And that’s just the Shadow we are aware of.

More challenging is the Shadow we are unaware of – more commonly referred to as our blind spot or the log in our eye compared to the splinter in our brother’s eye. Both references allude to a blockage, a hindrance that is there; that no matter how well we look, we just cannot see. We can clearly see the blind spots in others, and the splinters in their eyes, while being totally oblivious to our own.

“But why even bother with all this?” you may ask. “Shadows do no harm. I can just learn to live with them - I’ve managed all right so far.”

Yes, that is true. We can simply resign ourselves to living with our shadows - but then we also settle for spending our lives in a twilight zone of half-light – a place where our relationships with those around us are unfulfilling, disappointing, and often hurtful.  We sit in the shadows and watch others playing in the sunlight, and tell ourselves we were not born for sunshine.

Not so, says Jung. We are all born with the potential to live fully in the light. We all have within us the Golden Child, the one filled with and surrounded by the glow of the Divine. However, for most of us, while we may enter life “trailing clouds of glory” as Wordsworth described it, we soon find ourselves shattered and fragmented by people, circumstances, and life experiences. And if not shattered then definitely reshaped and reconfigured so that we “fit in” with the expectations of others.  However, there is that within us that which will always strive to be whole and complete again to reclaim and reintegrate the fragments of ourselves that got lost along the way.

Except these fragments now lie in the hands of the Shadow self – in that part of our inner selves that is unknown, unacknowledged and unrecognised.

How do we go about reclaiming these missing or lost aspects of our being? Especially when we sometimes don’t even know what we’re looking for or can’t see it even if it lies right in our eye line. Easy - remember how a shadow reflects the shape of the thing standing between it and the sun? Well, and here’s the really scary part – those people who come into our lives that irritate, frustrate and drive us to distraction – they carry one of the parts we are missing!! The very thing about them that rubs us up the wrong way is the shadow of the quality we are missing or disowning in ourselves!

So the solution is really quite simple – identify that quality, acknowledge it also resides in you, sit with that thought for a bit until you become comfortable with it, see how it has shaped your responses to people or the lack of it has hampered you in your life’s journey and take from this exercise the gift the Shadow has given you in the form of the person you found so very objectionable.

Much easier said than done!!The process itself is challenging and sometimes painful – which is why we sometimes prefer to live in the dark! But the rewards of finally living in the light make it more than worthwhile.

I still remember my first true encounter with the Shadow Self quite vividly. A young girl was visiting in my house – and the moment she walked in my hackles rose. I found her bold and brash and – here’s the rub – greedy - first at the supper table, piling her plate high with complete disregard for anyone else and clearly relishing every mouthful. I was horrified, appalled, disgusted and seething with unexpressed anger. For a while I justified these reactions – after all, I was kind, generous, and gracious – and her behaviour was just so opposite to all that.

 Long after she’d left, I was still sitting with all these emotions – until one day I realised she’d been sent to show me something. I realised that I objected to her “greed” so vehemently because meeting your own needs was so far from my own experience. I’d grown up in a dysfunctional home and learned co-dependent behaviour before I’d learned the alphabet. I knew all about meeting the needs of others – always and even to my own detriment. And this young girl came into my life when my marriage to an alcoholic was at its most dysfunctional. No wonder I was so outraged by this person who so unashamedly took steps to fill her own hunger.

Recognising my own hunger, and then discovering ways of meeting my needs in a healthy way was the beginning of my own journey to wholeness and healing from the debilitating shadow life of co-dependency – but the catalyst was a young girl who made me so very, very, very angry!!!

I know now that was only because I had not yet learned that those who trigger my rage or fear are simply bringing me a gift – those parts of myself that have been held by the Shadow Self. I now know better – and find that such people don’t have to stay around that long anymore before I get it! That alone is reward enough for learning to love my shadow!!

By Claudia Davidson