 |
| "Dreams are pictures of
feelings." |
Richard Corriere &
Joseph Hart
"The Dream Makers" |
|
|
| All of
us dream, but few of us remember our dreams and
fewer still have any sense of their meaning.
Margaret Phillips Johnson, who teaches dream
analysis at the C.G. Jung Institute in Los
Angeles put it concisely: "You can think of
a dream as a letter the unconscious sends the
ego." The letter, however, is written in
hieroglyphs. Further complicating matters, there
are as many hieroglyphic languages as there are
dreamers. Hence, an image vividly remembered from
a dream can mean one thing to one person and
something else to another. |
|
| The
Rosetta Stone for interpreting dreams was
discovered in the Seventies by psychologists
Richard Corriere and Joseph Hart and set forth in
their book "The Dream Makers: Discovering
Your Breakthrough Dreams" (Funk &
Wagnalls, New York, 1977). Several years later,
their therapeutic community, the Center for
Feeling Therapy, crashed and imploded, resulting
in California's longest, costliest and most
complex psychotherapy malpractice case. Along
with everything else lost in that legal and
emotional cataclysm was an innovative and
wonderful way of understanding and learning from
one's dreams. Easy to grasp, but profound in its
significance, Corriere, Hart and their fellow
therapists had discovered that "dreams are
pictures of feelings." |
|
| The
feelings we experience in our dreams are what is
meaningful about them. The images and events that
occur in our dreams are expressions of those
feelings. "I'm in a speedboat. Someone
else is driving. They are being reckless and I'm
afraid. I tell them to slow down and be more
careful." This is a dream about not
being in control. Perhaps someone else is calling
the shots in our life. Perhaps it is an aspect of
our own personality - our anger or our bravado -
that is making the critical choices that affect
our safety and happiness. Not only does this
dream afford us a clear vision that someone else
(or something else) is controlling our current
situation; we also catch a glimpse of our True
Self - intelligent, aware, and sensibly concerned
for our own well-being. |
|
| Friedrich
Nietzsche observed that "we are all artists
in our dreams." Our dreaming minds are
capable of re-creating familiar scenes and
familiar persons with great clarity and
incredible attention to detail. We can also
create in our dreams original - even
extraordinary - places, events, and situations
without the least bit of mental effort. There's
no such thing as writer's block in the mind of a
dreamer. Words, sounds and images flow in a
torrent from our unconscious, mimicking reality
so convincingly that we rarely know that we are
dreaming while we're fully caught up, emotionally
and intellectually, in the imaginary reality of
the dream. But there's more to the art of
dreaming than just painting perfect pictures.
There's a profound, mysterious, insightful wisdom
working behind the scenes in our dreams, trying
to lead us out of our pain and confusion, out of
our bad habits and insane behavior; trying to
inform us who we are and what we need to do in
our waking lives to become healthy, happy, free
and secure. Like great art, it is the moral and
intellectual content of dreams that makes them
worthy of our serious consideration, not their
"mere" ability to create fully realized
imaginary worlds. |
|
| Here,
then, are ten lessons to get you started on the
dreamer's path to greater self-understanding.
Since we, too, are on that path we can't tell you
where it ends. But we know how far we've come and
that each part of the journey brings its own
rewards. It helps to write down your dreams and
talk about them. Some will be easy to understand,
but others will baffle you for a very long time.
Understanding our dreams is much more an art than
a science. |
|
|
| |
|
