Marriage of Lucid Dreaming and Dream Analysis (part 1)

A client of mine once dreamed that she was lying in bed. A man dressed in a robe, with a hood covering his face, walked up and stood beside her bed. He said, “I want your heart.” Visualizing the man ripping her heart from her chest, the woman awoke in terror.

She asked what countless people have asked upon awakening from such a dream, “Who was that man? What does this mean?” If she had posed this question to a frequent lucid dreamer, he or she might have disregarded the dreamer’s preemptive search for an interpretation, and said, “Too bad you didn’t become lucid. Then you could have realized that it was only a dream.”

A therapist, looking at the dream as an indication of past trauma, or unrealized potentials, or both, might have asked in classic noninvasive fashion, “What are your associations to this figure? How might he serve as a metaphor for some aspect of your life?”

If the dreamer had simply become lucid, she could have responded fearlessly, or simply woke up. Her fear might have subsided with the realization that the man and his disturbing words were only part of a dream. Or, if the dreamer had acquired in retrospect the insight that the man portrayed, for instance, the dominating, Apollonian quality of maleness, she may have realized that her sense of self was feeble in the presence of such strength, and she may have associated her fear with actual past events and relationships.

What’s Missing?

Both of these approaches — of the lucid dreamer and the dream analyst — have merit and can produce meaningful results, but what is lacking in both of these orientations is the balancing perspective of the other. In my experience, lucid dreamers can be too quick to go off in search of something more desirable. It’s their dream after all, so why not bag the old dream and go in search of a new one?

And therapeutic dream analysts, especially those of a psychodynamic bent, may remain stuck trying to discern the meaning of the imagery without regard for what the dreamer did, or could have done, to alter the dream’s outcome.

As an early lucid dreamer, I was passionate about the possibilities of experiencing higher states of awareness, and dream interpretation was initially not very important to me. My little book, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976)––an outgrowth of my master’s thesis––went to the heart of what I considered the ultimate lucid experience: communion with the white light. I was largely uninterested in the unresolved conflicts to which dreams often alluded.

To give some sense of my priorities as a hot-shot lucid dreamer, I once told a psychoanalytically trained colleague the following dream:

I am on the streets of a Mexican town with my two best friends. We meet a beautiful woman, who could be a prostitute. We flirt with her, and them make arrangements to visit with her that evening. Just as we say goodbye to her, I notice my father standing nearby in the shadows. I know that he has overheard our conversation with the woman, and I can discern his disapproving look even in the low light. But just as we stand facing each other in silence, there is an explosion to the east. We both turn and see an orb of white light the size of several suns hovering 50 feet above ground. I look at my father lit-up face, and can see that he has forgotten the tension that was between us. I become aware that I am dreaming as the light begins to approach and pass over us. Then there is another explosion, and the light appears again to the east. This time, a strong wind begins to blow in its direction, and I am pushed along toward it until I lose my footing and fly up into the light.

When I shared this dream with my psychoanalytically trained friend, he immediately seized upon my relationship with my father, and understandably wanted to ask probing questions regarding my sexuality and my father’s values. However, I was shocked that he would trivialize such a profound experience. I grew increasingly irritated with his questions, and cut short our conversation.

Somewhere in my late 20s, however, I began to shift to the therapeutic side of dream studies. Not only was I encountering my own powerful unfinished business in non-lucid and lucid dreams alike, but I began to pursue a career as a psychotherapist, working with individuals for whom the prospects of having a lucid dream seemed as remote as winning the lottery.

At first, I was convinced that if my clients could achieve lucidity in dreams depicting their life struggles, the therapeutic process could be greatly accelerated. I tried on many occasions to introduce lucid dream induction as a therapeutic intervention. While some of my clients were successful in having memorable and therapeutic lucid dreams, the great majority of them were not.
The Revelation

A breakthrough came for me in the form of a realization about ordinary dreams. In working with clients on a day-to-day basis, I began to notice that dreamers already exercise considerable reflective awareness in their non-lucid dreams. In retelling their dreams, dreamers exhibit the kind of deliberate thinking that characterizes waking cognition, but everyone seemed to have overlooked that fact. Just because dreamers aren’t lucid, I concluded, it doesn’t mean that they are always passively uninvolved in the dream’s unfoldment and outcome. To the contrary. I wanted to shout from the housetops that dreamers were not merely “recording secretaries” in the dream, but were reflective and clearly influencing the outcome of virtually every dream!

It was right in front of our eyes, but neither the lucid dreamers who seemed overly focused on lucidity per se, nor the content-oriented dream analysts who remained devoted to analyzing the imagery, seemed cognizant of this feature of ordinary dream reports.

To me, it was an astounding fact, upon which an altogether new theory of dreaming could be developed. I was talking about this “revelation” 30 years ago, and have never stopped talking about it. It’s simple: If the dreamer is reflective and thus capable of exercising a wide array of responses, and if these responses actually alter the course of the dream as they seem to do, then all dreams can be seen as an interactive, relational process, and analyzed from the standpoint of relational dynamics.

So from this point of view, systems-oriented family therapists are probably better at analyzing the dream than psychodynamically trained therapists.
A Co-creative Model for Dreaming

I wasn’t the first to articulate a cocreative, relational model of dreaming and dream analysis. I found a kindred spirit in the work of Ernest Rossi, who in his seminal work, Dreams and the Growth of Personality, announced that “there is a continuum of all possible balances between the self-directive efforts of the dreamer and the autonomous creation of the dream content.”

In this pithy statement, Rossi basically said that there are two systems interacting in every dream–the dreamer and the source of the imagery. (To those of you who are interested in brain science, you will probably think of the two prevailing positions on dream generation – but that is a vastly complex debate, which exceeds the scope of this essay.) By positing these two somewhat distinct co-contributing elements in the dream, he laid the groundwork for a view of the dream as an interactive, relational, and co-created event.

This view of dreaming makes full lucidity less necessary for good things to happen, and treats it as a special event within a continuum of awareness that is readily observable in ordinary dreams. It also suggests that the dream content, as a largely autonomous creation, may ultimately elude the understanding and control of even the highest states of lucidity.

A relational view of dreaming can also threaten the traditional clinical view that dream images can be analyzed as static content, unaffected by what the dreamer is feeling, thinking, and doing in the dream. What kind of interpretive conclusions can we draw if the dream imagery is in constant flux, tethered to and influenced by the dreamer’s responses? One can no longer say, “this means…,” but instead has to describe the dream process in such terms as, “this is what happens when you respond in this way.”

Although this approach can frustrate a person’s needs for “answers,” it underscores personal responsibility and unacknowledged competencies, as well as approaching the dream as an unfolding relationship.

Dream Logic

A concept that grows out of cocreative dream theory, and is a useful concept in learning how to use the FiveStar Method is what I call “dream logic.” This is simply a way of understanding scene changes in dreams. If you look at content alone, a scene shift can appear unrelated to the original scenario. But within cocreative dream theory, we look upon each scene as an encounter that “plays out” between the emergent dream content, or agenda, and the dreamer’s response to it. If the response facilitates an acceptance or resolution between the agenda and the dreamer’s status quo awareness (ego), then the scene may evolve without shifting, or it may shift to a different scenario that reflects a new (more integrated) balance between the dream agenda and the dreamer. Similarly, if the dreamer’s response is “tainted” by assumptions, fears, beliefs, etc, that prevents an integration of the dream agenda, then the dream may deteriorate (into conflict, or less pleasant developments) or a scene shift may represent this new (lower) balance between the dreamer and the dream agenda. Now this may sound very abstract. But whenever a scene shift, think, “This is what the first scene becomes when the dreamer responds as he or she did.” Take for instance a dream in which I am walking along and a dog approaches barking. At first I grab him by the neck to strangle him, but then feel pity and let him go. He licks me in gratitude and we walk off together. The scene shifts and I am walking up a mountain path with June, my old girlfriend who cheated on me, and we are amazed that the views look like the grand canyon.

A dreamer might not see any connection between scene one and two because he will typically be focused on content, rather than on relationship process. But you can point out the significant shift from counteraggression to compassion, and how his kindness allowed him to come into a harmonious relationship with the dog, which then created the conditions for enjoying his time with June, who also had hurt him. You might point out that his clemency toward the dog seems to have transferred over to June, thus allowing him to enjoy the positive benefits of that relationship.

So do you see how connecting the scenes is an easy thing to do if you focus on what the dreamer does or doesn’t do in scene one to make the events unfold as they do in scene two? I call this dream logic, and you can get really good at tying dream “fragments” together into a complete picture once you shift to understanding the power of the dreamer’s responses.

Perspective on a dream

A middle-aged man going through a divorce shared this dream: “I am watching ancient statues walk toward an opening in the ground. It is a well, and when they get to the edge, they are lowered into the water where they are reclaimed. It all seems very purposeful. Some of the statues are green with age, and broken. Some have to be carried.

“This is all happening on the edge of an arena enclosed by high, white stone walls that have steps that go down to an the arena. I look down into the arena from above and sees two white cars racing around a track. I know that the cars are very expensive, and owned by a wealthy man, who allows people to drive them. The two cars collide, and I wince thinking that the accident will be very costly. But apparently the man has anticipated this problem, and has made the cars in such a way that they can be snapped back together, so that people can race around without fear of destroying the cars. I am relieved to see the cars restored to their previous state.”

When asked about feelings, the man replied “sad,” “somber,” “sober,” and “courageous” to describe the willingness of the statues to submit to the dissolving of their prior forms. But he went on to say that he felt “excited,” “competitive,” “afraid,” and “relieved” to describe the scene in the arena.

In formulating a theme or process narrative, the dreamer and I considered, “Some things are coming to a purposeful end without anyone expressing regret.” In the second part, however, he decided that the theme was something like, “Someone observes an apparently destructive process that can be easily reversed, because someone has anticipated it and made it possible.”

The dreamer related the first scene to his marriage, which had been coming apart for two years. He had given up thinking that the relationship could be salvaged, had fully embraced an attitude of letting go, and had recently welcomed the divorce. But the second scene seemed to capture the relationship dynamic in a new relationship with an old friend. At first, he was concerned that the relationship simply mirrored some of the conflict that he’d experienced in his marriage, and was considering ending it for that reason. But the surprising resilience of the white cars seemed to suggest to him that a wholly different process was unfolding–one that could be destructive, but not in any permanent sense. What’s more, the dreamer realized that the relationship was always playful, even if it times it seemed to be ending.

When we looked at the dreamer’s responses to the dream, there wasn’t much to consider, except that the dreamer initially concluded that the cars had been totally destroyed. Only later did he realize that they were made to absorb the forces of the collisions. He realized that he often felt fatalistic whenever he and his friend argued, and would sometimes speak precipitously and hurtfully about his sense of hopelessness. He decided that the dream accurately portrayed the conflict between him and his girlfriend, but revealed a deeper foundation that could weather the storm. In applying the dream, he decided to tell her about the dream, and to make a commitment to avoid fatalistic pronouncements in the midst of their arguments. She had always felt that it wasn’t as bad as he believed, so she was encouraged by the dream, and by her partner’s realization.

Most of this work was strictly process oriented and followed the FiveStar sequence of steps, meaning we considered the feelings, theme, and dreamer responses before we examined the specific content. However, the white cars captured the sense of newness and beauty in their relationship, and became a source of reassurance for the couple. Indeed, the contrasting imagery between the first scene and the second allowed the dreamer to see the vast differences in the two relationships: his marriage (old forms and memories as depicted by the statues) that had to be “reabsorbed into the earth,” and his new relationship could be embraced for its capacity for resilience and renewal. The wealthy owner of the car suggested the presence of higher power in their relationship–something that both of them had felt since meeting.

Therapists who use a psychodynamic model–and that means most of us from time to time–are often on a mission to help their clients answer a simple question, “What is similar and what is different between the new and the old?” Clients in distress often assume that when a relationship is superficially similar to an old, unhealthy relationship, that the two relationships are alike. This conclusion can be quite tragic, because a promising new relationship can be rejected on the basis of superficial similarities without appreciating the deep differences. This dream sets the stage for the dreamer to experience the differences between the old and new, and thus performs a profound service for the dreamer. Of course, a process-oriented dream work method will get to the heart of the differences, because the dreamer’s conclusions (i.e. that the old and the new relationships are both destructivce) will be called into question when the dream work examines first of all how these assumptions may reflect habitual reactions. Once the dreamer has to face the possibility that he has rejected the new unfairly, the dream imagery can be analyzed either to support or refute the dreamer’s conclusion. In this dream, the white cars are “proof positive” that the relationship process in the new relationship was, contrary to the dreamer’s reflexive assessment, more positive and resilient than he had thought. You need always to consider the subjective reactions of the client/dreamer alongside the “facts” of what is happening in the relationship as you search for an accurate and balanced answer to the question, “What is similar and what is different?”