How to View Dream Imagery

Traditional dream work treats a dream image as a “given,” a part of a text or narrative created by the subconscious mind and whose appearance is determined from the beginning of the dream. Cocreative theory, in contrast, treats the imagery as the “mutable interface” (my words) between the dreamer’s consciousness and the dream content, which is unformed until it is observed. In cocreative theory, the dream image is a “quantum” event. That is, it does not exist prior to perception, but comes into consciousness as a cocreated product of the observer’s “set” and the content’s agenda. So the image is what physicists might call a resultant vector of two forces meeting. What makes this even more complex is that the image is a moment-to-moment, fluctuating interface–subject to change in response to the dreamer’s reaction to it. Thus the image and dreamer are in a synchronous, reciprocal feedback loop. Modern family therapy is founded on this premise, which can be succinctly summarized as, “Reciprocity is the governing principle of relationships” (Nichols and Schwartz, 2008). Previously, this founding principle of systems theory has not been applied to dreams for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the age-old Greek theory of mimesis–that dreams represent something in our waking lives. So we ask, “What does Jane represent to you?” rather than, “What is the quality of relationship between you and the Jane figure and how is she changing in response to your style of relating to her, and vice versa?” This is a longer question, and generates a more complex answer, but it preserves the rich, dynamic, relational process that has been heretofore overlooked entirely in traditional dream work. This process is the same process that we understand to be at work in waking relationships. So cocreative dream theory sees the dream as possessing all of the ambiguity and indeterminacy of a waking experience, which unfolds according to the interaction between the observer and the phenomenal realm.

More on Analyzing Dream Imagery

In cocreative dream theory, nothing is fixed from the outset. The dreamer and the dream content interact in real time to cocreate the dream experience. A fundamental assumption of this approach is that the dreamer’s beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and reactions influence the way the dream unfolds, and that any change in the dreamer’s overall attitude or response set is mirrored by changes in the imagery. So the dreamer and the imagery are, to some extent, autonomous systems. But they are bound together in reciprocal interplay. It’s kind of like marriage, in which a wife’s needs may be perceived as demanding, leading the husband to believe that he needs to distance himself in order to be comfortable. The wife, in turn, sees him “doing what he always does,” approaches and become more emphatic. You know what happens then. The interaction between the dreamer and the imagery is very similar if you are able to take off the traditional view of the dream as a fixed message, and see it as relationship process. A therapist working with the couple would endeavor to show them that they both play a part in the conflict, and that they each can bring about change by working on their side of the equation.

So let’s look at the image for a moment. At first it may be a black dog, which can then into a threatening man, who then might have a heart attack and die when the dreamer hits him over the head with a frying pan. Pretty dramatic, right? In the traditional approach to symbols, the dream work might revolve around what a dog means, who or what the man represents, what a fying pan means, and what a heart attack means. The dreamer’s responses might be seen as justified, and thus completely overlooked. This approach bears fruit, but from a cocreative standpoint, we’re really missing the boat to take the separate images and analyze them apart from the interactive process. From a relational standpoint, we would be interested in what the dreamer did just before the dog turned into a man. That is, what she was thinking, feeling, and doing? She may have petted the dog, or she may have run from the dog. Mostly like the latter, right? Because in dreams, if you pet a dog or kiss a frog, it’s likely to become more approachable and positive, just as in mythology and in fairy tales.

From the standpoint of cocreative dream work– of which the Five Star Method may be the only systematic method developed thus far–we wish to analyze the dream much the way that a marriage therapist analyzes a complex relationship: We want to track the dreamer’s responses over the course of the dream, and assist the dreamer in reviewing and considering alternatives to those responses. Perhaps the dreamer’s reactions were based on fear. If so, we discuss how a less fearful response may have impacted the imagery and the eventual outcome. This is the essence of effective relational therapy, regardless of whether it takes place between a husband and wife, or between a dreamer and the dream images: In both cases, we are trying to analyze what is going on between the two parties, and get both of them to assume responsibility for their own actions and assumptions. Of course, dream work is a little different, because we don’t have access to the dream imagery. But even family therapy, a therapist knows that systemic change will occur even when a single member of a system changes the way that he or she relates to it. Looking at the dream as an interactive process empowers the dreamer in determing a course of action that may change fundamentally the way that he relates to the dream and to the world.

Formulating the Dream Theme, Story Line, or Process Narrative

Extracting a dream theme is a powerful technique in and of itself. Indeed, some people have developed entire dream work approaches around the dream theme, even though there are slightly different ways to approach this method. Robert Gongaloff and Paricia Garfield have focused on universally occurring dream themes, and have tried to create an encompassing list of such themes. Mark Thurston and I were probably the first to write about dream themes back in the 1970, myself in a little article that was published in the Sundance Community Dream Journal, and Mark in a book that he wrote a year later. But Mark probably deserves the main credit for devising this simple, but powerful analytical method.

Mark and I have always thought that the dream should speak for itself; that is, the theme or process narrative (as we have called it in a recent paper that was published in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health) should emerge from the dream structure, not be imposed from some predetermined list, however encompassing it might be. So our approach is to simply describe what's there--the action devoid of content. This approach is very similar to what family therapists do when they analyze the interactional dynamics of a family system. They believe that the specific content of a family's presenting problem is far less important than the way the family members are relating to each other. Not every family who struggles with, for example, a sexually active 15-year-old ends up in family therapy. Many families find ways to deal effectively with such challenges. So it's not the specific problem that causes the family's distress, it's the way they relate to each other around the problem. So a family therapist will observe how the family relates, rather than focusing on the content of their complaints, believing that the solution lies in changing how they are relating, rather than specifically addressing the content of the problem. Indeed, structural family therapists believe that the family will be able to address the problem effectively if, and only if, the family changes the way they relate.

Back to the dream theme. Dreamers are often "caught in the headlights" of the specific dream content. They are alarmed, intrigued, and otherwise preoccupied with the "what" of the dream, and thus do not see the underlying relational dynamics of the dream drama. For instance, if I dreamt that my boss was chasing me with a book, trying to hit me in the head with it, and I was able to avoid him by reciting his favorite poem, I might spend a great deal of time trying to figure out what a book meant, and what the particular poem meant. By focusing on the content, I might overlook the process narrative, which might reveal more to me than any association to the dream images might produce. The theme, "someone is trying to avoid someone else's aggression, and finally resolves the problem by appealing to his interests," could greatly expand my associations to the dream by temporarily diverting my attention away from the imagery. Not that we want to avoid the imagery, but unless we look at the underlying process at first, we may never see this dimension at all. When you effectively formulate a process narrative, sometimes the dreamer will immediately see one or more parallels in the waking life. It's a powerful intervention, and one that decreases the chances that the dream worker will project his or her biases onto the dream.

One other thing: You can state the process narrative from different perspectives. You can describe from the dreamer's perspective (i.e. someone is trying to get away from someone else...) or you can describe it from another dream character's perspective (i.e. someone is trying to catch up with someone else...). By stating the process narrative from other perspective, you help the dreamer get beyond a narrow view of the dream's deeper meaning, and look at his or her own behavior through the lens of another dream character. This multidimensional approach will support Gestalt dream work when you get around to working with the imagery (in Step Four of the Five Step Method).

Applying the FiveStar Method to Group Dream Work

Students of the FiveStar Method often ask me how to apply the FSM in a therapeutic or personal growth group. Interestingly, I originally conceived the FSM as a group dream work method, probably because I received some training years ago with Montague Ullman, whose approach to group dream work is well known and highly effective. But after using the FSM in group and individual work, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t depend on a group for its effectiveness. That being said, it can offer a group that is lead by a seasoned leader a very dynamic interactive process, which can enhance personal insight, faciliate interpersonal learning, and deepen intimacy.

The problem, as most therapists realize, is that a group of inexperienced group members will often make precipitous and invasive interpretations that effectively short-circuit the process of slower and surer discovery, and override the dreamer’s role as the ultimate authority. This is partly due to the age-old belief that dream analysis involves figuring out what the dream is saying, or what it means. Within this tradition, dream workers focus on dream images or “symbols” as the carrier of meaning, and may set about to “solve the puzzle,” rather than viewing the dream through the lens of cocreative or relational dream theory, which treats the dream as an interactive process between the dreamer and the dream content that unfolds in real time–like any real relationship. As the first systematic approach to relational dream work, the FSM focuses prinicipally on the dreamer’s responses to the dream imagery–his or her feelings, thoughts, and reactions in response to what manifests “out there” in the dream. The FSM also views theses responses as “cocreative” of the dream’s outcome, because the dreamer’s reactions clearly affects how the imagery behaves, and so on, in a synchronous feedback look. Until a group becomes familiar with this relational reorientation, they will operate according to the old model, and they will focus on interpreting the images rather than helping the dreamer see how he or she is interacting with, or relating to the dream content.

So it’s important to put the group on notice from the outset that they will first have to learn how to contribute the dream work process, and that means the leader must be willing to control the process in a disciplined way until everyone gets the hang of it. You don’t have to be a stormtrooper in providing corrective feedback, but you do have to intervene immediately to redirect wayward projections.

It helps to break down the five steps of the FSM into clearly delineated stages, and announce beforehand the focused tasks assigned to each stage. Much of your work will be to keep the group members from getting ahead of the process, so you can intervene with messages such as, “That’s about the imagery. We’re not there yet, so hold onto those ideas until we get there.” Also, you can encourage savvy group members to help you “police” the process until everyone has adjusted to the requirements of the FSM. Some client/members will catch on quickly, but some will find the shift in worldview to be quite difficult to negotiate. But remember, controlling the process is very important, and if you’re inclined to be overly polite, you will lose control of the process, and the dream work will quickly deteriorate into a trivial guessing game. So before you introduce the FSM to a group, you need to take stock of your readiness, as well as your group’s capacity to adopt a very advanced and powerful therapeutic intervention.

The Inherent Mystery of Dream Images

A common principle--and, I believe, misconception-- is that the dream images can be understood solely as aspects of oneself. This implies that the dream characters can, with some interpretive work, be identified as qualities that already reside within the dreamer, even though these qualities may have been repressed or overlooked. To some extent, Freud "set this up" by saying that every dream image refers to something in one's past waking life. Of course, Freud believed that we were resistant to this awareness, but nonetheless, the images always referred to known persons, objects and events, and always from the past. Hence Freud's approach to dreams was both reductionistic and retrospective. Freud wasn't the first to imply that dreams should be fully understandable. Plato believed that dreams were merely representative of waking life. The Greek theory of mimesis posits that dreams mimic waking life, and waking life mimics the spiritual or supramundane reality, such that dreams are twice removed from ultimate truth.

These assumptions underlie Western approaches to dream analysis, such that analysis has been traditionally regarded as an exercise in interpreting what the dream refers to in waking life, as if to say that the dream points to what is knowable, but perhaps not fully acknowledged. This culturally embedded, and largely unexamined assumption, overlooks the dreamer's experience of the dream imagery as essentially mysterious and autonomous. Dream workers tend to ignore the phenomenologically rich and inherently mysterious nature of much of the dream imagery.

A chorus of voices have intoned a different view in recent years. Jung was one who believed that dreams had a prospective function, pointing to higher states of psychological integration that the dreamer had not yet achieved. Consequently, some dream images cannot be fully understood, because in essence they point beyond the status quo structure of self consciousness.

If dream images cannot be fully understood, what should be our stance in working with them? Again, I refer you to the FiveStar Method, as one approach that places emphasis on the dreamer's responses to the dream, and to the quality of relationship that arises from those responses. By placing the emphasis on the dreamer, our focus is on what is known, not what is unknown. By helping the dreamer see how different responses could have precipitated a different outcome, we divert attention away from the question, "what does the image mean?" to "how can I respond to it in a better way?" Marriage therapists face the same struggle when they endeavor to divert a person's attention away from trying to figure out the other person's motives, and instead focusing on one's choices and the degree of control that one can exert over one's own behavior and attitudes. Indeed, if you ask a counselor what is the principal mistake that people make, the counselor would probably say, "focusing on other people." Other people are ultimately unknowable just as dream images are ultimately mysterious. We may try to reduce both of them to familiar categories of our own understanding, but in so doing we run the risk of trivializing the nature of interpersonal encounter, whether in the dream or in waking life. Do we really want to be able to fully "appropriate" the people in our lives, and the images in our dreams, into our own familiar frameworks? That may always be the ego's errand, but I think it promotes tension reduction over true development. When we view the dream as inherently mysterious, then our focus turns to where we can do our finest work: on improving our responses to the "other" with whom we can have a rich and unfolding relationship if we are willing to suspend our need to know everything about it. Indeed, intimacy is founded on an exquisite tension that arises from the realization that that the "other" offers something that we have never known, and perhaps never will.

Blending Dreamer Response with Metaphor

A 49-year-old woman dreamt that she was driving a car in which there were two other people, one male and one female. She was trying to get one of them to a place where they could get some treatment. She wasn't on the main road, yet, but was a road that would take her to the main road. As she drove, they were talking to her, and she was a bit irritated and distracted by that. Suddenly, she came to a hairpin curve, and lost control of the car. As the car went over the edge of the embankment toward a body of water below, she was unafraid and just witnessing the event.

We talked about her feelings and my own as well. There was a sense of urgency or anxiety about having to transport the people, and some annoyance that preceded her accident. In terms of theme, we decided that it was something like, "Someone is trying to help someone get somewhere, but it distracted and is not prepared for a surprising development that causes her to lose control." As we formulated the theme, the dreamer could relate to the dream immediately as a theme that often unfolds in her waking life. We discussed the responses that she made to the situation--first of all to the distractions, and then to the loss of control. We decided that she could have been clearer about her needs to stay focused on her goal rather than try to two things at once. Refusing to engage in conversation may have left her free to anticipate the hairpin curve. She was able to relate to the dreamer's behavior, because she often held back in letting people know what she needed, and thus lost a sense of her own priorities. But when it came to the loss of control, both of us were impressed with her calmness. We both felt that she typically adjusts well to setbacks, and this was an example of that resilience.

Why Dream Workers Overstep

Everyone seems to be aware of a central problem that arises in dream analysis or “interpretation.” That is, dream workers often overstep their boundaries, and effectively invade the dreamer’s autonomy by making precipitous conclusions about the meaning of the dream, or its images. Jung was the first to announce that the dreamer was an essential part of the analysis of any dream, and that the dreamer’s unique experience had to be taken into account for any interpretation to be valid. He introduced amplification as an effort to obtain the dreamer’s unique associations to the dream imagery, and amplification survives today in many forms. Boss believed that the dreamer’s experience was not so much to be interpreted, but to be treated as just another experience in the life of the person. He adovocated a very careful, dreamer-centered process called “explication” that probed into every significant detail of the dream so the dreamer could grasp its implications. But you know what? Both Jung and Boss were known to break their own rules, and assume a rather heavy-handed role. In more recent times, disciplined approaches like Ullman’s group method, and Delaney’s Interview Method, endeavor to do an even better jog in protecting the dreamer from arbitrary projections. Taylor joins Ullman in trying to protect the dreamer by having group members precede their comments with, “If this were my dream,…” But beyond that, Taylor believes that projections are inevitable, and thus takes a less restrictive approach to the dream process.

Some would say that human nature, or ignorance of countertransference, accounts for the difficulty in keeping our hands off other peoples’ dreams. But I think that the problem doesn’t reside as much in the dream worker as we have previously thought. I believe that projection arises as a consequence of our view of dreams. By believing that dreams are their content, we set in motion a process of trying to discern what the images mean, or what they are saying. This is same approach taken by art critics who try to analyze the statement that the artist is making. Critics comment on whether the artist succeeded in conveying the presumed message, or not, and whether the message itself is valid. This preoccupation with the meaning of the content, and the intention of the creator, influences dream analysis, as well. For as I have pointed out elsewhere, the ancient Greeks set this whole project in motion by treating dreams and art as representative of something else (our waking life).

Susan Sontag, the writer and critic, is known for many things, but her essay “Against Interpretation” is probably her most famous essay. She makes an impassioned and masterfully crafted statement that the interpretation of art is driven by an unexamined and trivializing assumption:

“The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art [and dreams, too, according to the Greeks], have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation . . . it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something” Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation and other essays. New York: Picador

So how does this relate to my topic today? Consider this possibility: that to the extent that dream workers believe that dreams are comprised of content to be interpreted, they will almost inevitably offer their own conjectures based on their own experiences and assumptions. A content focus thus encourages invasive projections. In contrast, a process orientation the dream analysis–in which the dreamer’s feelings, thoughts and actions are seen to influence the dream’s outcome–focuses on what actually transpires during the encounter. This focus does not encourage invasive projections, because it is based almost entirely on what is clearly evident in the dreamer-dream interactive process.

So why do dream workers overstep their roles? Even the great teachers of our time? In my opinion, it is because in spite of their stated positions, they were wedded to an underlying culturally embedded view of the dream as content rather than interactive process, and thus infected the dream work with their own subjective pronouncements. The solution to this problem, therefore, is not having a more disciplined approach to dream content, but having an altogether different view of the dream, in which the dream worker’s responsibiltiies have virtually nothing to do with interpreting dream content. Again, I refer you to the FiveStar Method as an example of an approach that makes the dream process the centerpiece of the analytical work.