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Dream a little dream of me

I’ve been quiet on the blogging front of late. This is because I’ve been directing most of my spare time and energy into a research project exploring the gestalt approach to working with dreams. Not only am I fascinated with the subject matter but I’ve also become somewhat entranced by the research process itself. Lots of material for future blog posts I’m sure!

In the meantime, I’d like to give an introduction to the gestalt approach to dreams, as it strikes me as an approach that warrants more attention and exploration.

Essentially, the gestalt approach to dreams is to become and experience as much of the dream content as possible. This is in contrast to an analytic approach in which the dream’s meaning is interpreted; either as your way of symbolically coding what you know to be true but want to avoid knowing (Freudian tradition), or as your way of manifesting collective archetypal forces (Jungian tradition).

Classic gestalt dreamwork involves telling your dream in the first person, present tense as if you’re back in the dream and it’s happening right now. That re-activates much of the energy tied up in the dream. The rough methodology of dreamwork involves choosing parts of the dream that attract your attention and ‘becoming’ them.

If I’m sat at a desk in my dream, then I can speak as me, or I can speak as the desk. I can become aware of other characters and objects in the dream and speak as them. As I do this, I notice what I become aware of and feel as I speak from the desk part of myself. Spontaneously, I might make new connections, reach new insights, or connect with feelings that I usually stop myself from connecting with.

By focusing on the here and now of dream exploration, gestalt shifts the focus from finding some meaning for the dream, to making contact with whatever is tied up in the dream. We don’t need to answer the question ‘What does this dream mean?’. One dream can answer a dozen different questions at a dozen different times, the only real relevance test being does the dream seem in some way relevant to you now?

And like anything in gestalt, you can self-verify this through experimentation:

Phase 1 Recall your dream. If you can, speak it out loud; if not, think it through or write it down. Stay in the first person, present tense (eg ‘I am walking down the road and notice a squirrel up ahead’). Notice what you become aware of as you recall your dream.

Phase 2 When you’ve finished recalling, choose something from the dream that you’d like to play the part of for a while. To start with, it helps if you switch seats to become this dream aspect. Now, speak from that dream aspect and explore your perspective in the dream (eg ‘I am a squirrel and I’m standing here in the road and…’). Explore what you’re thinking, how you feel, what you’re aware of (eg ‘I am a squirrel and I’m thinking….’, ‘I am a squirrel and I’m feeling….’, ‘I am a squirrel and I’m aware of…..’).

Phase 3 Create a dialogue between you as you, and you as the dream aspect. Keep one seat for you, one seat for the dream aspect, and change seats to speak as each part. Having spoken as the dream aspect, what would you like to say to it? Is there anything you’d like to ask it? So, I ask the squirrel ‘what are you doing in the road?’. When I change positions and become the squirrel, I answer ‘I’m giving you an amusing example to use in your blog’. The idea is to suspend your expectations and go with whatever comes up until you feel you’ve reached a natural conclusion. You can then repeat phases 2 and 3 for as many other parts of the dream as you want.

What’s key in the three phases above is that the exploration takes place in the immediacy of felt experience, and allows meaning to arise spontaneously out of creative exploration. Everything in your dream is taken to be some aspect of yourself, and so you’re invited to re-absorb some of those energies and perspectives.

This is the approach that came to characterise gestalt dreamwork, and is heavily influenced by the charismatic example of Fritz Perls. What’s especially interesting for me is the theory that sits behind this way of working. Essentially, the methodology above rests on the idea that dreams are projections of the dreamer. That is, everything in the dream is some aspect of self that has been dis-owned and which the self is attempting to get rid of.

Projection is pretty much like trying to throw a part of yourself away. You can’t throw parts of your selfaway though, so they instead become experienced as something external to yourself. Working with projection is a matter of re-owning projected aspects of self. This is why Perls described dreams as ‘the royal road to integration’; by re-owning aspects of the dream, I am re-owning aspects of my self and so moving towards greater self-integration.

Of course, this way of working with dreams doesn’t fly with everyone; not everyone is entirely comfortable about dialoguing with their inner squirrel. And that’s fine; the above is just one way of working with dreams in gestalt, and I generally adapt my method according to what’s appropriate for the given situation. My research interest is in what happens if gestalt therapists work with dreams in a deliberately different way that emphasises different gestalt concepts.

That’s proving to be a very interesting voyage of discovery for me. And if I give my voyage a voice and ask myself where I’m taking me? I just laugh and tell myself to wait and see!

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Image credit: www.theodysseyonline.com: On the Importance of Dreams.

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