The Shape of a Dream

LETTING DREAMS TAKE US INTO OUR INNER WORLD

Photo created by AI + added to and edited by Rhaine Della Bosca

*Disclaimer: this article is not medical advice but rather draws from my personal experience. I am not a health care practitioner.

I went for 10 years and didn’t dream thanks to the acupuncturist, the Chinese Medicine woman, who saved my life. Many psychologists will tell you that we think we aren’t dreaming but we really are. Well, I know I didn’t dream because dreams were an injurious activity that happened during the night and after a life-altering course of treatment using Alternative Medicine, my symptoms that were a direct result of dreaming, simply stopped.

During the 90s and early 2000s the undetected, not yet diagnosed, C-PTSD was making itself known that presented as mysterious symptoms and one of those symptoms was nightmares. I would awaken with anxiety and migraines feeling like I had the flu which would last days. Once I began the treatment regiment, I told the Chinese Medicine woman, who was also had a degree in Western Medicine, about the dreams along with the other symptoms that two years of Dr. appointments and tests couldn’t diagnose. She gave me needles - lots of needles, and fire cupping, and Chinese herbs she created in her home, which were strange concoctions with specific verbal instructions of how to ingest. For one and a half years I saw her, first weekly, then every-other week, then once a month. And gradually, as I got better and better, then finally felt like I had returned back to the world of the living, feeling a semblance of normalcy; perhaps better than I’d ever been. And over the next decade I simply didn’t dream.

Turns out that treating nightmares with acupuncture is a real thing. You can read more about it here if you are curious.

Today, in my present life, I love dreams. They are air and emotion and shapes of things I haven’t yet recognized.

Many times, the meaning comes around later. Sometimes it’s immediate. Sometimes I work with the dream and see if I can coax out the thing it’s trying to say, to tell me, listening for what it’s saying about my lived life. It’s not to say I never have a nightmare, but they are spaced further apart which keeps them manageable.

It was another dream about the Ex. I thought I was done with those. I’ve had these dreams for many years. We’ve been divorced for almost a quarter of a century now and still, they are so real. They drift in and out with no warning, no pattern, sometimes spaced months apart. And they are always devastating in many ways.

I was back there, at the farmhouse, trying to make the marriage work – giving it another chance. And there was another woman standing in the other room. I was holding a tomato plant – like I was giving it to him and he was either indifferent or he didn’t want it. But there was that point in the dream, while sleeping, where I knew. I knew it wasn’t working and that it wouldn’t work. It would never be what I had hoped for in my fantasy. We were two different people from two different worlds that had collided in this thing called life.

He started telling me, in so many words, that he was unhappy with me. “You know, it’s the things you do”. I knew what that meant - that I’m head strong, independent, have art projects brewing on the side and that my world didn’t revolve around him. And then he brought up a woman’s name. “We go way back” he said. I asked him flat out, “Are you going to divorce me?” He looked the other way not answering. Instead, he recited the “list”. He named all the irritants and flaws which were blurred and soft, not landing on me. Then, I realized my young kids were there listening (they are now 46 and 42). And I panicked because they didn’t have a bank account and I turned to him and asked, “Will one of us need to go with them to open an account?” As if he knew. As if I didn’t have Google. But being back at the farm in the 70s and 80s, the world hadn’t arrived at the internet’s feet yet. Then I said, “Well, I guess I won’t be looking at the 2-bedroom apartment.

The ways “in” to interpret dreams are many - from dream dictionaries to psychological analysis. Sigmund Freud once wrote the following:

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

For scientists like Freud, Carl Jung and Fritz Perls, dream interpretation was an important part of psychotherapy. In fact, all three believed that dreams could reveal unconscious desires and issues. 1

But my favorite way to peer inside the dream space, connecting it to the present, and to my life is by utilizing the wisdom of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Dr. Estes is a Jungian analyst that has created her own unique spin on how to interpret a dream.  She tells us:

Dreams are like a letter from home from a deep place in the psyche that has a picture of yourself, of your life, of your psychic state at the moment that you may not be able to see from your own ego consciousness alone. And in this way, dreams save people from the blindness, from blundering into walls from failing to sense something or to see something important. A dream in that sense tells a story. A story that is not completely obvious to us in daylight but becomes very clear to us when we are asleep at night and it unravels itself all before us while we’re dreaming. They give information about one’s interior life.

-          Take a look at all the motifs of the dream.

-          Is this a dream about recognition of something that’s new?

-          Where is this happening in my life?

-          Where should this be happening in my life?

-          Is it about losing something, about being chased, finding treasure?

Most dreams are stories. They have beginnings, middles and ends. Nightmares don’t have ends – we wake up in the middle w/ no resolution.

In psychotherapy, I divide them into four parts:

1)      Exposition-the opening w/ all the characters and landscapes, where all characters have something to say and their habitat is described.

2)      There’s mounting action. People start doing things. Things start occurring in the dream.

3)      Crisis comes - a tension point of some sort where something’s got to give, somethings got to change one way or another.

4)      Resolution where the outcome is seen. Positive or negative or neutral.

This is why we follow our dreams. This is why we want to know what they mean because they encourage us. They break open our narrowness of vision. They open our tightness of here. Dreams make us as large as we really are. They give us the world on the terms of our wholeness rather than the terms of our woundedness or smallness. So we have a longing to listen in order to be made whole. When we follow our dreams, this is most important, we can leave a better world behind because we give others permission to follow an interior prophet, an interior storyteller, an interior teacher who can help to make others whole as well.

May you have dreams that save you from yourself and I wish you dreams that take you far into mysteries and I wish you dreams that show you the things that you need to see that will help you and I wish you dreams that will please your heart and comfort you and I wish you dreams especially that are direct, sweet, loving letters from home. 2

   1. Read more about the science and benefits of dream interpretaion.

2. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: The Beginners Guide to Dream Interpretation, Sounds True