Tag: creativity

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The Art of Interpreting Dreams

 

If you woke up one morning with a vivid dream in mind, who could help you understand it? Do you know anyone who specializes in dream interpretation?

In earlier times you could bring your dream to a local shaman, sage, or priest. During the 20th century you could consult with a psychoanalyst or some other kind of psychologist.

Today, however, few religious leaders have any interest in dreams. Most professional psychologists receive no training in dream interpretation. The same is true of neuroscientists, who tend to dismiss all dreams as random nonsense from the brain.

If you felt your dream was more than random nonsense, where else could you turn for help and insight?

Here’s a thought: Ask an artist.

Many artists have surprising skill and aptitude as dream interpreters. I just watched this in action with a group of international artists who gathered at a forest retreat in Estacada, Oregon for a weeklong workshop on dreams, art, and multicultural identity, co-facilitated with Alisa Minyukova. I was hoping the members of this group (we’re calling ourselves the Dream Mapping Theater) could offer feedback on my theory that dreaming is a kind of imaginative play in sleep. What I found was much more interesting—a glimpse of the possible future of dream interpretation.

The artists in the group came from many different cultural backgrounds, with a diverse array of creative talents.  Yet they all shared three key virtues that made them remarkably effective at exploring the meanings of dreams.

First, they were unusually curious and open-minded people, full of questions and willing to follow the conversation wherever it led. The bizarreness of dreaming did not bore them or make them anxious. On the contrary, they were especially interested in otherworldly dreams that transgress and transcend the boundaries of waking reality.

Our work together began two years ago with informal conversations about the weirdness of “immigration dreams,” in which a person born in one place and living in another has dreams that creatively merge their multiple cultures, languages, and identities. The artists were struck by the radical difference between their freedom in these dreams and their increasing constraint in the waking world, with hardening national borders and tribal identities.  They became curious to learn more about their dreaming selves and the wider range of movement and awareness they experience in dreaming. This kind of mental flexibility does not come easily to everyone, but artists may have more capacity for it than most.

Second, the members of this group were quick to see connections. They were hyper-associative, in the best possible way. They could rapidly identify dream images and themes with personal relevance to their families, friends, and early childhood experiences. They eagerly noted symbolic parallels in their dreams to movies, paintings, poems, and other kinds of art. They made lightning-fast references to history and politics, language and religion, mythology and metaphysics. Because each member of the group came from a different cultural tradition, we could discuss the potential meanings of each dream from an amazing variety of perspectives.

More than two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle said “the most skillful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of observing resemblances.” Artists seem to possess this faculty in abundance.

Third, and most impressively, the members of this group knew how to bridge the conscious and unconscious parts of their minds. They were skilled at transforming subtle inner feelings into dramatic external works. Indeed, they all have professional training in communicating their deepest personal intuitions in forms that other people can perceive and understand. Once they realized they could apply this craft to their dreams, the ensuing creative explosion was a sight to behold.

Lana Nasser, a performer and story-teller born in Jordan now living in the Netherlands, shared an intensely realistic dream of “osmosing” with trees to diagnose their health from the inside. She spent much of the week exploring the forest and working with others to create an immersive robe of moss, lichen, and ferns. We filmed her one night slowly fading and morphing into a fantastically glowing green tree.

Victor Mutelekesha, a sculptor born in Zambia now living in Norway, told us a frightening dream involving fire. Early in the week he noticed an old burn pile in the forest, and before we knew it he had stripped down and buried himself in the deep, wide circle of black charcoal. (It was about 40 degrees and drizzling at the time.) The resulting footage of his Promethean emergence out of the ashes was a stunning creative response to the raging flames of his dream.

Jennifer Cabrera Fernandez, a dancer and vocalist born in Mexico now living in Italy, described an eerie dream of being paralyzed and transformed into a “stone witch.” It sounded like a nightmare, but she connected the witch’s body posture with the ancient Aztec gods of her cultural heritage, making it an image of strength, not weakness. On the last night of the workshop we turned an old horse barn into a dream temple of the stone witch, with bonfires casting a wild reddish glow on Jennifer’s elaborately painted face and body.

It took a special set of circumstances, and a talented and mature group of individuals, to generate this kind of volcanic creativity. But I suspect that many artists could, with a little guidance and encouragement, also become excellent interpreters of dreams.

This might sound like what Sigmund Freud called “wild psychoanalysis,” a dangerous dabbling in realms of the mind that should be left to medical experts.  It’s true that sharing dreams requires a high degree of sensitivity, caution, and mutual respect. But it’s also true that people were safely talking about their dreams long before the rise of psychoanalysis in early 20th century Europe. Dreaming is a natural and healthy function of the human mind, available to everyone. Throughout history, in cultures all over the world, sharing dreams has been a normal part of everyday life.

And artists are really, really good at it.

If you struggle with mental health problems, by all means bring your dreams to a psychotherapist. If you think your dreams might contain divine messages, go ahead and consult with a religious official.

But if you simply want help in exploring a strange dream and its possible meanings, try asking an artist. Think of it as a micro-commission in which you request (and pay?) an artist to give you creative feedback about the dream, providing a novel and illuminating portrait of your oneiric self.

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(Note: photo credit to Isak Tiner)

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Preparing for the 2018 Dream Studies Conference

The world’s biggest yearly gathering of dream researchers, teachers, artists, and therapists is less than two weeks away.

The 35th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) will be held June 16-20 in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA.   I attended my first IASD conference in 1988 in Santa Cruz, California, and I have only missed two since then.   This year I am giving several presentations, covering a range of current and emerging interests.  The conferences offer an ideal place to share new ideas and test future plans.  Many of my projects over the years have been the outgrowth and flowering of seeds first sown at an earlier IASD conference.  Below are the seeds I’m planting this year.

June 17-20, 8:00-9:00 am

Morning Dream-Sharing Workshop, with Bernard Welt

“Dream Journaling for First-Time IASD Conference Attendees”

This morning workshop is for first-time IASD attendees, who will learn a variety of methods for starting a dream journal, exploring the dreams that accumulate over time, and discovering surprising potentials for creativity and insight.  Attendees will be able to share their experiences and discuss common themes and questions.  The initial meeting of the workshop will involve introductions, questions about the conference, a discussion of initial interests in dreams, and a list of topics people want to learn more about.  The presenters will take time to introduce the attendees to the basic practice of keeping a dream journal, which some of the attendees may already do.  Also discussed in introductory terms will be the role of dream journals in history, art, religion, and science.  The following sessions each morning will provide ample space for the attendees to process their experiences at the conference, ask questions, share impressions, and correlate different ideas from different sources.  The presenters will make sure in each session to devote at least half the group’s discussion to various practical aspects of dream journaling, and the list of interests and questions that arose from the first session.

 

Sunday, June 17, 4:15 to 6:15 pm

Arts Symposium: Dreaming, Media, and Consciousness

“The Mythic Roots of Cinematic Dream Journeys”

The presentation will start with a discussion of the idea of films as simulated dreams (with “films” also including works appearing on television, some shorter than typical movies, some longer).  The presentation will analyze the elements of cinematic experience in terms of its historical roots in theater, myth, religious ritual, and shamanic journeys.  The focus in this first section will be the creative interplay of art and dreaming within the formal features of cinematic experience.  The second section will focus on two dream-related themes in several films and television shows that have deep mythic roots.  One of these themes is the heroic journey into the realm of dreaming in quest for something of importance or value for the waking world.  The other theme is the danger of becoming trapped in the realm of dreaming and no longer knowing what is waking and what is dreaming, or who is dreaming whom.  These two themes have alternately enchanted and terrified humans throughout history, as witnessed in various myths, stories, and philosophies around the world, and now in the movies and tv shows of the present day.  The power, mystery, and wonder-provoking weirdness of dreaming emerges very clearly in several films and televisions shows, including Dead of Night, Dream Corp. LLC, The OA, and Twin Peaks: The Return.  These and other works will be considered in terms of the two mythic themes of heroic journey and identity paradox.

 

Tuesday, June 19, 11:30 to 1:00

Religious Research Panel: Dreams About God

“The Dreams of God of Lucrecia de Leon”

The dreams of God reported by Lucrecia de Leon, a young woman from 16th century Spain, included dangerously accurate prophecies that brought down the wrath of the Inquisition.  This presentation explores the religious, psychological, and political dimensions of her dreams, especially the theme of dreams as speaking truth to power (drawing on the historical research I did for Lucrecia the Dreamer: Prophecy, Cognitive Science, and the Spanish Inquisition).  The presentation will start with the historical context of Lucrecia and the religious dynamics of her life and community.  It will then look at the 24 dream reports specifically mentioning “God” in the main collection of her dreams, and discuss the main themes and features of these dreams.  This discussion will include use of digital methods of data analysis, Jungian psychology, cognitive science, and metaphorical theology.  The presentation will conclude with reflections on the psychological, political, and religious dimensions of dreaming in historical circumstances and in the present-day.

 

Wednesday, June 20, 2-3:30 pm

Dreamwork Panel: Theories and Work of Jeremy Taylor

“Creating a Dream Library”

Following his death, Jeremy Taylor’s massive collection of books and papers have been entrusted to me, and in this presentation I will share plans for building a library that will provide a long-term archive for Jeremy’s books and papers, plus my books and papers and other dream-related resources people have shared with me.  I will discuss the plans for this library in relation to Jeremy’s tool-kit principle #1 that ALL dreams speak in a universal language of symbol and metaphor.  That principle offers a key for understanding the nature and significance of Jeremy’s library (a vast repository of the world’s mythic, religious, and artistic traditions). I will also address Jeremy’s personal practice of dream journaling and its importance for an appreciation of his life and work.

 

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Dreaming, Art, and Transformation

An experimental workshop offers a glimpse of the potential power of a dreaming collective.

The full impact of the Dream Mapping Project’s workshop in New York City won’t be known for a while, as each artist who participated now goes forth to reflect, imagine, and create new works.  But it was clear that everyone felt the vibrant intensity of the dreams we shared and the dynamism of our interactions with each other, and I’m not alone in saying it was the most powerful process of exploring dreams I have ever experienced.

We gathered on Friday morning, May 11, for an open-air breakfast at the Butcher’s Daughter restaurant, seven of us sitting outside at a table set for four.  It was a beautiful sunny day, and as the relentlessly honking trucks and cars roared past on the street just a few feet away, we had our first chance to talk and get to know each other.  We had been meeting via video conference for several months, but this was the first time most of us had met in person.

From the restaurant we walked to our base camp for the weekend, a second-story loft on a tiny street curving through the heart of Chinatown.  It was a perfect space for our needs, with gentle theater lighting, a small stage, a couch, several chairs, a restroom, a curtained area with a video projector, and a tea and snack station.

We started with introductions, as each participant told the rest of us about their family background, cultural traditions, artistic practices, and international journeys as immigrants.  We talked about sleep, and dreams, and the various ideas and theories people have developed to interpret their dreams.  I told them about the general dream-sharing process we would be using during the workshop, and I described the most important principles for making sure this process became a positive experience for everyone, drawing on Jeremy Taylor’s basic approach to projective dreamwork.  I emphasized the need for everyone to feel safe and respected, and I encouraged us all to practice the virtues of patience, empathy, playfulness, and trust.

Following a lunch break, we invited a local musical artist, Rome, to officially launch the workshop with an hour-long “sound bath” performance.  Using a specially designed set of seven metal bowls, each one finely tuned to a specific musical note, Rome created a strong vibrational field within the loft space, playing notes, harmonies, and rhythms that resonated all through our bodies.

Now in a very contemplative state of mind, we shared for first time the dream we had each chosen to bring to the workshop.  The suggestion was to bring a “big dream,” a dream that’s especially memorable and still feels vivid and powerful today, even if it came from many years ago.  Each participant described their dream twice, in the present tense, to help the rest of the group get a full, holistic sense of the dream’s characters, settings, feelings, etc.  I asked everyone to give a title to their dreams, and this is what they offered:

Jennifer (from Mexico, living in Venice): Tasting the Moon

Viktoria (from Ukraine, living in Berlin): Giving Birth to a New Me

Alisa (from Russia, living in New York City): The Potato Dream

Victor (from Zambia, living in Oslo): Creepy Lungs & A New Beginning

Kristof (from Flanders, living in Brussels): The Ancestor Dream

Lana: (from Jordan, living in rural Netherlands): Wear the Dance Belt on Your Head

Kelly: (from California, living in Portland): Being Dissected by the Evil Alien

(Note: the titles may change, depending on how the process unfolds from here.)

This took us through the rest of the evening, as we eventually opened the conversation to include all the dreams and began pondering their various points of immediate convergence (such as family members, animals, flying, loss, fire, crying, hope).

The next day we spiraled more deeply into these dreams, carefully exploring each element of each dream and inviting everyone in the group to share unexpected feelings, forgotten memories, and intuitive insights.  Two dream-savvy visitors, Bernard Welt and Margot Jewers, joined us for a few hours to add their perspectives.  At a certain point Alisa took the lead as the discussion became more psychological, bringing in ideas from Freud, Jung, and Gestalt theory, and also more spiritual, expanding into realms of transpersonal experience and metaphysical awareness.  We paused for long digressions to hear each other’s personal stories, many of which had never been told before.  The dreams themselves became a living presence in the room, like visitors from another dimension, the cosmic +1 for each member of the group.

As the night wore on, we began discussing our plans to create a collaborative performance that we could present on Sunday evening, at the end of the workshop.  We had invited a few local friends to attend, and we wanted to share something special with them, something they would find interesting, entertaining, and hopefully dream-provoking.  But we had no specific plan yet, and we finally decided to end for the day, get some rest, and trust that inspiration would strike.

When we gathered the following morning, everyone brought an impressive degree of energy and focus.  Led by Lana and Jennifer, we quickly dove into a series of theater and enactment exercises, playing with our dreams in more actively embodied ways.  By this point it felt almost effortless to slip into the dream characters and let them interact with each other.  And yet (speaking for myself), it also felt utterly surrealistic to embody one of my own “big dreams” while moving through a space filled with several other fully-immersed dream characters, whose lives and stories and multiplicities of meaning I had come to learn very, very well.

Before we knew it, it was time to prepare the stage, lay out refreshments, and welcome the guests.  The performance went by in a blur, and I have no idea what the attendees made of it.  I’m pretty sure they had never seen anything like it!

But after the audience left and we were able to debrief among ourselves, it was clear that everyone felt this kind of process has enormous creative potential, far beyond what we rather spontaneously put together for that evening.  We are cooking up plans for additional collaborations, with a goal of presenting a group exhibit at the 2019 conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, to be held in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, June 16-20.

Although the workshop officially ended Sunday evening, most of us stayed a day or two later to work with Kristof for additional video and photography work with our dream characters, going outside the womb-like studio into the vastness of the bright, bustling city.  Once again, the dream exploration process took another spiraling plunge into the psychic depths, as our embodied dreams entered a different reality, disclosing new dimensions of meaning.

The dream I shared with the group, “Being Dissected by the Evil Alien,” comes from my early 20’s, and I have been studying and exploring its meanings for many years.  Yet the dream became something entirely new during the course of this workshop.  Being in a group of immigrants, the Evil Alien suddenly appeared as an immigrant, as a strange and frightening visitor from a radically different place.  As I let the members of the group guide me through a deeper exploration of the dream, I gradually became aware of the sensation of being metaphorically “dissected by aliens,” leading to a surprising shift in the locus of my perspective within the dream.

On Monday, Alisa and Kristof dressed me in a black cape and leather mask, and told me to close my eyes.  They walked me around for several minutes, spun me in various directions, then told me to open my eyes. I was standing in broad daylight at the intersection of Canal Street and 6th Avenue.  Truly, an out-of-body experience—bringing the dream into waking, and waking into the dream.  I have never, ever felt like more of an alien in the world.

I’ve asked the other participants to write some reflections about what they felt during and after the workshop, so I will wait until I hear from them before making too many big-picture comments about what it all meant.  One thing was very clear on that last night, however—everyone had gained a dramatically deeper insight into their own big dream, and into dreaming in general.  The group somehow generated an unusually high degree of trust, engagement, and creativity that made those insights possible.  The question I’m now pondering is, how exactly did that happen?

We had done a lot of preparatory work by phone, video, and email, and that certainly helped when we finally got together for the workshop.  Alisa arranged for an excellent meeting space, and Lana, Kristof, and Jennifer lent us their theatrical skills.  Jeremy Taylor’s approach to group dream-sharing, with its emphasis on the “If it were my dream” preface, provided a simple, common language we could use to safely and respectfully navigate through each other’s dreamscapes.

Perhaps the most important factor was what I am calling (in retrospect) our multi-polar approach to leadership.  Alisa and I set the project in motion, and we both made introductory comments at the start of the workshop.  But after that, the process took on a life of its own, as different members of the group stepped forward at various points to guide the next twist of the spiral.  The final performance was a thoroughly collaborative effort that emerged organically, with no fixed plans or expectations.  The multiplicities of the group—multiplicities of personality, culture, gender, race, sexuality, and artistic media—became an amazing source of interpretive strength.

Two other serendipitous events helped prepare me for the workshop.  The first came on Wednesday, the day before I traveled to New York, when I had a cup of tea with Delanna Studi, who wrote and performed the one-woman show “And So We Walked,” a fascinating dramatic memoir about her journey, in waking and dreaming, to reconnect with her Cherokee heritage.  I saw the show that evening at Portland Center Stage, and felt extremely inspired by her courage, creativity, and deep wisdom about the ways of dreaming.  The second came the next morning, on the flight to New York, when I read a book I had recently bought, Jon Lipsky’s Dreaming Together: Explore Your Dreams by Acting Them Out (2008), which I figured might give me some ideas for the workshop.  Indeed it did!  I’ll close here with some quotes from Lipsky, a powerfully creative dreamer in his own right and a long-time professor of theater at Boston University:

“It is this quality—that dreams are both part of us and apart from us—that makes them so valuable to anyone interested in their inner life, and to artists in particular.”

“Dream Enactment is a laboratory for collaborative playmaking.  Each dream has to be explored by the ensemble.”

“Dream Theater is a laboratory for practicing the art of ‘rotating’ leadership.”

“So: imagine a nightclub—small round tables, low light, candles—and up where the jazz band would play there’s a stage.  On that stage a troupe of actors appears for late-night dreams.  A soundman with a synthesizer sits off to one side and starts tolling a bell. The Dream Show is about to start. For the next forty-five minutes, the troupe will present a set of dreams like a set of jazz with themes woven together through image and narrative like some kind of theatrical music. The troupe takes a break and over good wine or strong coffee members of the audience, stimulated by the dream set, share their own reminiscences of dream life. The bell tolls again and a second set of dreams is enacted. Maybe even some dreams culled from the audience are presented as an encore. This is one vision of a Theater of Dreams: a place where actors and audience re-experience their dreams. The style would not be dreamy, but precise. The goal would be to have the audience dream the actors’ dreams. The breadth of experience that we all possess in dreams—what I call ‘Our Own Shakespearean Stage’—would be revealed. Actors and audience would come together in a world of imagination where the fantastic and the mundane sit side by side and our passions are unleashed in the most ordinary circumstances. Here we feel the overlap of our dreamscapes with our waking life, and we leave the theater feeling that our world is much fuller than we usually allow. The magic of a dream show is that it’s essentially autobiographical, a true personal story distilled and embellished by the creativity of the dreamer’s dream weaver. The Dream Café demands a commitment to be true to the dream story, while crafting a theater piece that resonates on a more universal level. This is an attempt to stretch the boundaries of contemporary theater by throwing our intimate, personal, imagistic experiences on a larger archetypal canvas.”

 

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Art, Immigration, and Dreaming: An Experimental Workshop

An international group of artists join together to explore their dreams.

Next weekend (May 11-13), six professional artists and I will gather in New York City for an experimental workshop on the interplay of dreaming, artistic creativity, and the realities of life as an immigrant.  The participants are an incredibly talented group, and I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to learn from them.  The artists include:

Alisa Minyukova. Born in Leningrad, living in New York City.

Victor Mutelekesha. Born in Zambia, living in Oslo, Norway. 

Jennifer Cabrera Fernandez. Born in Mexico, living in Venice, Italy.

Viktoria Sorochinski. Born in Ukraine, living in Berlin, Germany.

Lana Nasser. Born in Jordan, living in the Netherlands.

Kristof Persyn. Born in the Netherlands, living in Belgium.

Alisa originally came up with the idea for the project, and since the beginning of the year she and I have been in regular conversation with these artists via video conferences, talking about their dreams and exploring questions of language, identity, and meaning in both art and dreaming.  As an overarching concept for the workshop, Alisa has been developing the idea of “dream mapping.” We will experiment and play with various ways of mapping the terrain of our dreaming landscapes, orienting ourselves to their most important features, and tracking our dream personas as they journey through these imaginal realms.  Each artist brings a lifetime of personal and cultural experience with dreaming, which bodes well for the creative energies we hope to generate together.

Two other people have been invited to join the workshop at certain points to add their ideas to the mix.  Bernard Welt, a long-time friend from the International Association for the Study of Dreams and a leading expert on dreaming and the arts, will lead a discussion about dream journals, sharing dreams, and mapping dream content.  And Rome Omboy, an artist and healer, will open and close the workshop with a Singing Bowl meditation.

A major motivation for the gathering is the rising hostility and violence towards immigrants all over the world.  We believe artists can be a powerful force in promoting greater recognition of our shared humanity, especially artists who are deeply attuned to the multiple identities that emerge within their own dreaming depths.  The goal of the workshop will be to generate creative insights about overcoming fears of otherness and illuminate new paths toward personal and collective integration.

Kristof will be creating a video documentary of the workshop, which is sure to become an interesting creative work of its own.

 

 

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Dreaming and Theater: A Dynamic Connection

In August of 1991 I joined a group of dream researchers from the U.S. and Western Europe on a journey to Golitsyno, a conference center just outside Moscow in the former Soviet Union, where we planned to meet several Soviet researchers for a gathering organized by Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak.  Just hours after our plane landed in Moscow on August 19, the airport was suddenly shut down by the Red Army; a military coup against the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had begun.  All communications with the outside world were cut off.  Our only source of information was the state television, which offered nothing of substance and simply told everyone to stay calm. Alas, we didn’t.  As heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled through the streets, our jet-lagged brains struggled to process a surreal mix of fear, disorientation, and uncertainty about where this violent rebellion might lead.

But we had come to Golitsyno to talk about dreams, so that’s what we did, as reality itself took on a strangely dream-like quality.  Amid the various lectures and panel discussions, the most memorable session by far was a workshop on dream theater.  One person shared a dream, the rest of us chose a role to play based on an element from the dream–e.g., a character, object, setting, or emotion–and then we all performed the dream as a group, with the dreamer as the audience.  The process brought out incredible moments of insight, collaboration, creativity, and much-needed comic relief.  We were connecting with each other in a way none of the other conference sessions had allowed.  The attendees spoke a dozen different languages, so every verbal exchange involved a slow and laborious system of translation.  But here in the dream theater, we could act and react to each other immediately, spontaneously, right in the moment.  We found the best way to make sense of a world teetering on the brink of chaos was to play with each other’s dreams.

Among the many vivid impressions from Golitsyno, this workshop gave me a deep and lasting curiosity about the oneiric dimensions of live dramatic performance.  Plays are collective dreams. That has been my hypothesis ever since.  A live theatrical show provides a magical space where people can dream together, where shared imaginal experiences can be created, enjoyed, explored, and amplified.  

It turns out this hypothesis has a long history in the psychology of dreaming.  When Carl Jung (1875-1961) taught classes on dream analysis to graduate students at the University of Zurich in the late 1930’s, he told them to start the interpretation of a dream by treating it as the personal theater of the dreamer.  Many dreams have a “dramatic structure” that directly parallels the structure of a theatrical play.  Jung showed his students how to identify four elements commonly found in stage dramas: 1) the locale, where the dream is set and who is present as a character; 2) the exposition, what kind of problem motivates the characters and launches the plot; 3) the peripeteia, how the plot unfolds and changes over time; and 4) the lysis, how the plot ends, with or without a clear resolution.  Analyzing a dream in these terms does not automatically produce a definitive, unambiguous answer.  That was never Jung’s goal.  Rather, his theatrically inspired approach was aimed at opening up new vistas for interpretative inquiry, highlighting potentials for creative growth while making sure the meanings stay grounded in the dreamer’s lived experience.

The Gestalt psychologist Frederick Perls (1893-1970) took Jung’s approach a step further.  In his workshops and seminars Perls taught his students to reimagine dreaming as a theater of their own minds: “Every part, every situation in a dream is a creation of the dreamer… Every aspect of it is a part of the dreamer, but a part that to some extent is disowned and projected onto other objects.”  Perls emphasized the value of dreams in helping us become more aware of the alienated parts of our psyche, with the goal of eventually embracing those detached elements in a greater whole: “Dreamwork is the royal road to integration.”  By “dreamwork,” Perls meant a process of live psychodrama very similar to what we practiced in Golitsyno.  He asked for the dreamer to narrate his or her experience in the present tense, like a story happening right now, because “we want to bring the dream back to life.”  He gave the dreamer the title of “stage director” for an impromptu dramatic recreation of the dream, with various members of the group serving as characters, settings, and props.  Perls encouraged the performers to engage in spontaneous dialogues, the better to highlight unconscious projections and alienated parts of the psyche.

The dream theater method my colleagues and I learned in Golitsyno was not as directive and goal-driven as Perls’ approach, which focused on the therapeutic effects of provoking confrontations and reconciliations among the various elements of the dream.  Our practice was more open-ended, exploratory, and self-guided; it was not therapy, although it felt deeply therapeutic for many of us.

In his 1984 book Film and the Dream Screen, the literary critic Robert Eberwein used psychoanalytic language to account for the dream-like qualities of watching a movie.  Drawing on Freud’s theory that dreams reveal our earliest childhood memories of total fusion with reality, before there were boundaries between self and other, Eberwein claimed:

“Our experience of film permits us to return to the state of perceptual unity that we first participated in as infants and that we can know as dreamers. The ‘sleep’ in our experience of film, that is, will be seen to return us to the primal sense of unity with our dreams. As a result, we are able to watch and feel a sense of involvement in the images on the screen, the distinction between res cogitans (the mind) and res extensa (external reality) having dissolved as we enter into the oneiric world of film.”   

I don’t entirely agree with his views of early child development (humans are relational beings from the start), but I do believe Eberwein’s approach is helpful in highlighting a powerful dimension of dreaming energy that becomes activated when watching a movie.  Indeed, I believe this argument can be made even more strongly in relation to attending a live theatrical performance, where the visceral immediacy of the drama comes closer than any other art form to invoking the startling beauty and electric intensity of an actual dream.  In a play, the audience and actors share an imaginal space they create and hold together.  Within this space, a story emerges that grows and takes a unique shape according to their dynamic interactions during the performance–the live presence of the actors intensifying the emotional responses of the audience, and the live presence of the audience stimulating the creative talents of the actors.  The best plays are like the best dreams: surprising, decentering, mind-expanding, awe-inspiring, emotionally exhausting, and acutely memorable.  They are unreal, yet realer than real; retreats into fantasy that catapult us into fresh engagement with the world.

Last year I joined the board of directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, where some of the greatest theater on the planet is being created and performed.  From February to November, eleven plays (usually 4-5 by Shakespeare, one big musical, and the rest original commissions for OSF) are presented in three interconnected theaters.  The 2017 season performances began a few weeks ago, and just recently the 2018 season was announced, with favorable attention to OSF’s passionate commitment to presenting plays, both classic and new, that reflect the full range and diversity of the world in which we live today.  I’m very excited to do what I can to support the members of this amazing artistic community as they weave dreams and cast dramaturgical spells that transport audiences into imaginative spheres of beauty, wonder, and fiercely relevant insight.

 

Notes:

I wrote more about the Golitsyno experiences in a chapter titled “Dreaming in Russia, August 1991,” in my 1999 book Visions of the Night (SUNY Press).  My roommate at the conference center, Michael Dupre, wrote about his experiences in a 1992 article titled “Russia. Dreaming. Liberation.” (Dreaming 2(2): 123-134).

The Jung quotes come from the 2010 book Children’s Dreams (Princeton University Press).

The Perls quotes come from the 1970 book Gestalt Therapy Now (Harper).

In a future post I will write in more detail about the work of Robert Bosnak, who organized the “Dreaming in Russia” conference and who has done extensive work connecting dreams and theater, and Janet Sonenberg, who wrote the 2003 book Dreamwork for Actors and who has worked with Bosnak in theatrical contexts.

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on April 4, 2017, and has been slightly revised.