Dream Work

Peter Phillipson

Introduction

Freud once called the dream the Via Regia, the royal road to the unconscious. And I believe it is
really the royal road to integration … The dream is the most spontaneous expression of the existence
of the human being. (Perls, 1992/1969: 87) I love working with dreams. I have found that they have
the capacity to move therapy work on to a new level, both in individual and group therapy. They
speak from a place that is outside the familiar, and often to what is not being attended to, or
avoided in life and therapy. I will start with a (non-exhaustive) list of ways in which we could work
with dreams. It is also not a set of either/ors: dreams can operate on many levels simultaneously. So
keep in mind that just because a dream has a satisfying meaning on one of these levels, it doesn’t
mean that there isn’t more on another level. Dreams are incredibly artistic, multilayered
expressions. They are an expression of the human capacity for creativity, for living outside the
immediate given, and imagining a world that does not yet exist, but which we can work to make
actual (like Martin Luther King’s dream). I will then write about ways to extend the meaning of
dreaming and Gestalt dreamwork into our waking lives, seeing our lives as a waking recurrent
dream.

Ways of working with dreams

I have found nine different lenses useful at various times for working with dreams, and I will list
them now.

1. Telling the dream

Sometimes a dream is so complete and meaningful in itself thatwould be approaching a desecration

to ‘work’ with it/pull it apart. It just needs telling with full contact and hearing with full contact. Just
be aware that such dreams exist, and that not everything needs to be ‘worked on’. For example, if a
client whose life and dreams have been cramped and closed, fearful of the outside, has a dream of
opening the door and going out into a world that seems pleasant and interesting, I would just want
to celebrate. There might be other considerations: if the client tells the dream while holding a
cramped posture, I might both celebrate and ask the client to dialogue between body and dreamer.

2. Being the parts of the dream

This is the approach favoured by Fritz Perls: telling the dream in the present tense, and then
retelling the dream as different characters (animate or inanimate), holding dialogues between
the characters. This is often a very useful approach, bringing the interaction between split or
polarised aspects of personality into the therapy, but you need some sensitivity to which
characters to choose, otherwise it becomes a rote procedure. It is important to ‘defocus your
eyes’ and learn to get a sense of shape and process within the dream and within your client’s
life, posture, or way of presenting the dream. This will guide the therapist as to what characters
and encounters are most energised and will therefore be most fruitful.

3. Being the dream

 One of the characters is the dream itself! If a client says ‘I have an interesting or frightening or
unpleasant or friendly or ... dream’, then I could suggest changing this to ‘I am an interesting…
dream’ and continuing as the dream. The emotional tone of the dream is part of the dream, as
are the physical movements the person makes or dreams themselves making during the dream.
Dreams are not just images. There are often parallels between all these levels that build up a
picture of the whole gestalt that is being shown. Further, as Freud pointed out, ‘Even the
judgements which are passed upon the dream as it is remembered after

awakening and the feelings which are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong in good
part to the latent dream content, and must be fitted into their place in the interpretation of the
dream.’ (Freud, 1995: 351)

4. Acting out the dream (psychodrama)

Different people in a group can take different roles within the dream (again animate and
inanimate). In a group, this can both be enlivening and help to actualise the group process
aspect of the dream (see below). I want to add something here. There are several approaches
which use this format of getting group members to act roles in someone’s psychological dramas
(whether it is Psychodrama or Hellinger’s Constellations work). Much is made of the seemingly
uncanny way in which people, with minimal prompting, take on the roles in a way that seems
impossibly accurate. Is something psychic or mystical happening here? I would say that it is a
conjuring trick of a strange kind, one where the conjurer is actually not aware of the hidden
moves s/he is making (and therefore not intentionally misdirecting the client). The hidden move
is the assumption that the scene that is being acted out (a family interaction, a dream, or
whatever) is an objective fact. But we don’t live in an experiential world of objective facts or
memories. It is like the standard projection exercise where some object is put in the middle of
the group and people are invited to speak as that object. Everybody’s identification with the
object is different, not only from everybody else’s, but from how they themselves might identify
with it at another time and in another group situation. The ‘I’ that is doing the identification is
actualizing in this group situation, with these people. So the people they select to play the
characters are at one level playing the family members/dream images, while at another level
they are selected for who they are, and playing themselves. To contrast, what on this analysis
would not work is for the client to go into a video booth a week before the workshop and record
their dream or family story, and use that video in the workshop to present their material. In this
case the people would not be playing the roles assignedto them particularly accurately, as the
presentation would not be in the context of them now. So in working this way with dreams, the
whole aim would be to show the client’s present interests in this situation now, and themes that
are current in the group as a whole, rather than to produce a miraculous reading of the person’s
history.

5. Comment on the therapy/group process

Dreams, especially dreams on the night before therapy or in the middle of a multi-day group,
can often be seen as comments on the process of the therapy or of a group. Often people’s
dreams in groups converge round similar themes or even contain similar events or characters. It
is important to remember that Gestalt Therapy is not an intrapsychic therapy. As I wrote about,
self is actualizing at the contact boundary, not ‘inside’ the person, so the dream that is
remembered and brought to therapy is one that is dreamed in that context, and is presented as
a communication to the therapist and/or the group, not as an abstract narrative.
6. Changing or continuing the dream

Sometimes a dream can be re-dreamed (as the Senoi apparently do, see for example
<http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/how-remote-senoi-tribes-use-dreams-for-personal-
growth.html>), or retold in a different way, or continued, say, beyond the point where the client
habitually wakes up.

7. Dream as a retroflection

This is a way of working with a dream favoured by Isadore From. In this approach, the
assumption is that what is dreamed is an internalisation of some action which would more
appropriately take place in relation to the environment (cf. dreams as comments on therapy or
group process). The work would be to find the possible action in the world which would be an
undoing of the retroflection. For example, if the dream is a wish fulfilment dream, we could
explore how the wish could be fulfilled in reality and conversely how it might be inhibited from
fulfilment. If it is critical or angry, what criticism or anger needs to be expressed outwards? If it is
loving, what might be loving expression outwards?

8. Interpreting dreams ... which of course we never do in Gestalt Therapy!

Sometimes a meaning of the dream is so self-evident that we can say directly what it means,
though this does not mean that there are no other levels at which something new can be
discovered. I remember, at a time when I was very busy with things I had to think out and was
ignoring my feelings and needs, I dreamed of a burnt-out shop, everything burned apart from a
calculator which had ended up out on the street. I did not need to be the calculator to
understand the message! Preferably the meaning must be immediately clear both to the
therapist and the client. But sometimes the dream speaks to an area of experience that the
client is so much avoiding that their dreams have a very clear meaning to everybody other than
themselves – this is of course different to the therapist giving themselves the unique power to
interpret other people’s dreams, or giving dream images fixed meanings. Just as the telling of
the dream is a relational act, the therapist’s response to the dream is a continuation of that
relational sequence, not just helpful information-giving.

9. Predictive dreams/other cultures

Some people, particularly from other cultures (e.g. Afro-Caribbean and Irish) will be very clear
that some of their dreams are about what is to happen. In Afro-Caribbean culture, dream
symbols have specific predictive meanings (for example, dreaming of a fish is often meant to
foretell a death). I believe that these ways of looking at dreams should be respected, and the
meaning accepted unless there is other evidence that this might not be useful (e.g. a paranoid
client). Remember that this does not exclude seeing the dream at any or all of the other eight
levels! Once again, the dream is a relational event, which includes thecultures of the therapist
and client.

Waking dreams

Since dreams are experienced in the relative isolation of sleep, they are usually the most original
of our psychological experiences. For the typical person, in fact, the dream may be the only state
where originality can become manifest… That which seems absurd, bizarre, or meaningless in
dreams only seems so from the older more established points of view and attitudes that still
dominate the conscious mind. (Rossi, 1985: 14-15) In the preamble to his work with Gloria
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0j6FIxIog>), Fritz Perls talks about Gestalt Therapy as
‘Helping the patient to wake up from the nightmare of his existence.’ I was reminded of that
when working with a number of clients who approach their lives with a set of expectations that
things will go wrong, or a sense of their badness, which seems to survive robustly in the face of
events that don’t fit their expectations. Meanwhile, they bring dreams which seem to describe
their actual situation or character much more closely. I have experimented with suggesting to
them what would it be like to regard the dream as reality and the reality as a recurring dream or
nightmare that they live out. This has led to some very exciting explorations by those clients,
where all the ways of working with dreams can be used with their descriptions of their lives (for
example their relationships or the way they see other people round them). For example, a mild-
mannered client brings a dream with a lot of fighting. What if the reality of the person is a
fighter, and the mild-mannered presentation is a recurring dream? What would that dream
mean? How might I be with the fighter? What would the client lose by waking up? Who do other
people become in the dream (for example, people to be placated or polite to)? What needs
fighting over? Each of us lives to some extent in a recurring dream or nightmare thatshapes our
lives as if it was an objective fact. The paradox is that it is sometimes only in our sleeping dreams
that we allow ourselves to open other possibilities that we can live out. It is not a big stretch to
say that on waking up and preparing ourselves for the coming day in our habitual fashion, we
also send ourselves back to sleep and into the ‘nightmare of our existence’.

Conclusion

I have presented some of my thoughts about dreams and their place in therapy. I have shown
ways to approach dreams in therapy, and some of my recent thoughts extending our dreams

References

Freud, S., tr. A.A. Brill (1995). The Interpretation of Dreams. Quality Paperback Book Club, New
York.

Perls, F.S. (1992) Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Gestalt Journal Press, Highland, NY. (First published
1969).

Rossi, E.L. (1985). Dreams & the Growth of Personality. Brunner/Mazel, New York.