Dreamwork 101

How to create meaning with your dreams - Part II in a series

Nov 06, 2023

The Knight’s Dream, Antonio de Pereda, 1655.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how to remember and record your dreams. In this week’s newsletter, I’m going to teach you how to work with your dreams in order to find more richness, creativity, and meaning in your life.

The process I’m going to teach you here is a combination of what I’ve learned from various teachers, including my own therapists, my professors in graduate school, the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson (a personal mentor), and Stephen Aizenstat, creator of the Dreamtending approach, along with my personal and clinical experience over many years.

Whether you write your dreams down or voice record them (in which case, I recommend using a transcription app like Otter.ai), keeping a dream journal is the first step in learning to work with them.

Once you have a dream written down—even if it’s only a brief snippet—you can begin to “work” (or, if you prefer, play) with it. Dreamwork uses both your analytical mind and your imagination to create meaning with (rather than from) your dreams.

Against Interpretation

I use the term dreamwork, rather than dream interpretation, intentionally. Although the word ‘interpretation’ is a kind of Swiss army knife of meanings, I think talking about dream interpretation gives people the wrong idea.

People who are unfamiliar with dreamwork often want to know what their dream “means,” as if there was one right answer to arrive at. Spoiler alert: there’s not.

To the extent that we can interpret dreams, it’s more of an art than a science. Even then, I think it’s more helpful to think about relating to dreams than interpreting them. As I wrote previously, you don’t interpret a poem. Just as poems bend the rules of language, dreams bend the rules of perception and reality in order to say something that couldn’t otherwise be said. So it helps to think of your dream more like a poem than a coded message to be deciphered.

Step 0: Read Your Dream A Couple of Times

Once you have your dream written down and you’re ready to work with it, read it through a couple of times. Read it aloud, if you can. (As an aside, you should always read a poem twice, and preferably aloud).

Let it rattle around your brain and see what it brings up for you. First impressions are often valuable, here, because intuition tends to show up as an immediate “knowing.” It’s also helpful to remember how you felt in the dream. Is this a feeling that’s showed up recently in your waking life, as well?

One trick I forgot to mention in the previous article: write your dreams down in the present tense, not the past tense. Example: “I’m in my old house, and it’s dark…” Writing and speaking your dreams in the present tense allows you to re-enter the dream in your imagination more vividly.

Step 1: Association

The next step in working with a dream, after writing it down and reading it through a couple of times, is to list your personal associations for each image. The way Robert Johnson taught me to do this is to make each image the center of a kind of miniature mind-map in your journal, with the associations surrounding it in a cluster. After listing out all your associations to an image, you might feel into which one resonates with you the most, and highlight or circle it.

I mentioned in my previous post that “dream dictionaries” are bogus. That’s because we all have different associations to any given image.

Imagine, for example, you find a cat in your dream. A cat is going to mean something different to you if you’re a cat person, versus someone who hates cats or has a deadly allergy to them. Furthermore, what kind of cat is in your dream? A black cat, or a derpy orange one? Is it skinny and neglected, or sleek and well-fed? Or is it your cat, the one that died ten years ago? Your personal associations for each image will give you clues to what your dream means to you.

Go through each image in your dream like this, in turn. Once you have associations for each image, you can begin piecing them together (a little like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle) to see what kind of picture they might form.

Cat, from a woodblock print by Kawanabe Kyosai, Japan, 19th c. What is it dreaming about?

Step 2: Amplification

Amplification is about taking your personal associations to your dream images and making them bigger and louder. You do this by connecting them to the kind of larger archetypal themes we find in religion, mythology, literature, and the arts. By doing so, it becomes possible to find even more meaning in your dreams than you could derive from your personal associations alone.

As a beginner, it can be tricky to get started with amplification. Jungian analysts literally spend years studying mythology, fairy tales, and other weird subjects in order to gain the broadest possible base for understanding dreams. Personally, I’ve been obsessed with myths and legends since I was four years old, which as it turns out, is actually a useful background to have as a therapist.

But you don’t need to be a Jungian analyst or a lifelong mythology nerd to do amplification—a little research can go a long way. Whether you start with Wikipedia or your local library, looking up symbols or themes from your dream can yield unexpected connections and meanings.

To take up our feline example again, a little research will show us that cats play an important role in mythology and fairy tales. That’s not surprising, given that humans have lived with cats for thousands of years, since they started hanging around our grain stores and eating mice. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the cat goddess Bast, or Bastet (who also makes an appearance in Marvel’s Black Panther movies) and loved their cats so much they sometimes mummified them and buried them with their owners or in special temples.

In Norse mythology, cats are associated with Freyja—a goddess of sex, love, and fertility—who had a chariot pulled by cats. Indeed, cats were often associated with sexuality, the feminine, and goddess figures. Perhaps for this reason, in the Christian middle ages they were often seen as witches’ familiars and associated with the Devil.

The Gayer-Anderson Cat, thought to be a representation of the goddess Bastet. Egypt, 664-332 BCE. British Museum

Not every piece of information you gather through amplification will resonate with you and your dream. You’ll know when something intuitively hits.

Step 3: Animation

Animation is about bringing dreams to life. There are a number of ways to approach it, and this is where you can really get creative with dream work.

One technique is to close your eyes and imagine you are back in your dream. See the images around you, hear the sounds, and notice what you feel. You can walk around, exploring your dream landscape, or enter into a dialogue with one of the figures in your dream. When you do this, don’t try to think of what the figure would say, but wait and listen for their response. This is what Jung called active imagination. It’s a little like a guided visualization without the guidance.

You can do the same thing in a written format. (Don’t worry about making your writing ‘good.’ That’s not the point, here.) Writing can be especially helpful for recording a dialogue with one of your dream figures. Carl Jung recorded extensive dialogues with imaginal figures, which became the basis for his famous Red Book.

You can also try making visual art based on your dreams. In my experience, paintings based on dreams often have a special kind of energy, a numinous power that comes through them because their imagery comes from the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. Alternatively, you can experiment with other media, including sculpture, music, or dance. The key here is to express the dream in whatever format you enjoy and feel called to.

Philemon, a figure who originally appeared to Carl Jung in a dream in 1913, and with whom he had many conversations. Some of Jung’s paintings from The Red Book are now in the Louvre.

Step 4: Action

Marie-Louise von Franz, perhaps Jung’s closest disciple, was known to begin therapy sessions by asking a client, “So, what did you do about that dream you had last week?” If they hadn’t taken any action, she would sometimes even throw them out of her office.

Therapy clients and students of dreamwork are often most surprised by this last step. We tend to think of dreamwork as a contemplative exercise, so where does action come into it? What could you possibly do with a dream?

The Jungian “compensation” theory of dreams says that they counterbalance the one-sidedness of our conscious perspectives. As such, they might point out where we’re going wrong, or what we’re neglecting, and directly or indirectly suggest some practical action we might take in our lives. At other times, the suggestions that dreams offer are more abstract—or else totally obscure.

Either way, in the Jungian worldview, dream work takes on an ethical dimension—because only you can decide what action you will take or not take in response to your dreams.

I gave one example of this practical approach in my previous post on dreams. My dream about having my poems published inspired me to sign up for a year-long certificate program in poetry writing, and eventually to performing at poetry readings and publishing in a local journal.

As another example, a powerful series of dreams about sick or neglected cats might lead you to volunteer at an animal shelter.

At other times, it might be more appropriate to honor a dream with some kind of ritual. Because the unconscious speaks the language of symbols, we can use symbols to speak back to it.

In response to the cat dreams, for example, you might add a small statue of Bastet to your altar or bookshelf, or even leave a bowl of cream out for your dream cats.

The Art of Dreamwork

You don’t have to go through all four steps with every dream that you remember and record. With some, you might just list your associations. You may or may not find mythological amplifications for any given dream. For other dreams, however—the ones some cultures called Big Dreams—you might choose to dive further into them with imaginal dialogues, artwork, or ritual.

Remember, dreamwork is an art, not a science. As you practice the various techniques of dreamwork, you’ll naturally develop an intuitive feel for how best to respond to and work with your dreams.

Mind, Meaning, and Magic

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