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Dream Appreciation The minute parsing of dream meaning can be
revelatory. As the same time, if we are not careful, it can
become another way of distorting the image, like a lepidopterist
mounting a butterfly on a trophy board rather than marveling at
its living presence. It is a convention in psychology to talk of
"dream mechanisms," but the psyche is not a steam engine or a
computer. We are investigating an ecosystem, not the innards of
a device. What I am referring to as the appreciative mode of
dreamwork involves a vivifying encounter with the imaginal
realm. Here the images not only stand for something, they exist
in their own right. Instead of labeling and sorting them,
extracting their meaning and discarding them, one enters
open-handed into their world. Jung used a technique he called
active imagination to particpate in a dream's livng presence. He
describes his discovery of this method in his autobiography.
While sitting at his desk one day, trying to come to grips with
his own intractable fears he abruptly had the sensation of
letting himself inwardly "drop" to a deeper level of
imagination. He felt himself plunge down, "as if the ground
literally gave way beneath my feet," eventually landing in a
dark cave where he encountered various mythological creatures,
personages, and symbols -- dwarves, glowing red crystals,
enormous black scarabs. Dreams can have such an authoritative
feel -- their presentation as deliberate, exacting, and
inalienable as the director's cut of a film -- that the
dreamer's first challenge is simply accepting them as they are.
Psychologist Mary Watkins counsels against imposing a burdensome
conscious structure upon a spontaneous creation: "Try to take
the image as a given and as completed," she writes, "rather than
a play which you, as ego, must rework and finish." This, she
ads, counters "ego's attempts to consume the image as the bird
would the spider." The act of appreciating is in the spirit of
what the poet Keats once characterized as "being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable grasping
after fact and reason." We take the position of opening
ourselves to the dream without unsheathing the sword of
interpretation. I have often found myself returning to certain
images I have allowed to live, gratified that they still retain
the power to inwardly move me, and have not been "analyzed to
death". Indeed, a hallmark of this mode of living encounter is
an upwelling of feeling, for here we are seeking the emotional,
not the intellectual, center of the dream, that place where
wordless transformative energies pool and stir. Sometimes an
image arouses a full-fledged mood state -- a catch in the
throat, a gut feeling, the sudden pounding of our hearts in
"irrational" fear or "wild" passion. Then we know that the
imaginal creatures, which are intimately connected with the
body, are hungering to be part of our lives. Another aspect of
appreciating a dream involves sharing it with others. When we
work on a dream alone, we tend to repress those aspects we don't
want to see. To encounter a dream in the company of others helps
us see what we would otherwise gloss over. The Jungian analyst
Marie-Louise von Franz writes, "Dreams generally point to our
blind spot. They never tell us what we already know ... The
trouble with interpreting your own dreams is that you can't see
your own back." We require companionship with others who have
become sensitized to the imaginal dimension, for we may see more
through their eyes than we see through our own. If we open our
hearts as well as our minds to the dream, then its entire world
-- and by analogy, our "real" wolrd, too -- is revealed as a
living plenitude. The simplicity of an open gaze is itself
transformative. Then life willingly bears us beyond our habitual
viewpoint, showing us where faith sleeps in a mustard seed, and
a cosmos really does glimmer in a grain of sand. Copyright ©2004
Mythical Path. All rights reserved. Federal law prohibits
reproduction of this material in whole or part for any purpose
without written permission of Mythical Path. For permission to
reprint send an email to our author.
About Author :
Author, instructor, nutritionist, public-speaker, expert dream
interpreter
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