Building Narrative Through Dreams
By Karen Minikin, CTA TSTA (P) is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, Head of Psychotherapy at the Iron Mill College, Exeter and TA/psychodynamic supervisor.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158
Introduction
In "The Tempest" Shakespeare plays with the notion of fantasy and reality in his story that begins with betrayal and deception creating disorder. In response to this Prospero uses manipulations and illusions to return order so that forgiveness can be possible for him. One point made in this tale is that with enough persuasion, one reality can give way to another. This is the work of dreams. They provide opportunity for seeing experiences with different eyes, differing "I's".
Our interest in dreams is ancient and goes back as far as records began. There are numerous references to dreams in the Bible and other religious texts. Bion, (1962) mentions dreams as a contact barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind, like a gateway providing both a protective defence yet access. This paradox is what can draw us to the enigmatic quality of dreams which can be both fascinating and frustrating all at the same time.
My interest in dreams has come about largely from my own personal therapy as well as from my client work. Dreams offer a rich language to both show yet conceal what we are experiencing and psychically working with. They can offer insights into our difficulties, our emotional journeys and successes and give us some indication of how our unconscious minds work. The symbolic language of dreams offers opportunity for us to engage with vivid imagery conveying the intensity of experiences that often escapes us in waking life.
Dreams and the Unconscious Mind
Rather than a sense of order and predictability, our unconscious minds hold mutually incompatible impulses at the same time. For example, love and hate can be expressed and felt simultaneously. Meanings are easily displaced from one image to another. In our dreams it may seem perfectly natural for an object, animal or person to morph into something else. Likewise, one image may have many meanings and there can be a sense of timelessness or lack of chronology in the narratives we create whilst we sleep.
One of Freud's well-known ideas was that dreams expressed "wish fulfilment". In other words, the unconscious mind expressed the true desires in the psyche, though the meaning of these is disguised in dreams to prevent disturbing the conscious mind too much. In other words, dreams express emotional conflicts deeply felt. In TA and Gestalt approaches, we can link this to how we think about impasses.
Images and scenarios in dreams may convey intensity, as well fragmentation. In Freud's idea of displacement, aspects or fragments of an image or meaning is conveyed somewhere else as part of the disguise. For example, many years ago I dreamt of a blonde woman wearing glasses. There was a close association between us in the dream and I was deciding whether our friendship could be taken to another more intimate level. On waking the image of the glasses stayed with me and I found myself experimenting with associations and interpretations. It was with some shock later that week when a black male client sat in front of me and I recognised the very same glasses from my dream. This offered some insight into the emerging erotic transference and countertransference in our work.
Given that dreams process the last 24-72 hours of our waking life, it seems likely that counsellors and psychotherapists dream about aspects clients, every night following a working day. If captured, these reveal rich dynamics about our clients, our work and the power of the unconscious invisibly at work in our waking lives. In other words, our conscious minds have a tremendous capacity to ignore disturbing as well as useful information.
For Jung, dreams were the route to the unconscious both individually and collectively owned. He understood the collective pool of wisdom and experience available to us as our blueprints of nature or archetypes. Rather than "wish fulfilment", he preferred to think about "compensation". The dream compensated for what was missing in the dreamer's waking life. Jung saw the benefits of holding inner dialogue with people in the dream and this idea has been built on and worked with by Gestalt and TA practitioners in chair work.
Jung advocated the benefits of staying close to the dream, particularly staying close to the original images, rather than diverting away too much through free association. He was also much more cautious than Freud about interpreting dreams as he believed this was reductive and that the reverence that is sometimes given to interpretations does not always account for the analyst's perspective. In other words, he recognised the subjectivity and intersubjectivity of two minds working on a dream. This is essential in relational approaches to counselling and psychotherapy.
Return to old watering holes for more than water; friends and dreams are there to m
Working with Dreams
There is no one correct way to work with dreams and will depend on your working context, your beliefs, your philosophy and approach. Having said this, it is important to be respectful and ethical in responding to our client's dreams. Like any mode of unconscious communication, there is a greater risk that the way we respond and work with this material can be experienced as intrusive and some clients may become frightened by what is revealed. Hence, sensitivity and consideration regarding the context, the transference and/or countertransferential dynamics is vital.
If explanations or interpretations are offered, give them with consideration and sensitivity. It is possible to make use of dreams in organisational and educational settings and whilst the consultant might be more reticent about offering personal interpretive insight they can emphasise the use of exploration, reflection and learning. Alternatively, focusing on the group/organisational or cultural dynamics rather than the individual dreamer offers opportunity for gaining the learning from a dream without being overly intrusive. In this way, the dreamer can be considered as embodying aspects of the organisation. This can be powerful if a working group is willing to share aspects of their dreams, making them group knowledge. This provides scope for thinking about the wisdom in the dreams and using a framework of social dreaming might be particularly helpful.
In TA psychotherapy, we can use dreams diagnostically for assessment, for strengthening Adult, for decontamination and deconfusion. I have used them frequently to support my relational approach by using the dream as an "illustration," (Berne, 1966) and as a way back into working in the transference. Clients may say things about themselves, their feelings towards you and the work between you through their dream illustration that would be much harder for them to do directly. Likewise, by paying attention to my own dreams after a day's work I have often been able to pick up on dynamics that I have missed whilst in session.
George: Case Illustration
I have found dreams to be particularly helpful with clients who are working through traumatic experiences and PTSD. One example of this is my work with a builder who I call George. George had fallen down a deep hole on site at work. The hole contained a co-incidental obstruction that had saved his life. For over a year he had suffered, first with anxiety, then depression, panic attacks and insomnia before developing full-blown symptoms of PTSD, which included repetitive dreams of falling. There are more associations and meanings to make of his experience, but a couple of things are worth mentioning.
Fear of falling
- People and mammals have a natural fear of falling, so this fear is a common communal experience.
- The symbolism of falling into a hole is rich in terms of metaphorical associations. For example, "hole" Vs "whole", falling into the unconscious, the birth tunnel/canal, penetrating a hole, engulfment, the womb, "the man who feel to earth" were a few that came to my mind and affected me as we talked.
George was pleasant and affable, yet I could hardly stand to sit with him for fifty minutes. The bodily agitated terror I experienced in his presence seemed to absorb all my emotional resources. This countertransference in the work together with his dreams allowed us to start building some bridges and making sense of his waking and night terrors. At first his nightmare dream was repetitive. He was on the way to work, via motorbike (no helmet), when he falls down a hole, waking terrified.
Novellino (2012) writes about "exogenous" nightmares that follow terrifying experiences including the danger of death. In these, the individual relives the actual trauma and struggles to convert the archaic experiences into conscious memory so that they can remember without re-experiencing. My client, a very practical man knew that his dream was connected to his trauma but this did not help him.
Over time, as I listened to his daily struggles, particularly the fragments of his experience that brought on panic attacks, we slowly started to make more connections between his waking and dreaming anxieties. Over the course of three months, his dream changed. He spoke of being at a petrol station "filling up" and he falls down a hole. This develops to being at the petrol station, filling up when an alarm sounds. He grabs a helmet and jumps down the hole. Slowly George was beginning to claim intention and control in his dream. His dream developed narrative and he could remember these and tell me about them.
One session he said "I just don't understand the alarm. Why do I keep hearing the alarm ring in my dream?" I remembered him telling me that when he was stuck down the hole his mobile phone had rung but he could not answer it because he couldn't reach into his back pocket. When I offered him this, George's body jumped out of the chair and landed breaking the wooden framework. It was such a simple yet important connection. In that moment it was as if the missing link bridged the break in his psychic system and his conscious and unconscious mind were now connected. He re-enacted the fall, the drop right in front of me, breaking my chair! By staying close to his dream he had developed a narrative - a narrative that bridged his conscious effort and unconscious work. This had made more space for his feelings; his vulnerability and he was reclaiming his mind. After this moment he no longer had the dream and I no longer felt on the point of collapsing with agitation.
Conclusion
I started this blog referring to Shakespeare and his capacity to describe disorder. Through this I am reminded of chaos theory. I am no scholar in this field, only aware of the basic hypothesis that dynamic systems are sensitive to original conditions and small differences can amplify the effect on the way system develops. Our dreams may seem disordered and yet can also help make sense of disorder. For me, working with dreams is informative, moving, creative and so very rewarding for both client and therapist. They can be helpful in both comforting a distressed psyche as well as challenging a defended one and in both cases respect for the context of the work and the dreamer helps to provide the holding and containing environment that is important when we delve into the unconscious.
Written September 2024
References
Bion, W.R. 1962, Learning from Experience, Heinemann, London
Berne, E., 1966, Principles of Group Treatment, OUP
Berne, E., 1972 (my edition, Corgi, 1996), What do you say after you say hello?
Bowater and Sherrard 1999 (TAJ 29, 4): Dreamwork Treatment of Nightmares Using Transactional Analysis
Bowater 2003 (TAJ 33, 1): Windows on your Inner Self: Dreamwork with Transactional Analysis
Freud, Sigmund, (1913, My copy 1999), The Interpretation of Dreams, Oxford University Press
Gellert, (TAJ 5, 4): 1975: How to Reach Early Scenes and Decisions by Dream Work
Jung, C.G. 1957, (my copy, 1990), The Undiscovered Self, Princeton-Bollingen
Jung, C.G. 1974 (my copy, 2002), Dreams Princeton University Press
Novellino, Michele, 2012, (TAJ 42, 4): The Shadow and the Demon: The Psychodynamics of Nightmares
Schiff, Jacqui et al, (1971), Passivity, Transactional Analysis Journal, 1 (1): 71 – 78
Summers, G. and Tudor, K., Co-Creative Transactional Analysis, TAJ Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 23 - 40.
Thomson, 1987: (TAJ 17, 4) Dreamwork in Redecision Therapy
West, Marcus, (2011), Understanding Dreams in Clinical Practice, Karna
