Introduction Our dreams are like a well from whose depths we can draw up spiritual and psychological knowledge as we would life-giving water. Our dreams present a vivid picture of our soul’s condition, give information about our relationships, and offer practical guidance for solving problems in our lives. But to drink from this well of knowledge within, we first need to draw up the bucket. To “draw up the bucket” means making a daily practice of paying attention to our dreams. Such a practice involves trying to recall, each morning, any dreams we might have had the previous night, writing these dreams down, meditating on and analyzing their images. In this article I will describe a useful method for working meditatively with our dreams. Later I will illustrate this method with a dream example, but first I want to look briefly at some of the facts scientists have discovered about dreams. Scientists Explore Dreams Scientists’ have discovered that, even though some people do not remember their dreams, everyone dreams every night. About one and one half hours of dreaming occur for every eight hours of sleep. When we are dreaming the brain maintains a level of physiological activity similar to its activity when we are awake. Most dreams consist of vivid involuntary visual, and sometimes auditory and tactile, perceptions which are as immediate as the sensory perceptions we have when we are awake. Thus, physiologically and psychologically our sleeping brains treat dreams as real experiences. Dreams come mostly during REM or Rapid Eye Movement (named for the eye movements that occur) sleep, as distinguished from Non-REM sleep. During REM sleep our bodies are paralyzed, perhaps an evolutionary survival mechanism so we cannot harm ourselves in our dreams. It has been found that having had an adequate amount of REM sleep each night is helpful in complex problem-solving during waking hours. Problems that bothered us when we went to bed may be worked through during REM sleep. A high proportion of REM sleep comes later in the sleep cycle, say after we have slept for 6 or so hours.
How To Understand Our Dreams:A Four‑Step Method * Many people have the misconception that their dreams are easy to understand. They are too quick to arrive at what they think is the correct interpretation. They assume they already know the dream’s meaning at the outset. In a 1983 lecture entitled, “Inner work‑ A Program for Translating Our Dreams into Reality,” and in a later book called Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson presented a method which we can use for understanding our own dreams. In Johnson’s method arriving at the interpretation is the next to the last step. “Because our dreams are telling us things about ourselves that we do not already know, we cannot automatically understand their meaning.” We first need an objective standpoint. “The eye cannot look at itself unless it has a mirror.” Johnson’s dream method acts like a mirror in that it enables us to see ourselves as the dream portrays us. The method of interpretation provides an objective standpoint by giving us a set procedure which requires that we withhold our immediate subjective interpretation of the dream until after we have carefully examined the dream’s individual images. This method has four distinct steps, which are to be done in order. In the first step, we obtain our associations to each word in the dream. ”Associations” mean any thoughts, memories, feelings or metal images which are associated in our minds with the dream’s content. Our associations can be obtained by treating each word like the hub of a wheel and writing down our associations in the form of spokes coming out from this hub. The associations can also be written in paragraph form. Whichever way we choose, it is important to write them down so we can meditate on them later. The associations that “pop out” at us while we are meditating on them will be the correct ones for understanding our dream. In the second step, we need to identify each word in the dream as a part of our own personality. Dreams are like “x‑rays of the personality.”‘ Although our dreams use people, places, objects, and events from our waking lives as their symbols, our dreams are usually about us. The dream images can be identified as parts of our own personalities. It is important to write down how we have identified each image, because, as Johnson says, “we evade less that way.” In the third step, an interpretation of the dream is attempted. Only after completing the first two steps do we have the information necessary to understand our dream’s meaning. In the interpretation we will utilize the associations and the identified parts of our personalities to help us determine our dream’s main message. We should try to condense the message into one concise statement. This will be illustrated in the dream example below. In the fourth step, we translate our interpretation of the dream into reality by taking a specific action. We should not just think about the interpretation; we need to do something about it. As Robert Johnson says, “When God speaks to us in our dream, we need to be courteous enough to reply.” Our action is our reply. The results of our action also help us judge whether our interpretation of the dream is correct. * Robert A. Johnson presented this dream interpretation method in a lecture on May 9, 1980 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Tustin, California, for the C.G. Jung Club of Orange County. The method also appears in his book Inner Work, Using Dreams and Creative Imagination for Personal Growth and Integration published by Harper and Row in 1989.
Translating Our Dreams Into Reality
What follows is an example of how I applied Robert A. Johnson’s four‑step method to one of my own dreams. At the time I was in my late‑thirties, on the brink of middle age. Restore My 1936 Buick A young man, Ron, wants me to restore my 1936 Buick. I don’t really want to, but neither do I want to sell it, unless the price were at least $50. I think Ron is about to offer me that price but then he says he’ll give me $10 for the car. I feel this would be a gyp for me. I’m bothered at his low offer and feel it is an insult. I say that the old Buick would be worth a lot if it were restored, probably $2,000. But the restoration work seems immense. I think of the dent in the fender. I would resent putting that much time and energy into the car, even though I know there would be a high payoff once it had been restored to its original condition. It’s not the kind of work I’d want to do. But unless the work is done, it seems that I will not receive the car’s true value. To complete the first step of the method, to obtain my associations, I reflected on the dream’s images, allowing the thoughts connected to the images to come to mind. Many associations came to me.
I recognized the young man in the dream, Ron, as a person ten years younger than I whom I knew from my work. Ron was a bright young man, a good writer with much potential, but he had not been able to realize his talent. Instead, Ron had continued working at a routine job which was far below his ability and which gave little opportunity for creative expression. Ron also seemed tied to his mother. For example, Ron would often ask his mother for advice instead of making his own decisions and Ron was still receiving significant financial support from her, even though he was in his mid‑twenties and living in an apartment. This association of Ron as tied to his mother fit in with the fact that I had had this dream on Mother’s Day.
The 1936 Buick was the first car I ever owned. I bought it when I was sixteen years old. To this car, I associated independence, initiation into manhood, and a sense of power. Another association was that it was an object of real value which was obtained for relatively little outlay because the price I actually paid for the car, the same price as I wanted in the dream, was $50. What about the offer of $10 for the car in the dream? I painfully remembered, that this was the price for which I had actually sold another car I had once owned. That car’s brakes had failed and a shady mechanic convinced me it would be very difficult to repair and that it would get towed with high impound fees if it sat on the street any longer. This raised my anxiety, and so I sold it to him for that ridiculously low price just to get rid of the burden of it. Later, I saw the mechanic’s friends driving my former car, which was running perfectly well after it had been fixed. They waved and smiled in a triumphant manner, and I realized I’d allowed myself to be duped. It was a painful lesson. So I associated the offer of $10 in the dream with a situation in which my own naivete and weakness had prevented me from getting the full value of something. Restoration, in the context of this dream, seemed to mean, “bringing something back to its original condition.” When it came to my associations to the $2,000, I recalled that money in dreams can refer to creative life energy. I thus took the $2,000 to represent a fairly large quantity of such energy. The dented fender on the old Buick brought to mind the idea of something being wounded. This made me think of my own emotional wounds, especially those I had received during his adolescence, which was a troubled period for me. My original car had actually been dented in its fender by wife of a local government figure in the town where I lived and she had neglected to leave a note on the car; I only found out when a boy who had seen her drive away told me about it. So the dent represented a wound that had been done in negligence by someone who should have known better. It took me a considerable amount of time and effort to arrive at these associations. I had to sit with my dream journal, meditate on each image, and write down all the mental associations which came to me. This is not “free association” in the Freudian sense, because in Johnson’s method the associations continually refer back to the original word at the hub, whereas in Freud’s method the word from the dream serves only as a starting point in a linear chain of associations that may lead farther and farther away from the original dream image. I then proceeded to the next step, the identifying of which part of my personality was represented by each dream image. I decided that the young man in the dream, Ron, stood for the part of me that was potentially creative, but was still tied to the idea of being mothered by life, and therefore was not independent enough to be assertive. Ron represented my tendency to expect life to take care of me, rather than to take a more active role in my own life. Ron was the weak, unassertive part that could gyp me out of realizing my potential, just as in the dream he tries to gyp me out of the Buick. The 1936 Buick represented a part of me that had been devalued in my youth. The Buick was a wounded part of me, which, if it could be restored or made whole, would have great value for me.
The amount of $10 referred to the wounded part of me that did not have adequate energy resources to undertake the task of restoration. And Ron, since he offered the $10, represented the part that wanted something for almost nothing, the part of me that wanted to take the easy way out, that is, not to do all the work necessary to restore the car.
The $2,000 represented the part of my personality that contained the creative energy that would be freed for use if the “restoration” were accomplished. This hints at a possible interpretation that the healing of my emotional wounds would bring new life, and a restoration of my true creative self. After identifying the parts of my personality as they were represented in the dream symbols, I was ready to carry out the third step: to make an interpretation of his dream. To arrive at an interpretation we try to determine the key message of the dream. To accomplish this, we need to use our intuition to tie together our associations and the identified parts of the personality into a meaningful statement. I stated what I thought was the main message of his dream: “A part of my personality, which was wounded in my youth, needs to be restored to a condition of strength and wholeness, but I have not committed myself to the effort. If I were to commit myself, then I would receive a large payoff of new energy, and I would be able to come closer to realizing my creative potential.” This interpretation “clicked” for me, that is, it felt intuitively correct to me. From this interpretation I realized that, if my emotional wounds were healed, I would need to put some energy into my own healing process. I asked myself how I could do this. I asked myself how I could restore the wounded part of my personality so I could get the full value out of my creative potential. In asking these questions I had already begun to take the fourth and final step of the dream method: to decide what action to take based on the interpretation of the dream. I decided that my first action would be to visit the actual neighborhood where I grew up. I drove the thirty minutes to my old neighborhood, that still looked the same as when I had lived there more than twenty years before. I got out of my car, (by this time a newer model Toyota), and walked down the very street where I had lived when I had owned the 1936 Buick. But while doing this, something happened which I had not expected: I got a splitting headache! Our bodies sometimes tell us things are minds don’t know. From past experience, I knew that I got headaches when I was angry about something but was not admitting my anger to myself. As I drove back home from my old neighborhood, trying to determine what hidden and unresolved anger might be the cause of my sudden headache, I thought of an incident that had occurred when I lived in the old neighborhood. I’d had a fierce and scary argument with my father in which there had been a great deal of shouting, ending with my father threatening to tow my car away, the 1936 Buick. I remembered how powerless I had felt at the time and how angry I had been at my father. As I relived the incident in my imagination, I felt the depth of my anger at my father. I was surprised to find that I could still have so much anger at him after all those intervening years. I realized that this one incident was a symbol for our conflict‑filled relationship. It became apparent to me that I had still not resolved the hurt and anger from our many conflicts.
As I came to this realization, my headache subsided and I began to see that, I needed to face the long-lasting depth of my angry feelings. One of the benefits of this insight was that it began clearing the way for me to integrate anger into my conscious personality and to use the energy it gave me to live more assertively. *
From the work I did on this dream I also resolved to talk with my father and try to reestablish a better connection with him, to become friends as we’d never been able to do when I was younger. It was finally time to let go of my anger and to heal this old wound, which was blocking my creative energy. I was stuck in anger at a deeper level, still had problems with authority at my job and this condition kept me in reactive rebellion instead of authentic independence and selfhood. * David W. Augsburger, in Anger and Assertiveness in Pastoral Care, (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1979), shows clearly the relationship between anger and assertiveness, and how anger can be expressive of “creative life energies,” (p. vii).
So I did talk with my father, not in any analytical or psychological way really, but just as man-to-man (man on the brink of middle age to man on the brink of old age), and we started doing things together, like having lunch, going out fishing on a quiet lake, going on a weekend camping trip. We never talked directly about what happened in the past, because that was difficult for him, but we shared a new friendly non-competitive relationship in the present that, I think, healed us both. Along with acknowledging and re-experiencing the hurt and angry feelings of my youth, I did two more things that helped to translate my dream into reality. I went to see a therapist to talk out my feelings about the incidents of the past and how they affected the present. In this way I was able to work directly with a caring person to heal my wounds. I also wrote an autobiographical story about the time he’d been cheated out of his car for a mere $10, relieving myself of the hurt and anger from that painful incident. Taking all of these actions helped me resolve my left‑over hurt and angry feelings. As long as I had been denying my anger, my access to other aspects of my emotional life, and consequently to my creativity, was blocked. As a result of doing this work on my dream and completing the four‑step dream method, I experienced an upsurge of energy and a feeling of renewed life. By making the effort to delve into my dreams I felt I had opened the way to a better, more creative life and gained a stronger sense of myself and my potential. Conclusion Although the four‑step method of working with our dreams obviously takes a considerable amount of time and effort, carrying it through can bring the rich reward of greater self knowledge, thus helping us become the whole personalities we have the potential to become. The well of knowledge exists within us in our dreams. We need only to draw up the bucket and drink from the life‑renewing water.
Selected Bibliography Dement, Wm. C. Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep, (W.W. Norton Co., New York, 1978). Covers the laboratory research on sleep and dreams in a most readable way. De Vries, Ad Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, (North Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1974). An encyclopedic treatise on symbols in myth, history, literature and culture from far back in ancient times into the modern period. Useful for archetypal exploration of dream content. Fontana, David The Secret Language of Dreams, (Duncan Baird Publishers, London, 1994). Beautifully illustrated book that gets the reader into the symbols and images that may appear in dreams. Freud, Sigmund The Interpretation of Dreams, (Avon Books, New York, 1965). The must-read classic in the field. Brilliant use of deductive logic to analyze dream symbols in the context of case studies. Johnson, Robert A. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Creative Imagination for Personal Growth and Integration, (Harper, SanFrancisco,1989). First half of book presents the 4-step method. Jung, C.G. Man and His Symbols, (Doubleday, New York, 1964). Jungian theory for the masses, with ample pictures and photographs illustrating Jung’s ideas, with a section of dreams. The hardback edition is better. Kelsey, Morton T. Dreams: A Way to Listen to God, (Paulist Press, New York, 1978), a superb little book that shows that dreams are an integral part of the spiritual life. This book also contains many practical tips for working with one’s own dreams. Mallon, Brenda The Dream Bible, (Godsfield Press, Great Britain, 2003). Illustrated with interesting psychological explanations of a large number of symbols that may appear in dreams. Quenk, Alex T. and Quenk, Naomi Dream Thinking, (Davies-Black, a division of Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, 1995). Uses some Jungian and other theoretical approaches to dream work. Out of print, but a copy might be obtained from Alibris via Amazon.com. Sanford, John A. Dreams and Healing, (Paulist Press, New York, 1978). In this succinct account of dream interpretation, using case studies, Sanford shows how to arrive at a concise statement of a dream’s message. The book contains an excellent section on working with one’s own dreams.
