Directing Your Dreams

"Characters from a horror movie were there, waiting to axe me. I went over to the beach with my boyfriend. Giant crabs were there, ready to attack."

These dreams do not reflect idle thoughts about home economics, plumbing, or marine life. Rather, they au zero in, with laserlike precision, on current crises in the dreamers' lives, emotional earthquakes that threaten to topple their basic sense of self-identity.

Laura was a 35-year-old mother of four whose husband, Jim, had just left her. Laura's dream summarized her view of herself and her tattered marriage: "Jim broke up the pair of us and threw me away." She thought the two of them were "his favorite pair." Even her use of a basket of laundry--an assortment of family members' clothing-was apt: her own life revolved around family and home.

Further, just before the breakup, Laura came home early one day to find Jim dressed in her underwear. This, she told me, was her first clue that he was having problems with his sexual identity and had begun in secret to cross-dress. It's no wonder she dreamed he had discarded her, the sock with the hole.

Al, the man who dreamed about a defective switch and plugged-up pipes, was about to undergo major surgery to repair a blocked vein in his leg. A former train engineer, he drew on images from his work identity to express his perception of what was wrong with his leg and his anxieties about how the operation would go. Al spent four nights before his surgery and three nights after it in the University of Oregon's sleep laboratory, where psychologist Louis Breger and his colleagues awakened him several times a night in order to collect his dreams.

Al's other dreams included surgical images, such as cutting up a large piece of meat; repair of other broken objects, such as a stove and a car; and problems with the transport of fluids, such as a half-dried riverbed and a stopped-up septic tank. AR these images occurred in dreams before the operation. Not one occurred after its successful completion. He focused on the threat to his body and its functions before his surgery. Afterward, he no longer felt this threat.

In her dream, Tama revealed a normal adolescent's desire for love and intimacy. But she worried that a calamity would keep her from fulfilling her wish. When Tama was only two years old, a forklift truck overturned on her, crushing her leg and necessitating many operations. When she was nine, surgeons finally had to amputate her leg.

Although Tama told child psychiatrist Lenore Terr this dream had nothing to do with her accident, "she actually had been axed," Terr observes. That was how the girl viewed the surgery she had undergone. Furthermore, Terr asks, "what looks more like a forklift truck, after all, than an oversize, shiny, bright orange Alaska king crab?"

A worn-out sock, rusty pipes, giant crabs: dreams are full of these wonderfully fitting images. Although dreams often puzzle us, it's worth the effort to capture and decipher them, for they show us what we otherwise may not see. They help us uncover truths about ourselves that our waking minds may know yet deny or that, awake, we may not be able to articulate clearly. They do so especially in times of intense emotional upheaval, as Laura found when going through a divorce, Al when facing major surgery, and Tama when confronting the fear that her damaged leg would keep her from getting married.

Few of us go through life without encountering such crises. Indeed, times of crisis highlight the important functions that dreams serve in our lives. Events we perceive as both positive and negative, beginnings and endings, pluses and minuses, all place heavy demands on the dream system. When we gain or lose a job, a mate, a home, or when we undergo any major change in our lives, our internal picture of who we are and our sense of security are called into question.

At such times, our dreams go into high gear. In our dreams, we search through our life story to find memories that can help us cope. We sleep more lightly and awaken more often. Dreams are more apt to stick with us when we're troubled than when life is going well.

The Chinese symbol for crisis includes the characters for both danger and opportunity. The danger we face during a crisis is from the potential shattering of the program on which we run-the present self. The opportunity is in expanding that picture, reshaping how we see ourselves, constructing a new, better-functioning persona.