Dreams during crises show how that equation is working out. Is the
danger overwhelming us or are we dealing with the opportunity to assume
new roles? Are these roles positive or negative? "Are you a good witch or
a bad witch?" the Munchkins asked Dorothy, who, when threatened with the
loss of her beloved Toto, dreamed she was blown out of Kansas and into
the land of Oz.
From Bad Dreams to Good
Our dreams serve, Cincinnati psychiatrist and dream researcher
Milton Kramer suggests, as an emotional thermostat. A bad dream, like an
elevated temperature, is a symptom that something is wrong. It is a
distress signal, a message from our sleeping mind to our waking mind that
is risky to ignore. Kramer's studies show that the mind-set we have
during our dreams affects our attitudes and behavior the following day.
After a bad dream, we awaken more discouraged than we were at bedtime.
After a good one, we tend to feel more optimistic.
Dreams also offer a shortcut to understanding and overcoming the
emotional stumbling blocks of people in crisis. The times that try men's
(and women's) souls are precisely those when we most need to shift our
dreams into action, to turn from simply recognizing the danger to our
present self to accepting the opportunity to invent or devise a change
and then to rehearse and work on it.
The crisis dreaming method-which addresses malfunctioning dreams
directly to try to change those that reveal a continuing, underlying,
poor identity pattern-offers an opportunity to direct our dreams toward
more positive results. Once you discover the trend of what is happening
from dream to dream, you can identify more easily those that are
unproductive or even self-destructive, and you can start to work on dream
repair that very night.
Useful in many situations, the crisis dreaming method aims to
change negative, hurtful dreams to positive, heating ones. It enables
people to stop bad dreams while they are in progress, and to rewrite
their scripts. In this way, we can redirect dreaming to perform its
proper function: to update our inner narrative, our sense of
identity-first by recognizing those aspects of our present crisis that
are negative and demoralizing, and next by finding images of strength
already filed in our memory banks. We can then activate these images to
change our waking attitudes. In so doing, we can adapt faster and more
fully to the emotional hurricanes we all encounter.
The crisis dreaming method has value in good times as well as bad:
It shows how we can use dreams not only to understand ourselves better,
but also to foster desired changes in our waking lives. A good dream
system enables us to reorganize our sense of ourselves internally, to
make the necessary transformations in point of view when circumstances
change, to create a new, self-respecting version of who we are.
If you are currently wrestling with a major life crisis, the first
step is to pay more attention to your dreams. You may be skeptical. The
conventional wisdom is that most of us recover from a crisis by changing
our waking lives, not our dreams. Can it work the other way around? Many
of those with whom I have worked tell me that dreams provided them with
both the insight on how the present connects to the past, and the impetus
to change the program of the self in order to create a better fit with
their present lives. They have found that changing the endings of their
dreams can be a giant step toward these goals. This concept shocks
traditional psychoanalysts. It challenges the basic idea of the nature of
the relationship between the waking mind and dreams.
Understanding Dream Dimensions
Key questions to ask yourself about any dream you recall are: "Why
this dream?" and "Why dream this dream now?" For that, you need to look
for the underlying themes that bind together your dreams and waking life,
the emotional issues that prompt your sleeping self to declare: "This is
what I am feeling. This is what day-today events remind me of. This is
what needs more attention."
We build our dream stories to express these underlying themes using
various dream dimensions-distinctions that we make to define and
categorize our experiences. Dimensions, which reflect opposing states or
qualities, constitute our own unique and habitual way of organizing the
world we live in. We start in infancy to make big evaluative
discriminations: This feels good; that feels bad. This is warm; that is
cold. By the time we reach adulthood, we have added many such
distinctions. In dreams, the specific images, along with their opposites,
show how we see people and events and express our innermost feelings
about them.
The idea of our using a system of opposites in our dreams is one I
have adapted from the work of the noted anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss, who used this approach to analyze the characteristic ways
of thinking and myth-making in tribal cultures. He suggested that the
mind works on problems by dividing key issues into pairs and then by
juggling these elements, this way and that, patiently rearranging and
recombining them, until they fit the needs of the person telling the
story.
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