Finding Meaning In Dreams

November 26, 2006
By DAN ZAK, Washington Post It is January 2009.

Imagine, for a moment, that the new president begins his inaugural address by saying he has written down and studied his dreams. With a level head, and without detouring into the psychic or prophetic, he says he hopes to understand himself better by doing some dream work.

“I mean, how would that go over in the press?” says Gayle Delaney, who for the past 30 years has striven to mainstream dream work – the practice of sidestepping classical dream interpretation for a more nuanced, personalized meditation on one’s dreams.

Delaney is the founding president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. She has written books and virtually shorted out the lecture circuit in the United States and Europe. Still, many people think dream work is bosh and bunkum.

“Prejudice against dreaming is huge, in part because so much nonsense is written about it,” Delaney says.

Ask any professional with dream experience, and their message is clear: Ignore quick-fix dream “doctors” on TV and the Internet. Toss your conventional dream dictionaries to the curb; they are too strict, too patrician.

And their meanings? Meaningless.

“After all, a dream about a house must mean different things to a carpenter and an arsonist,” says Karen Shanor, a clinical psychologist in Washington.

Dreams should be worked rather than cut and dried into categories, Shanor, Delaney and others say. No book, and no one, can tell you what your dreams mean, because one’s dreaming life can be understood only in the context of one’s waking life.

As Dr. Phil-ish as it sounds, dream work is a matter of self-therapy, of being open to the possibility that reflecting on your dreams may yield some holistic or entertaining insights.

“People would just as soon think that dreams are random activity in your cortex,” Delaney says. “There are still huge swaths of movers and shakers whom I have as clients who say, ‘If I tell anybody I’ve seen you, I’ll have to deny it.”‘

Oh, if those Hewlett-Packard knuckleheads had prefaced their morning meetings with a little dream analysis …

That scenario is not so crazy. Business schools and management training programs in England and India use dream therapists to help hone problem-solving skills. Working through a conflict in a dream scenario may have a practical application to one’s waking life.

Still, there is bias against dreaming, agrees Clara Hill, a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland. Some comes from a lack of understanding dream work, particularly the aspects that sound a little paranormal.

Take dream incubation, in which people condition themselves to dream about a certain topic, or prodromal dreaming, in which the body sends signals to the dreaming mind about impending illness. The validity of both is supported by a wealth of anecdotal observation and some supplementary research.

But they still have that faint whiff of the psychic. Extrasensory powers may exist, but there is no way to gather statistical proof about clairvoyance.

“I think the jury’s still out on that,” says Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard Medical School professor who uses dream work in clinical and classroom settings. “It’s a matter of faith. Most of us hear really dramatic anecdotes in that direction, and I think it’s possible there’s something we don’t understand happening in communication outside of what we’re consciously aware of. But we also underestimate coincidences.”

What about the skeptics? How does Hill respond to naysayers who invoke psychiatrist Allan Hobson’s theory that dreams are products of benign psychosis – a mostly random firing of neurons?

“They might be, but if you can use them therapeutically, and it works, that’s great,” says Hill, who has conducted about 20 studies on dreaming. “So I get out of the argument that way. The research we’ve done so far is that people really can gain insight.”

Consultants Help Their Clients Discover Meanings of Dreams

By Bill Spurr / Features Writer

MOST TRADE shows at the Halifax Forum are dominated by the smells of french fries and coffee.

But on Saturday at the Nova Scotia Holistic Health Show, it was the aromas of herbs and incense that were pungently present.

And among the booths on feng shui, hydrotherapy, crystal therapy and massage therapy, reiki, therapeutic touch and healing hemp were two dealing with dreams and nightmares and what they mean.

Mal Cohen, intuitive dream guide, believes everybody is “a potential Einstein or Picasso” once they discover what their dreams are trying to tell them.

Cohen has been interested for decades in discerning dreams and 10 years ago realized he had some psychic ability in that area.

“But it was only a few years ago that I came to realize my native innate ability is more intuitive than analytical. So that’s when I realized it was more effective for me to take on the role of intuitive dream guide, rather than an actual interpreter,” he said at his booth at the health show.

“There was a gradual realization on my part that I didn’t really believe in dream interpretation. I didn’t believe that I had the right or the skill to tell somebody else what their dream, which is a very private and personal expression of themselves, means to them. My skill was using my intuitive ability to actually dream the dream with the person, experience it with them, feel it with them and through that experience, help them understand what the dream means to them.”

Many of the people who stopped by Cohen’s booth wanted to discuss dreams in which they were flying or levitating.

“In all those cases, the individual had something in their life that was creating a spiritual search,” he said.

The first step to understanding dreams, Cohen said, is learning how to remember them after you wake up. Once you understand a dream, it won’t return.

“When adults have nightmares, they’re wake-up calls,” he said. “Scary as hell; however, once the individual gets a handle on the dream and learns from it and gets the message, there’s no more reason for it and it never comes back. Sometimes you need to suffer a little in order to grow.”

Cohen usually works with people in his home. A session lasts about an hour. “Any less than that and it’s very difficult to fully understand and help the person understand the dream and develop a relationship with the individual,” Cohen said of the sessions, which cost $50 and sometimes require a follow-up visit.

Ruth Main, dream consultant, does believe in dream interpretation. The former United Church minister took a two-year Dream Work course at the Haden Institute in North Carolina, after she started having “immense” dreams while on a medical leave.

“Dreams are pushing us toward psychological and spiritual growth, so I would say the common factor would be a need for this growth,” she said of the people she works with and the dreams they talk to her about.

“They may have similar themes and be similar types of dreams, but I’ve never heard the same dream twice.”

Main, who has worked with hundreds of people, believes there is no such thing as a dream with only one meaning and that dreams are messages from the unconscious.

“Dream work helps us grow to become the people we were born to be. It leads us toward that,” she said, adding that many people are afraid of what their dreams, once interpreted, will say about them.

“Dream work is not for the faint of heart. It requires real commitment and, many times, real courage to face the issues that our dreams are bringing up for us.

“If a person has a dream and doesn’t get it, and it’s really an important one, it probably will occur again, often in the very same images as the first one. Generally, that kind of dream will go on until the person has some kind of insight into it.”

Main, who also charges $50 an hour, organizes dream groups, in which groups of four people discuss their dreams for a couple of hours at a time.

“Your dreams are uncensored and they are always honest,” she said. “They tell us the things that we don’t know about ourselves that we need to know.”