7 Days of Dreaming: Writing the Narrative
I hope you are enjoying the journey so far, and discovering the light your dreams can shed on the struggles and triumphs of your waking life.
Dreamwork Skill #3: Writing the Narrative
When you first wake and try to capture your dream on paper, you may be hunched over a scrap of paper in the dark, scrawling impressions before you fall back asleep, or hurriedly scribbling the gist of the plot as you hustle through breakfast.
However, when you return to your dream for a second look, the way you choose to write it down is important. Here are three considerations in the transcription of your dream:
Give your dream a title.
Titles should be simple and direct. “A Tiger Chases a Woman”. “A Man Encounters A Ruined Building.” These titles will help you find your dreams easily if you keep a dream journal, and will also enable you to track themes over time. Often the title itself can provide an “aha” moment!
Write your dream in the present tense, and in generalities. Don’t edit or sanitize.
Consider the difference between these two narratives:
a) “I dreamed of a train station, I was in a hurry and in the dream, people kept getting between me and the trains. I did not handle it well.”
b) “A woman is trying to get to a train, she is in a hurry, and she cannot reach her destination. She flails and lashes out at the people that get in her way, pushing some aside and even trampling one. The train continues to be out of her reach and she wants to scream.”
Which feels riper for interpretation and insight? If the behavior of your dream-self embarrasses or horrifies you, protect your dream journal and keep it confidential, but don’t sanitize your report. You can rob yourself of a great deal of insight doing that, and remember, your dream self is not you! The dream-self is a representation, just like all the other characters we encounter in dreams.
Break your dream into scenes.
Dreams tend to move fluidly and bizarrely through time, and sometimes we move from one setting to another with no continuity of character, location, or theme. For this reason, breaking a complex dream into scenes and processing each scene individually can be a more productive approach.
Dream Practicum
A woman I had been working with for a while arrived at her session in a state of agitation I had not observed before. She was reluctant to share what was troubling her, but finally disclosed that she’d had a disturbing dream the night before and could not get it out of her mind. The content of the dream was so disturbing to her that she did not even want to speak it aloud, but she did consent to write it down later that night and send it to me by email.
As we worked with the dream, here is the narrative that emerged, using the three guidelines above:
A Woman Has A Disappearing Child
i. A woman finds herself giving birth to a baby in the middle of a crowded room, even though she did not know she was pregnant and there is no biological way she could be pregnant. She is horrified and embarrassed.
ii. The baby is born and is perfect, and the woman holds it close and decides that it is not so horrible that it is here after all. The woman feels joyful and warm.
iii. The baby begins to shrink. There is nothing the woman can do. She cannot feed the baby and it gets smaller and smaller, despite the woman’s panicked attempts to save it, it disappears into nothing. The woman is consumed with grief.
Once the dreamer worked through her initial feelings of guilt and failure, she was able to let go of the idea that this dream was about neglect and literal death. She shared that, although the baby was newborn in the dream, it appeared to be about 8 months of age. We looked at what had been happening 8 months ago in the dreamer’s life, and she realized that 8 months ago, she had developed an incredible idea for a book she wanted to write. Although she had shared her idea with a few friends, their enthusiasm frightened her and she backed away from the idea.
Writing the dream in general terms enabled the dreamer to get enough distance to let go of the literal interpretation of the “baby” and realize that her “baby” was her unwritten book.
She began work on her book, motivated by the deep sense of grief she had felt in the dream for letting her idea wither away. She describes feelings of profound fulfillment that emerged once she began her work and have continued as she devotes herself to writing.
These dreams are shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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Perhaps you can practice this skill on an older dream, rewriting the narrative in general terms, titling it, and breaking it into scenes. Notice any insights that pop up during the process!
Feel free to share ideas, questions, or comments below, or email me directly at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
Want to go deeper? Join Lissa and Julie this September for a day-long deep dive into the imagery and meaning of your dreams. Learn more below.
7 Days of Dreaming: The Dreaming Self
Welcome to Day 2 of our 7-day dreamwork journey.
For most of us, there is a “Self” that watches and participates in our dreams. Our dreaming self performs actions, feels emotions, and engages with other dream characters much as we do in waking life.
This dreamtime version of ourselves has a lot to teach us. We can unlock some of that wisdom by practicing dreamwork skill #2.
Dreamwork Skill #2: Tracking the Dream-Self
Dreams can feel incredibly disorienting and odd due to one interesting trait of our dreaming minds: we tend to process the events of our waking lives while omitting the event itself. Our dreams may rehearse the characters, emotions, and values conflicts of a situation we are dealing with, without ever directly referencing it.
So, how do we figure out what issue our dreams are trying to resolve?
We track the behavior of the dream-self.
What is the “you” of your dream doing? How is she interacting with others? What is his communication style? What emotions are they experiencing?
Notice the dream-self’s behavior and ask yourself: Is this how I am behaving in waking life? If so, where in my life do I behave this way? If not, what can I learn from the way the dream-self is behaving? If the dream-self is acting in a way that embarrasses or confuses me, what might that have to tell me about how I would prefer to act, or how I am limiting my choices?
When you wake with some recall of a dream, write out the actions of the dream-self as though you were watching a silent film. Where in waking life are you engaging in similar actions?
Sometimes, the behavior of our dream-self will reveal our “personal mythologies” . Personal mythologies are strategies we have learned at certain traumatic points in our history that we continue to apply in situations where they are dysfunctional.
Observing the dream-self perform bizarre or embarrassing actions is often a first clue that we are living out a personal mythology rather than behaving rationally in waking life.
Dream Practicum
“In my dream I am walking to the end of a dock. I want to jump in the water and I see that the houses along the dock are all empty. So I start to take off my clothes and hang them on a fence, but just as I am about to dive in I notice a car pulling in to the house where I had placed my clothes. I panic and grab my clothes and run. I tell myself as I walk away that the water probably wouldn’t have felt great anyway, even though I had wanted to jump in more than anything.”
Before you read the section below, pause and imagine that this is your dream. What might the behavior of your dream self be telling you? Is this like you or unlike you? “Borrow” the dream to practice the Dream-Self skill.
In working with this dream, we used dream-skill #1 to notice the emotions in the dream. The feelings of excitement, vulnerability, and disappointment reminded the dreamer of a recent interaction with a friend.
We then played back the behavior of the dream-self as though watching a silent movie. Here is a woman walking toward something she really wants. Now she is looking around, aware of the presence of others. And now she is walking away without having completed her action.
Immediately the dreamer exclaimed “That is just like me, to back away from the thing I most want! And then to pretend that I never really wanted it anyway. Wow, how self-destructive!”
In her further work with this theme, the dreamer decided that this behavior — pretending she did not care about issues that, in fact, were deeply important to her — was costing her heavily and contributing to the decline of her friendship.
By recognizing the behavior in the dream as being self-defeating, the dreamer was able to identify places in her waking life where she was working against her own best interests. She applied this knowledge by speaking directly with her friend, stating decisively what she wanted instead of continuing to pretend she was satisfied with the status quo.
Although this was very difficult for the dreamer, watching her dream-self walk away from that highly-anticipated plunge felt painful enough that, for the first time, she was willing to risk it.
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Practice this skill on a dream you remember, or if you have been struggling with dream recall, use a favorite character in a novel or television show. What does the behavior of the character, and your reactions to that behavior, tell you about your own waking life actions?
As always, feel free to comment below or email directly with any questions or insights!
If you’d like to practice these skills in person or work a particularly powerful dream, join Lissa and Julie this September for a day-long dreamwork immersion. Learn more below!
7 days of dreaming: integrating dream wisdom into your waking life
Have you ever woken with a dream image that you just couldn’t shake?
Ever carried the emotional residue from a dream with you all day long, unsure of how to respond?
Regardless of what you believe about dreams, they impact our day-to-day lives. What if you could learn a handful of quick practices to help you engage with your dreams and gather wisdom for your personal journey? What if, in a few moments a day, you could build a practice of dreamwork that both deepens and enriches your relationship with yourself and your life?
This is what happened for me when I first started the practice of dreamwork, and this is my hope for you as we embark on this 7-day journey of working with dreams.
Every day for seven days, I’ll post a new skill on the blog and share a dream that illustrates how to apply it.
Whether or not you remember your dreams, you can learn and practice these skills by working with dreams you remember from the past, or with imagery that has popped up in waking life or in meditation.
You can share your dreams, and any questions or comments about the skill we are learning, either in the comments on the blog or directly by email at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
I hope that this 7-day journey will start you on a path strewn with personal treasure. Perhaps the skills you learn here will embolden you to bring your dreams into conversations with friends, or to incorporate them in counseling sessions as part of your personal work.
Let’s start right in on the first skill!
Dreaming Skill #1: Finding Emotional Parallels
When you first wake from a dream, even if the dream itself has escaped your memory, there is often an emotional residue that lingers.
Do you feel sad? Shocked? Angry? Frightened? Upon waking, rest for a moment with your eyes closed and notice any emotions that linger, whether they are attached to dream imagery or not.
If you have a few moments, write out the precise emotional signature of the dream. For example:
”I had a strong feeling of dread, deep in my stomach, and when I woke my heart was pounding as if in fear.”
“In the first part of the dream, I felt confused and bewildered, but then in the next scene I was proud and confident. When I woke I had a feeling of accomplishment.”
Now, look at what you’ve written. Where in your waking life do you experience this combination of emotions? What particular issue, person, or life domain brings up these feelings?
When you discover the part of your waking life that carries the emotional signature of the dream, you will have a clear understanding of what specifically the content of the dream is referring to.
Today’s Dream Practicum
“I don’t remember much about the content of my dream. But when I woke I felt extremely sad, almost as though there was a weight on my heart. Later in the day, I remembered one image from the dream; a girl in a blue dress was running away from me, and I had a feeling of loss. She’s not a real girl that I know, but she was about four years old and it felt like my heart was breaking.”
As this dreamer wrote down the emotional signature of her dream, she realized that the feeling of heartache and loss corresponded to a situation in her waking life in which she had decided to leave school to care for a family member.
As we worked with the imagery of the dream, the dreamer realized that she had started school 4 years ago, and the little girl walking away symbolized, for her, the loss of her dream of completing graduate school.
In our continued work with this dream, the dreamer explored the sense of heartbreak she hadn’t let herself acknowledge for fear of seeming selfish or uncaring about her ailing family member. As she allowed herself to feel these emotions fully, she realized she could be a compassionate caregiver and still take a course or two online.
As of this writing, she has completed her master’s degree. Her willingness to pay attention to the lingering emotions of an unremembered dream set her on a path that led to the fulfillment of a deeply-held but unacknowledged goal.
These dreams are shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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Set a journal and pen by your bed tonight, and practice the skill of finding emotional parallels upon waking.
And I’d love to hear what you find out! You can comment below with any questions or insights, or feel free to email directly at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
*A word about safety: If you find yourself battling strong anxiety, grief, or dread in the course of working with a dream, step back from it and call a friend, take a walk, or speak with your counselor. Dream work can get very deep very fast! Do not push yourself to continue unsupported. *
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If this journey inspires you and you’d like to work your dream in person, there are still a few spaces left in our intimate day-long dreamwork retreat this September. You can register below.
my life is out of control
by Lissa Carter, LPC
When my new client walked into the office her head was hanging so low, I felt concerned about the integrity of her spine. The speed of her speech infused every word with exhaustion.
“Everything in my life is out of my control,” she stated. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that every minute of my day is scheduled from 5 am until I drop into bed at 11. My mother is dying. My husband is having panic attacks. One of my children refuses to go to school unless we drag her and the other will go, but has stopped communicating with us. I think she might be taking pills, she is sleepy all the time, but I can’t even face confronting her because work consumes every waking moment and then when I do finally get home there are the dishes, the laundry, the yard, the homework, the dinner, the groceries, the dog needs a walk, the dental appointments, the leaking faucet. There is never enough money, never enough time, never enough breathing space. I know I should be exercising and eating right and journaling and doing yoga and taking care of myself and all of those things, and it’s just insult added to injury that I know what I need and don’t have time or money to do it.”
For the first time, her eyes rose to meet mine, and I saw the ghost of a sparkle there. “So…do you think you can help me?”
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Let’s all just take a moment and exhale. Were you holding your breath? I find I am, just writing this. And I certainly was holding my breath in that room, feeling my client’s exhaustion in my own hunching shoulders, in my own rapidly spinning mind, as I found myself frantically attempting to conjure some magical relief for her.
Taking that one breath, that one moment between stimulus and response, is often the only control we have.
In that tiny pause we can bring our consciousness to bear, we can apply our fierce intelligence and deeply-held wisdom to these moments of our lives.
But we don’t. Not most of us, not most of the time. Know why?
Because it hurts too much.
It hurts too much to be conscious, because when we are conscious we have to feel the loss of all the things we thought we would have by now that we do not have.
All the things we once had that we no longer have.
All the parts of ourselves that are longing to be seen and loved.
All the parts of ourselves that we actively reject.
All the sorrows of the world.
All the pain of our friends and family.
Staying busy serves us. There is so much pain we have to feel if we slow down for even a minute.
When we are fully awake to our lives, we are fully experiencing not just the joy and the laughter and the meaning, we are also fully experiencing the sorrow and the rage and the pain. Most of us prefer to dull that down. So we find ways not to feel. We go into autopilot.
And life spins out of control.
Because here’s the thing about autopilot: it never, ever leads us in the direction of growth and innate wellbeing. It leads us toward the next pleasure or away from the next pain, which is not the same thing at all.
The one thing, the ONLY thing we can truly control in life, is our values.
Our values are completely under our control. They are not contingent upon anything. My thoughts rise spontaneously, my eyes tear up without my deciding to cry, but my values are chosen.
So every moment that I can consciously take that pause between stimulus and response, and choose my action based upon my values, my life comes a little more under my conscious control. I begin to steer myself toward a life experience that matches what I long for.
I am choosing to hug my son for a full minute before I set the table because I value warmth and closeness.
I am choosing to drink chamomile tea instead of coffee this morning because I value a sense of calm.
I am choosing to take a deep breath instead of snapping out a response because I value compassionate communication.
And to do this, we have to let go of autopilot. We have to feel.
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In my client’s words, in her posture, I was reading the signs of autopilot loud and clear.
I took a breath. In the space of that breath, I contacted an old friend, the feeling of being an imposter. I contacted shame about all the times that, for some reason, I have been unable to help. I felt all of these things, and I reminded myself of my values of authenticity and openness. I let those values guide what I said next.
“I know from what you have told me that you are strained to the breaking point. And I know that the counseling journey asks a lot of you. It asks mindfulness of you, because we can only change our lives to the extent that we are conscious of them. And if you build the skill to change your life, you will simultaneously build your awareness of how painful your current life situation is. This puts me in a bind, because I am in this to help people. I know that helping you will probably cause you to experience more pain before things get better. So I am asking you: is that a bargain you are willing to make?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she nodded.
Burnout is not a sign of weakness. Burnout is a sign of strength, a sign of being way too strong for way too long.
Sitting in front of me was an exceptionally strong woman. We were on our way.
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What do you do to avoid pain? What do you do to keep your fears from whispering to you? How do these things get in the way of choosing to do what matters to you?
Meaning doesn’t need every minute of every day. Meaning just needs a portal, a moment of sweetness in which you can connect to what truly matters to you.
Meaning seeps through that portal and infuses the moments of your day and the days of your life with value and purpose.
If we are willing to open the gates of meaning— knowing that when it comes it will bring pain as well as purpose—if we are willing to make enough room for that, we will start to regain control of our lives. Moment by moment, choice by choice, word by word.
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What matters to you? How will you let that inform your choices today?
If you are struggling to find and nurture deep meaning in a life that demands a breakneck pace, join Lissa in December for a journey into the sacred space of dreams.
Our dreams are attempts to bring our lives into balance, to show us the neglected and unacknowledged parts of ourselves, to guide us toward wholeness. And many of us are too busy to remember them, let alone write them down or learn from them.
In this 4-hour deep dive into somatic dreamwork, we will slow down to the pace of our dreams through group dream imagery, expressive arts exploration, meditative movement, and guided dream journey. Bring a dream that has lingered with you, or harvest a dream-image from the guided meditation. You will emerge with a deeper understanding of your own wisdom and a renewed commitment to the sacred meaning of your own life.
Lissa is facilitating this intimate retreat in a private residence, and there are only 4 spaces left. If this topic is speaking to you, please reserve your spot soon!
This story is a composite of several clients to protect privacy. Many thanks to the brave, vulnerable, powerful clients who shared parts of their work in hopes that these stories will serve you.
We always love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below, or reach out to us via email at innerlightasheville@gmail.com.
Can't fix you, you're not broken
Posted by Lissa Carter, LPC
My client seemed very small, almost folded into herself. We’d been working together for a while, but I’d never seen her like this. Even her voice had gotten smaller, almost disappearing into the air before it reached my ears. I had to lean in to hear what she was saying, and the words landed like stones: “I’m in so much pain today I almost didn’t come in. But then I thought, ‘maybe Lissa will say something to make it better.’”
I know this feeling. Both as a human being, and as a client on the other side of the counseling relationship, I have so often hoped I could hand my pain over into wiser, more capable hands for resolution. I have hoped that someone, somewhere, could simply give me the answers that would rid me once and for all of the nagging self-doubt, paralyzing fear, or insistent anxiety. Surely this is not too much to ask of a professional that we are, after all, paying for this service?
There is a reason I can’t say something in this moment to take away my client’s pain. And it can be a difficult one to understand—equally difficult, it turns out, to explain, especially when a suffering human being is looking at you with hope in their eyes.
The reason is this: if I remove your pain, I remove your humanity.
Pain is not bad. Pain is a messenger, and it has vital information for you. And you, as the unquestionable expert on your life and your journey, are the only one entitled to interpret your pain. The wise, capable hands you are seeking are your own.
It’s a hard concept to come to grips with, this idea that pain is important. Thinking of sadness, anger, grief, anxiety—the “symptoms” so many of us try to eliminate—as the enemy makes sense. They are uncomfortable, unpleasant, unwanted. But these are symptoms of something other than emotional pain: they are also symptoms of meaning.
Consider it for a moment. When do you feel anger? When a principle that matters to you is violated. When do you feel grief? When something or someone meaningful is lost. When do you feel anxiety? When something deeply important is at stake.
Our painful emotions are trying to tell us what matters to us. They are signaling to us that our meaning, our purpose, is involved, and they are asking us to pay attention, because what is happening is IMPORTANT.
How could I possibly take that away from clients that I am ethically bound to help?
The next question is almost inevitable: why, then, should I bother to hire a counselor? If you can’t take my pain away or fix my broken brain, what can you do for me?
Well, I can’t fix you. That’s true. I can’t fix you, because you are not broken.
But I do think you are important enough to have a witness, someone who can sit compassionately with you as you gently begin the process of listening to these painful emotions, deciphering their messages, and leaning into their wisdom to create a new relationship with yourself and your life — a life based, not on the avoidance of discomfort, but on the complex individuality of your own meaning and purpose.
That’s what I told my client. I told her I did not want to sell her short, I respect her too much for that. I asked her if, instead of taking her pain away, we could make a space together to listen to it, even to welcome it. My client closed her eyes and imagined putting an arm around this pain as though it was worthy of her compassion. And something shifted.
My client’s sadness was not gone by the end of the session. What had changed was the way she was relating to it. Slowly, gently, she had begun to listen to what it was trying to tell her about what was not working in her life. Slowly, gently, she had begun the process of deciding how she wanted to live her life in the face of pain.
We don’t want to know this—we don’t want to know that life is going to be hard, and that pain is going to be inevitable. We’d rather roll the dice and hope that this nutrition plan, that self help book will stem the tides and keep us on a magically protected path. But the truth remains, whether we want it or not. A life that includes meaning will include pain.
And as it turns out, facing that truth gives us the opportunity to make a choice: the choice of how we want to navigate our lives. We can’t make this choice if we are too busy looking the other way, too preoccupied with avoiding the pain.
In that sense, the work you do in therapy goes far beyond the addressing of symptoms or the healing of a disease. The work you do in therapy is life work. You are learning to be the doctor/healer of your own mind, the conscious observer and mediator of your experience, and this is a lifelong art.
Therapy isn’t going to fix you. You’re not broken. Therapy will teach you to engage differently with your own mind and your own life, as an empowered agent instead of a victim to circumstance.
And that feels more important than symptom reduction.
Thank you to my brave client for her willingness to share this vignette.