Dreams as a Healing
Process
by
Diana Greywolf, Ph.D.
We all dream every night, whether or not we remember our dreams the next morning. Why is important to remember our dreams? As experienced dream worker Jeremy Taylor tells us “all dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.” That is, our dreams are the wisdom our unconscious mind possesses. The unconscious uses our dreams to communicate that wisdom to our waking mind and help us through life. As humans we are probably all wiser than we realize. The pressures of everyday modern life make us perhaps, less aware than our ancestors were of the power that is contained in our dreams.
Dreams tend to be forgotten quickly upon awakening. We wake to the sound of an alarm clock, before we would wake naturally. Jobs demand that we jump out of bed, prepare for a day of work away from home, hit the road and perhaps weather a storm of traffic delays or bad weather to get to the office. Who has time for dream recall! Yet the messages our dreams contain offer us wisdom that we have often lost the ability to access because of competing daily demands. Our dreams are our guides along life’s path. To access their messages we need to learn how to recall our dreams and how to find the message they contain.
Dream work specialists can teach us how to reconnect with our ability to remember our dreams and understand the messages they are trying to convey from our unconscious wisdom to our waking mind. Current researchers are discovering new techniques that help dreamers access dream wisdom. Among these are a number of creative techniques that directly access the “right brain” creative processes as well as analytical techniques that help dreamers to better understand the metaphorical language of their dreams. Dream group work is rapidly becoming an important tool in learning how to access dream meaning and dream group workers are the guides in that process.
For example, a dreamer reported a detailed series of dreams that included stories with themes about moving furniture away from an office and facing people who argued that the furniture belonged to them and who blocked the dreamer’s path. Another dream around the same time included a cat that was being choked by a string around its neck. This series of dreams came at a time when the dreamer was weighing whether or not to leave a job that she felt was stifling her creativity and sapping her emotional and physical strength. The wisdom in her dream was saying “yes, this job is choking you, it is going to continue to choke you if you don’t detach from it. Even though people and circumstances are putting obstacles in your way, to stay means being choked.” The dream gave the message in “health and wholeness” that the dreamer needed to detach from an unhealthy work situation. The waking decision about what action to take still remained with the dreamer. In the end she listened to her dream’s message after several months of wrestling with the decision.
A dream group offers dreamers a safe haven to explore their dreams and receive feedback about the meaning the dream might be trying to convey. Dream group participants come together on a regular basis to share their dreams with the group, if they choose, and to give and receive feedback from other group members. Dream group members share a commitment to learning from their dream messages and using those messages to manage life’s problems and to tap into creative processes that can improve their lives.
To learn more about dream work or to participate in an
ongoing dream group or a one-day dream workshop contact Diana Greywolf at the