This week we’ll analyze one of my own recent dreams:
Dream
In my dream, I was
living in the house I rented after I first got married, back in the 1970s. I
was doing some chore that involved going in and out of the attached
garage. Suddenly, I saw that an old VW bus was rolling out of the garage. The
engine wasn’t on, so there was apparently some problem with the brakes. Even
though the bus backed out of the garage, the next thing I knew, it was rolling
forwards down the slight incline of the road. It veered off the street onto a
grass strip, and it looked as if it was going to crash through the neighbor’s 8-foot-tall,
bamboo fence. But it came to a halt just before it got to the fence. I ran
toward it, but stopped abruptly when I saw two adults climb out of the bus and
run away. They looked like down-and-outers, for sure homeless, maybe addicts.
One was a man, the other I didn’t get a clear image of, but it might have been
a woman.
How do you begin
to work with a dream?
Always the first challenge with any dream is to try and
remember it, bringing it all the way from the sleep state into full consciousness.
This can be a frustrating endeavor. I have lost count of the number of dreams I
felt had importance and should be looked at carefully, but which I was unable
to remember by the time I was in the shower and getting dressed. This, despite
the fact that I was convinced I would remember them as I lay in bed, slowly
waking up.
I have tried all kinds of methods. For me, writing a dream
down first thing in the morning usually doesn’t work because my mind says, “Right!
I’ll get that written down just as soon as I open my eyes—which I’m sure to do
in a couple more minutes.” Then, by the time I actually do open my eyes, the
dream is gone.
For a while, when I was first learning to work with dreams,
I set my alarm to go off every two hours during the night. Then, when I
remembered a dream—which I usually did—I used a voice recorder to mumble some
barely coherent description into the microphone. That worked pretty well. But it
also took a kind of youthful, fanatic passion that I no longer have.
Now, I simply make the mental decision that this is a dream
I need to remember. And then, I repeat the dream to myself over and over, all
during the waking-up process. It has taken me a long time to learn to do that,
and even more, to discipline myself to do it. Now, it’s easier; I’ve made it
into a habit, and it works well.
The next step
On Wednesday, we’ll discuss the next important step:
divorcing myself from any emotional impact of the dream’s plot.
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