I wrote this recently to those close to me...thought I would share as I feel almost as close to all of you.... To the dreaming community and those who know me well: I know you probably think I belabor the dream world and want to hear your dreams more than what any normal person would want, or normal therapist, however I believe strongly that our inner world holds the key to what we will do and have done in the outer world….the one true way of getting to that ‘inner world’ is through imagination and mostly dreams…..remembering and writing down your dreams in the context and date that you have them is tremendously important and the ‘theme’ of the dream is repeated often in other scenarios. More to the point, I believe is the dialogues and many voices that resonate in our heads after the dream, that we either ignore or don’t want to remember in any detail, as if it will bring to the forefront the very issue we are dealing with in our ‘western way of life’….too busy to bother, heh? Robert Johnson writes a small book, Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. Since I follow much of Carl Jung’s approach to psychology and utilize Gestalt and Jungian methods which are in essence dialoguing with your dreams, I find this to be necessary….the following story came from Johnson as to Toni Wolffe’s attitude toward her patients and their dream work. I have somewhat of the same attitude. Johnson writes: “Many years ago, when I was studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich, the famous Toni Wolffe (a colleague of Jung) was still working with patients there as an analyst. On this particular subject, doing something concrete about your dream, she was known as a holy terror. She met her patients at the door, and before they could even get into a chair, she would demand: “And what did you ‘do’ about that dream from last week?” Patients who had done something specific, something concrete and physical, were safe from the wrath to come. But if they hemmed and hawed, said they had thought about it a little, had talked with someone about it, or some such vague thing, she would turn them around and steer them back through the door. As the door was slamming behind them, she would say: ‘Come back when you mean business.’ That was the way it was with her and everyone knew it: You either worked or you fled. Toni Wolffe’s idea was that dreams exist in modern people too much as airy thoughts, too much as abstractions in the head. One has to notify the rest of one’s body that one has dreamed. She said: “People can analyze for twenty years, and nothing below the neck is aware that anything is going on! You have to do something about it. Do something with your muscles!’ I believe that unresolved issues lie dormant in the body until they are triggered by a dream or events….and then all hell breaks loose!
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:32:48 +0000
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