Dreamwork as Spiritual Practice

Tag: healing (Page 2 of 5)

Some Bad News, Some Good News: Working with “Bad” Dreams

nightmares-01Some dreams can seem like really “bad news.” Of course, this won’t be news to anyone. Sure, we’ve all had unpleasant, uncomfortable, disgusting, disturbing, frustrating dreams. Most of us have had a few frightening nightmares, too.

Many spiritual traditions recognize that some things which seem to be poison can also be medicine. Even western medical science recognizes this—an obvious example being how poisonous chemotherapy can be medicine for cancer. (Incidentally, while I was on chemo, I noticed that the mosquitos didn’t bite me!) Yes, it’s true that dreams bring us lots of experiences that can feel like poison, but even the worst dreams also have the potential to be beneficial.

In the last post [“No Bad Dreams”] I explored some of the good news about bad dreams. But I would certainly acknowledge that nightmares really do seem awfully nightmarish, and in order to find the good news within the bad news, we need to start with some tools and skills to help us understand the dream differently. The dreamworker doesn’t just turn lead into gold by telling the lead that it should be gold. There are ways and means, gleaned from study, practice, and experimentation, which can make dreamwork seem like magic—and actually work wonders.

I always start with the assumption that any “bad” dream could potentially be a good dream—so  this particular dream deserves my attention and curiosity. Such an assumption is like an invitation to the dream: “I’m listening. You don’t have to shout (or spit, or threaten, or bite, or throw a tantrum). We’re on the same side, and I want to hear what you have to say.”

Lets consider some ways of working with those “bad” dreams. Over the course of my own career in dreamwork, I’ve developed a few approaches that seem to be helpful, and I’ve drawn upon the experience and wisdom of other practitioners as well. Here are some suggestions: Continue reading

No Bad Dreams: What’s Good About “Bad” Dreams?

nightmares-02Many people have primarily negative feelings about dreams. But, paradoxically, the unpleasantness of their dream experiences may be the very thing that leads them to new ways of thinking about their dream lives. With a few simple tools, “bad” dreams can become openings.

Suppose someone listens politely to my enthusiastic ravings about dream openings… then shrugs and says, “Well, it’s great that you have such wonderful dreams, but most of my dreams are exhausting and weird. Or sometimes I have awful nightmares. I’d really rather not remember them at all.” Well, that could be a total conversation stopper—or a chance to give a helping hand to a poor soul whose dreams are a drag.

Of course, when I encounter a disgruntled dreamer, I don’t start lecturing on the benefits of bad dreams. That would be rude. But I do ask about those dreams. What are they like? What feelings are associated with them? What images or themes seem to repeat? If the dreamer seems willing to answer such questions, or even seems just a little bit curious… then, there’s room to explore.

Sometimes, simply finding a connection between a recurring unpleasant dream emotion and a recurring unpleasant waking situation is enough to give the dreamer a different approach to problematic circumstances. Or, perhaps there’s a tiny, encouraging element within the “bad” dreams that the dreamer has overlooked—an element that offers hope, or insight, or reassurance.

Every conversation has its own direction, but once the conversation starts, most people will find that their interest in dreams has been awakened. If dreams present problems, they also present ways of working with those problems, and sometimes even outright solutions. When people discover this about their own problem dreams, they begin to think differently: instead of wishing dreams away, they find themselves inviting the opportunities that those dreams represent. And, once  people start inviting dream opportunities, more dreams will probably come to reinforce the positive impressions. Continue reading

Dark River

by Tina TauGuest Blogger

Kirsten has asked me to be a guest blogger at an interesting time. I’m in the midst of the sad and difficult waters of a breakup with my boyfriend of eight years. The work I’m doing around this breakup—and the energy of Kirsten’s pilgrimage on the Camino—bring to mind a deep adventure I had in Italy ten years ago, just before my marriage ended. This adventure was previewed by a big dream:

Dark River
September 2005
I’m in my dad’s book-lined study. One of the walls is waist high, with a river on the other side that is cresting into the room. I realize I’m going to have to swim, and meet up with my family later in New Orleans. I call my sister and tell her I have her kitten and doll, and she says, “Thanks, but if you’re swimming for your life, let them go.” Her voice grounds me into a new and more serious reality. In the river, I see I have to let them go, and I do. The river is very dark, very cold, scary and intense, sweeping me along.

The point of most intensity in the dream was the surging icy water up around my neck, and the blackness of the night and the water.

This was not just a vivid dream of coming change. It was also a heads-up about my attitude. My sister, a cancer survivor, was grounding me. She warned me, and it turned out to be so, that this swim was going to take everything I had—in two senses: It was going to take every ounce of my strength, and I was going to lose some precious stuff.

In October of 2006, about a year after the dream, I was lifted out of my life and given a chance to look at it from afar and above, much as Kirsten is doing on the Camino. My friend Rosie, a teacher in Hungary, wanted company on her visit to her boyfriend in Tuscany. She gave me the trip, air tickets and all, as a present. Continue reading

Sharing Ourselves in Grief Dreams

KB as kid 01I’ve been writing a lot about the deaths of my parents this past year, and the way that these losses have influenced my dreams and my waking life perspective. The last post (“Letting Them Go: Dreams of Death and Transformation”), ventured onto the shifting shores of dreaming and grieving, where the big questions—of origin, meaning and destiny—take shape. Now, I’d like to zero in on more personal ground: how dreams can respond directly to grief, offering comfort, acknowledgement, and an invitation to experience our continuing interconnectedness.

My Dad was surrounded by loved ones the night before he died. Holly and I flew from Oregon to Massachusetts just in time to be there. My sisters drove down from New Hampshire, and Dad’s wife was with him as well. I’m sure he felt our presence even though he was in a coma. Finally, however, he died early the next morning, alone—except for the kind ICU nurse nearby. We got back to the hospital as soon as we could, and again, we came together around his bed: sharing stories, crying, and saying good-bye.

He was already gone, but his face was quite beautiful in death. His eyes were closed, his chin was lifted and his lips were slightly parted—as if receiving the warmth of the sun on his face. This expression made him look like a boy, opening to something new, accepting it with willingness and quiet wonder.

I couldn’t stop looking at him. But it wasn’t until later that I recognized how much he also resembled an old photograph of me, at about twelve years old, with my head leaned back against a tree in the sun. Gradually, I made the connection—remembering why this photo was in my thoughts. Just six days before Dad died, I’d dreamed of his death. And, in the same dream, I saw myself as I was in that photo… Continue reading

Part 2 of DreamTime Article on Dreams of the Dying

DT cover 2015 fallDreamTime is an inspiring and intriguing magazine published by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. The first part of my article on dreams of the dying appeared in the Winter 2015 issue, and now part 2 has come out in the Fall 2015 issue.

Click on the picture to read Part 2 of the article: “Dreams of the Dying: Where Reality and Identity Become Fluid” by Kirsten Backstrom

Click here for Part 1:Dreams of the Dying

And click here to become a member of IASD! You’ll receive DreamTime three times a year, along with many other benefits!

After the Nightmare: Disorientation as Opportunity

Toby sleeping 01My cat, Toby, has some bad nightmares. Because he’s deaf, he sleeps very deeply and can’t monitor his environment while sleeping like other cats do. This means that when he’s in a dream, he’s utterly immersed in that dream, and when he wakes up, he’s usually a bit disoriented. Normally, he compensates by sleeping in places where he feels especially secure, and by knowing his environment (he’s an indoor cat, and it’s a tiny house) in every detail, so when he wakes he can immediately remind himself where he is. However, when he has an intense nightmare, it takes him so far from his familiar world that his own home seems alien and dangerous as he wakes up.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what he’s experiencing, but it’s not difficult to guess when he has had a nightmare. He wakes suddenly, sometimes with a yelp, on total alert with ears pricked and eyes wild. He looks around frantically, then scrambles for an exit or a hiding place. It’s most heartbreaking when he doesn’t recognize me and is terrified of me for a moment, then comes creeping to me on his belly as I crouch down to reassure him. He huddles against me, trembling so hard that his head bobs, frightened of everything that usually comforts him.

Eventually, he remembers where he is, who he is, and what’s going on. My stroking soothes him. But it takes awhile. Usually, what he needs most is his adopted mother—our older cat, Annie. As soon as he makes a sound of distress, she comes running. She examines him all over with concern, gives me a dirty look (“What did you do to my kitten?”), and briskly washes his face until he calms down. Then we’re all back to normal. (He becomes his usual confident self—and pesters Annie until she squawks with indignation.)

Toby’s nightmares—and shaky transitions—don’t seem to do him any harm. He absorbs their impact in his own way, reorients himself, and gets on with his life. Perhaps, the experience even energizes him, making his quiet, limited, indoor world more exciting by letting him see it in a new way.

When I have a nightmare myself, it’s not quite so difficult to get my bearings as it is for Toby, but it’s still pretty disorienting. By definition, a nightmare shakes things up. The nightmare situation is so compelling and intense that it stimulates a fight or flight response, causing me to jolt awake, on full alert. And it’s not easy to find familiar points of reference, and convince myself to power down my defenses. Continue reading

Grief Integration: The Vigil and the Dance

mom in millAs I write this, my mom has been dead for over a month—and by the time you read this, it will be over two months. I’ve had some more dreams about her, but none in which she seems fully present. Actually, I’m not really dreaming about my mother herself, but about my own experience of loss. The immediate shock of the first few weeks has passed, and now when I look at her picture (which I keep nearby, and look at often) I no longer have to remind myself that she has died. I look at her face, and it seems as if she is looking back at me. We understand each other. She is not available by telephone, but she is available in other ways. I feel our connection and her absence simultaneously (see “Grief Dreams: The Experience of Absence”).

This is what healing feels like. Healing doesn’t mean that the grieving stops. I am still trying to process some of the most overwhelming aspects of her dying—the feelings that were too intense, just too much to fully feel when everything was happening so quickly right before and after her death. I’m replaying events and emotions as stories to tell myself—to remember what happened, and that it really did happen. Of course, my dreams are doing this work with me…

Grieving Mom, Looking for Jill: I’m college-age, sitting at a table with several college friends. I tell them about Mom’s recent death. They listen, but go on to talk about other things, and my grief doesn’t seem real to them or to me. I leave them and walk, thinking about what I will do now that I have graduated. I just want to talk to Mom, to get her practical advice… Then, the grief hits me, and it feels unbearable. I go looking for my sister Jill, who is supposed to be in school nearby. I feel so lonely. I desperately need to see my sister.

The feeling of this dream echoes my waking feelings. I try to talk about Mom’s death and it doesn’t seem real, but when I’m alone and think of her, the reality is stunningly painful. In the midst of the feelings, I long to be with family—my sisters Jill and Didi, and niece Samantha—because they are closest to the loss, and share it. There’s no mystery to the dream. It makes sense that we are young, just graduated or in school, since that suggests the learning experience we are going through, and recalls some painful separations from family that occurred at that time in my life.

If there are further metaphorical dimensions of the dream to be explored (certainly, there are), I’m not especially interested in exploring them consciously right now. What interests me is that the dream gives me another opportunity to integrate the same kinds of emotional experiences I am having when awake. There’s a lot of integration to do, so both my dreaming and my waking concerns are turned in this direction. Continue reading

Grief Dreams: The Experience of Absence

alongside mom’s house, the brook continues to flow...

alongside mom’s house, the brook continues to flow…

Time keeps passing, and I’m gradually beginning to feel a little distance from my mom’s death. I can write about it, think about it, almost make it make sense that she is no longer there—three thousand miles away, but within easy reach of a phone call, in her house that is an old mill by a brook. She is still more real to me there than in my experience of her dying. It’s as if the few days surrounding her death were a dream.

What’s true is what’s always been true: she’s opening her curtains in the morning (a signal to her neighbor that she’s okay), having her coffee, watching the birds at the feeder, puttering carefully through the chores that make every knick-knack in her home and every moment of her day precious… I think I’ll call and tell her about the Bald Eagle we saw yesterday being chased by a Redtail Hawk… And then, of course, there’s that stunning punch of realization that she isn’t there. Her house is being emptied of her beloved furniture, pictures, books, coffee cups and bird feeders. Each time I think I’ve got some distance from the grief, it clobbers me again.

The stages of grief described by Kübler-Ross—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—helped a lot of people to better understand the process of grieving, but in recent years it has become evident that those stages were being used by many as a way to cling to an illusion of control and order in an experience that is essentially chaotic. Yes, all of the “stages” can be part of grief—but we almost never progress systematically from one stage to the next. My own experience is that the grief comes in waves—different kinds of waves at different times. When I think that the intensity is easing, I’m bowled over by a tsunami. When I think I should be in pain, I’m sometimes surprisingly unperturbed. Then, when I get the idea that “grief comes in waves,” it comes as a tornado, or a thunderstorm, or a rainbow(!) instead. I think I’m prepared for the feelings, yet they always manage to take me by surprise.

Nevertheless, I’ve noticed some distinct kinds of grief in the course of these weeks. There’s the flood of memories from childhood. There’s the fierce clarity of those nearly-traumatic shocks of beauty from her last hours—and just after her death. There’s the slow, reasonable acknowledgement that things are different now. And, most of all, there’s that gaping absence… the sense of someone so “full of life” just not being there anymore. Continue reading

Dreams of Helping and Being Helped

helping 01In my recent dreams, I’ve been aware of giving and receiving, helping and being helped:

Fragments: I receive three gifts: sagebrush, a meerschaum pipe, and an iphone—and must learn how to use them… Someone lends me a bicycle, and then seems more confident and capable herself when she experiences my gratitude… I’m in prison for life, and a fellow prisoner relieves my fear by asking me to help her solve some math problems… We distract the dragon, so the young girl can complete her initiation safely… A white bull calf comes to me for comfort, but when I am threatened he places himself between me and the danger…

We all have a need for our strengths and gifts to be recognized and received by others—and sometimes the best thing we can do to support others is to receive what they have to give, whether it is by listening to their stories and learning from their example, or allowing them to assist us on our own path—physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’ve been noticing this process in my dreams, at the same time that I’ve been noticing it in my waking life.

As my friend Kay is now on hospice, I’m recalling the many ways she has been a mentor to me. Kay and I worked together on the pastoral care team for a continuing care retirement community. She was an experienced pastoral counselor and spiritual director (volunteering with the team, since she was technically retired); and I was a relative beginner in this work. With warmth and grace, she gave me exactly the encouragement I needed, by allowing me to take the lead. She attended my workshops and groups as a participant; she brought me her dreams, and she invited me to act as her spiritual counselor as she got older and faced health challenges. It wasn’t like an adult letting a child win at checkers—she authentically found things that I could give her, that she could learn from me. While she also helped and mentored me in more traditional ways, she always allowed me to bring my best self to our relationship, and to experience my own gifts with her.

Kay is an especially wise and kind person. But, actually, similar giving/receiving relationships are happening all the time. If I pay attention, I notice that the true gifts and blessings in waking or dreaming life are always somehow reciprocal.

The other day, I was climbing a long, long, long set of steps (18 flights, I think) to the top of a hill in a nearby park. As I was going up very, very slowly, two brisk women and a healthy young dog passed me going down, with an older dog following stiffly behind them. The older dog—a sweet-faced, short-haired terrier—gave me a commiserating look as she went by. Continue reading

Reconnecting with the World Dream

compass rose 01Have you heard of “The Work That Reconnects”? Joanna Macy and Sam Mowe describe it as “a process that helps build motivation, creativity, courage, and solidarity for the transition to a sustainable human culture.” It’s a sequential process that “works as a spiral, because it repeats itself” over and over in our projects, in our lives, and in our dreams. As I learned more about this process, I became aware of how clearly it parallels some of the things I’ve been learning and teaching about the potential of dreamwork to make a difference in the world.

Our dreams reflect passages through the process of “The Work That Reconnects”—including, expressing, and revealing the levels in Macy’s spiral: 1) Coming From Gratitude; 2) Honoring Our Pain; 3) Seeing With New Eyes; and 4) Going Forth.

1) “Coming From Gratitude: To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words. The spiral begins with gratitude because that quiets the frantic mind and grounds us, stimulating our empathy and confidence.” –Joanna Macy and Sam Mowe

We belong to this world, and are manifestations of this world, together with the plants, animals and other humans that share in it with us. Dreams manifest the life force, and are one way that we maintain connection—to our place within the world and to one another. Often, in dreams, we experience beauty and feel this connection directly through our senses, perceptions, and emotions. We can receive nourishment from such dreams, and allow gratitude to fill the springs within us that we thought had gone dry.

Many times, when I’ve been identifying with discouragement and investing in impossibility, a dream has turned me around, waking me up to another way of looking at myself and my experience. My ego can’t change its mind so easily, but my dreams can show me what I’ve been missing and open my heart. When I share such dreams with others, and they share such dreams with me, our world is expanded. Each time I take part in a dream group, I come home with a new appreciation of my life—I’m humbled by the gifts available all around me, and I’m grateful. Continue reading

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