Category: Working With Dreams (Page 3 of 4)

Fair Enough: Word Play in Dreams

April 5, 2016 / kirstenbackstrom

In dreams, language is flexible, and words can be like puzzle boxes: superficially impenetrable, but holding meanings within meanings within meanings…

Or perhaps dream words are more like eggs: smooth and cool, not quite round, potentially edible, potentially messy—and representing the beginning of something that might hatch out, grow feathers, and fly away. Here’s a famous egg-spert on words:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The questions is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again, ‘They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’”
-Lewis Carroll

Dreams scramble the language! And we egg them on! Dream puns can be real groaners. Or brilliant. Or both. Which is to be master? Who’s making this stuff up? Are we adding the meaning ourselves, folding everything imaginable into the omelet? Not just spinach but seaweed! Not just mushrooms but marshmallows! I have to admit, I’m occasionally skeptical of the way we can wrestle words into meaning just about anything…

For example, when a dream setting is “the mall,” and we’re playing with words, we can shift the “m” one space to the left… so “the mall” becomes “them all.” Like Alice, I’m not sure about this. It seems like too much of a stretch. But that’s just me. Others have found a lot of significance in the malleability of “the mall”—and they’re certainly right that a mall is where we find “them all”… all of them, all of the anonymous other people whose opinions make a mall into what it is. So, perhaps they’re right. Perhaps Humpty Dumpty’s right. Words are tricky and proud, but manageable if you know how to play with them. And “the play’s the thing” (that’s Shakespeare—a master of wordplay if there ever was one).

Okay. Enough fooling around. Dreams are, indeed, ingenious with words—sometimes there’s no doubt at all that the word play makes sense on many different levels. And even when it is a stretch, a play on words can add dimensions to the dream that might not have been recognized otherwise. A humorous pun can open the mind. A riddle can help us ask new questions about old problems.

Sometimes, when a word or phrase in a dream seems to demand my attention, I look it up and find it has multiple meanings that are absolutely apt. These may be meanings I’ve forgotten, or meanings I’ve never heard before. It’s always useful to ask myself why the dream has chosen this particular word or phrase: what makes this way of saying something better than another?

In fact, I believe that the words spoken or heard within the dream, and the descriptive words I use as I’m writing or telling the dream, always have significance. Sometimes, I see significance right away, and sometimes I have to play with the words for a while, or let others play with them, before anything makes sense. And, occasionally, nonsense just remains nonsense… at least to my conscious mind. When this happens, however, I trust that what’s nonsense to my conscious mind right now might still make a deeper kind sense… There’s more to me than my conscious mind, and dreams are bigger than I am.

Here’s one where the word play definitely makes some sense to me:

Seeking Erin at the Fair: Holly and I are away from home and we get a text from our cat-sitter, Erin. The subject line reads “One Dead,” and we’re horrified. Desperately, I read the text for more information—but it’s just rambling existential philosophizing about what we risk when we leave loved ones behind.

Has one of our cats died? We must find Erin and make her tell us what she meant by this cryptic message. We go to a big fair (somehow pet-related) to look for her. We encounter many people in bright costumes at the fair, and keep seeking Erin, asking everyone if they’ve seen her. But she’s nowhere to be found…

Finally, we begin to think everything’s going to be okay. The message was about something else, and we’ll go home and find that the cats are all right.

One scene from this dream (too long to include) hinted at an overall theme I might otherwise have missed… In that scene, I complain about someone’s “unfair” behavior. As I wrote the dream in my journal, I noticed that my dream title included the words “…at the Fair.” —Hm. Could “fairness” be an issue here?

Over the past few months, I’ve been encountering so many obstacles and such painful losses, just when things should be getting easier. It doesn’t seem fair! I’ve been struggling with disappointment, and even hopelessness. So, in this dream, I’m exploring a “fair” place, to see what I might find. What’s fair, or unfair about this quest? Will I find what I’m seeking in fairness, or elsewhere?

Of course, the phrase, “One Dead,” and the name, “Erin,” stand out as distinctive language, too. The dream seems to be drawing attention to these words. So, leaving all other details aside, what is their significance? Continue reading

Lying Down Dreaming: Body Language in Dreams

March 15, 2016 / kirstenbackstrom

Since we experience the dream world as actively embodied (dream figures are usually doing things), it’s likely that movement, gesture, and posture are expressing something important, just as they would be in waking life. When we consider the metaphors, storylines and themes in our dreams, let’s also consider what’s going on in the body language.

In waking life, the body language of conversation can be as significant as the words that are exchanged, so shouldn’t it be the same with dreams? Suppose the incidental gestures and postures of dream figures are as meaningful as their overt intentions, opinions, and emotions… What do our dream bodies have to say?

If you keep a dream journal, you might become aware that you are describing certain physical actions repeatedly within a single dream, or as a pattern over the course of many dreams. Perhaps you notice there’s a lot of reaching, or crouching, or stumbling, or smiling, or running, or waving. Or you might sense that there’s a trend in the way things are being done when you keep coming across certain adverbs like quickly, or carefully, or awkwardly, or angrily. These words refer to the body language of the dream. What do they tell you? Are they consistent with the dream’s other communications?

Does one character’s “crouching” have the same purpose or significance as another character’s “crouching”—? Or is one character crouching down to pet the squirrel, and another character crouching behind the couch to eavesdrop? Is one “careful” gesture the same as another—? Or is someone carefully placing the chopsticks in a row, and someone else carefully tucking the baby into bed, or carefully crossing the minefield?

In the process of sharing a recent dream with my peer dream group, I noticed that the dream-ego and other dream figures kept lying down. Each lying down seemed different, and together they expanded the range of the dream’s meanings for me. Like with dominos, each dream figure’s lying down seemed to set off the next—click, click, click… Continue reading

The Dream Gatherers

January 5, 2016 / kirstenbackstrom

Here are two quite different approaches to dreams:

1-We sharpen our weapons and follow the trail, deep into the forest. There, we corner the wild dream beast, and, after a long and valiant battle, we return victorious with meat for a great feast.

2-We get all the kids and old people together and go out with our baskets and sacks. Perhaps we have one particularly fine patch of dream berries in mind, but on the way there and on the way back we find all sorts of other treasures: some dream nuts and mushrooms, and maybe a nice stream where the kids can play and catch a few crayfish, or a meadow where wildflowers are blooming, or a shady, soft place for a nap when it gets too hot. We chat as we walk, and we munch as we gather, and then we all come home satisfied with our day. Nobody makes much of a fuss over our full bags and baskets, but, after a modest supper, there’s still plenty left over to add to the storehouse. If we do this again tomorrow (and the next day, and so on…), our community thrives.

Traditionally, the first would be the men’s story, and the second would be the women’s. However, where dreamwork is concerned, both men and women can participate in either approach. You might be able to tell by the description that I’m biased in favor of the gathering method. However, both hunting and gathering have their places in a healthy human community, and in the world of dreamwork. The only reason to put a greater emphasis on the less glamorous approach of the gatherer is that the hunter generally monopolizes the field. Continue reading

Interview with a Dream Figure

May 19, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

If you want to meet a dream on its own terms, to enter the unmapped territory and find paths and passages you never knew were there, you have to go outside your comfort zone. Well, that’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? Even in our waking lives, we want to get beyond routine and have new experiences (up to a point). We aren’t just looking for reinforcement of our expectations. Jeremy Taylor reminds us that “no dreams come just to tell you what you already know.” But it’s certainly tricky to recognize a new thing when we see it, because our frame of reference sets us up to see what we expect to see.

I’ve written a couple of articles about different ways of looking at dreams that can help us get around our personal blind spots: by questioning the dream-ego’s point-of-view (“The Unreliable Narrator in Dreams”), and by exploring the inconspicuous details of the dream scene (“Turning the Dream Upside Down”). Now I’d like to consider another mind-bending approach that is deceptively simple, but tremendously powerful: asking dream figures or images about themselves.

There are many ways to communicate directly with the images in a dream. Fritz Perls set up conversations between dream images (as aspects of the dreamer’s psyche) in his Gestalt Therapy; lucid dreaming practices invite us to ask dream figures for guidance or gifts, etc. These and other practices can be transformative on many levels, but sometimes the concentrated effort required to transcend your own limitations can seem about as easy as jumping higher than your own head. Continue reading

Turning the Dream Upside Down

May 5, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

If I start with some straightforward approaches to dreamwork (see “Two Basic Dreamwork Skills”), I can learn a lot about dreams. But I can learn a lot more if I’m willing to turn the dream upside down, or inside out—to spin it, flip it, and toss it around a bit.

Actually, it’s not the dream that needs to be turned upside down, it’s the dreamworker. Have you heard the Nietzsche quote: “If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back”? In order to see the whole dream in all its multifaceted dynamic transpersonal splendor, I have to suspend my own habitual patterns of thought, stand on my head, and take a new look at the dream—until I can see the dream looking back at me. Like a mirror, the dream shows me a reversed image of myself, and more than myself. Continue reading

The “Unreliable Narrator” in Dreams

April 7, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

Can I trust the opinions and emotions of my dream-self? The dream-ego (the “I” character in the dream) is the most likely to share my waking point-of-view about dream events. As I’m remembering and writing or telling the dream, I think of the dream-ego as “me” and can easily take it for granted that what the dream-ego thinks and feels reliably reflects the “truth” about the dream situation. But let’s look more closely at this…

The Jungian dream explorer James Hillman has said that “in a dream the ego is usually wrong”—meaning that the dream-ego tends to apply a waking-life worldview to the dream world, and thus to misinterpret dream events. The dream-ego generally shares the waking ego’s assumptions and prejudices, but the dream world as a whole may have surprisingly different perspectives and possibilities to offer.

As I look at my dream, I need to remember that even in waking life, my own view is not the only way of looking at things—I must question this view in the light of others’ input. In the dream world, this is even more true, because dreams are almost always telling me more than my conscious mind already knows (see Jeremy Taylor’s Dream Work Tool Kit #4). The dream-ego’s view should be taken as only one out of many possible ways of understanding dream events. What does the rest of the dream have to say? What other points-of-view are available?

A Rib Comes Out of Me: I feel a sharp point sticking out of my left side, and when I tug on it, a long, thin, curved rib bone comes out. I hold my side, expecting to find a wound, but there is no mark, no pain, no blood. The rib has come out clean and white. I go to a professor—a pompous, arrogant fellow, who immediately says we should put the rib into a solution of coffee, so that its true, natural color will be revealed. I don’t really want the rib to get stained, so I say sarcastically, “That will work fine if its natural color is coffee-colored.” I keep asking him why and how the rib could have come out so cleanly, without leaving a mark or being smeared with blood. The professor dismisses my question, saying that this sort of thing (a rib coming out) only happens to “end-stage alcoholics with orgasm dysfunction.” I’m mortified and defensive—that description does not apply to me! He clearly does not know what he’s talking about. I certainly won’t tell him that the rib came from me.

I worked with this dream in my peer dream group, and the first insights that came up were consistent with the dream-ego’s opinion about the situation. Something strangely beautiful and with creative potential had “come out of me” (like Adam’s rib…) and the arrogant fellow (patriarchal male? inner critic?) was trying to diminish its significance (by staining the rib and implying that its “true color” was stained). He was also disparaging the source of this new creation (describing her/me as damaged or weak-willed). In the group, we all had a tendency to dismiss the professor’s suggestions, reinforcing the dream-ego’s negative response to him.

The professor was evidently an offensive character, and the statements he made were incorrect in a literal sense, so it seemed reasonable to assume he represented a mistaken point-of-view… Clearly, since I’m not an alcoholic nor do I have “orgasm dysfunction,” he’s got it all wrong—although the discomfort and defensiveness of my response both in the dream and about the dream are suggestive… There’s nothing I’m trying to hide, is there? The rib was simple and clean and left no wound, and that’s a good thing, right? Why stain it? Isn’t clean white its “natural color”?

Well, the next step was, of course, to start questioning these assumptions. Continue reading

Dream Labyrinth: The Winding Path of Group Dreamwork

March 3, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

I’ve been exploring labyrinths lately, and finding significant parallels between the sacred labyrinth walk and the spiritual practice of dreamwork, especially group dreamwork.

While a maze is a puzzle or a trap, filled with false starts, wrong turns and dead ends—a labyrinth is a single winding path, opening at each step as we go around and around the circle, back and forth, spiraling inward and then outward again over and over, gradually working our way to the center. While the final exit from a maze is just an ending, the center of a labyrinth is a turning point. When we come to the center, we pause to center ourselves, and then turn and return the way we came, following our own footsteps back to the beginning.

Some dreams can seem like mazes—a mess of frustrations, disappointments, confusions and anxieties from which we are relieved to wake up. But when we begin to explore even the most tangled maze of a dream, we begin to find that its paths are labyrinthine: there’s a pattern (or many patterns) even though we are going around in circles; there’s always a way forward even though we are often turning back; there’s balance and symmetry even when we keep finding ourselves further from what we thought was our goal.

The reason I’m saying “we” is because the labyrinth of dreamwork is most evident when we are in it together—as a group. Several times, I’ve taken labyrinth walks with others—and it’s amazing (pun intended) how many different ways there are to walk this one path. Each person enters at the same place, but at a slightly different point in time. And then, as I proceed, I keep encountering the same people over and over, unpredictably—we may walk side by side for a while, or pass each other going opposite directions. We converge repeatedly, but never intercept each other, never cross paths. But we all find the same center, and we all return to the same place when we have completed our journey. Continue reading

Humbling Dreams

August 19, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Some dreams are very good at keeping me humble. They remind me that I’m not the center of the universe, while simultaneously engaging my attention in everything that is going on around “me,” everything other than myself that is ultimately essential to who and what I really am.

A humbling dream:

Connecting the Student with her True Teacher: I have a student who has been working with me for a long time. But I realize that there is another teacher she really needs to meet. I go to great lengths to create an opportunity for my student and this teacher to come together, and then I get out of the way and watch how they connect. They have great chemistry and understand each other in a way that is beyond me. For the remainder of the dream, their dynamic learning/teaching relationship plays out, and I’m not actually even present as a character. Yet there’s a pervasive sense of joy at the “rightness” of this unfolding process. I am just a witness, but feel fortunate to have been a part of it.

One excellent way of looking at dreams [“Two Basic Dreamwork Skills”] is to see everything in the dream as an aspect of the dreamer’s whole Self. In other words, when I connect the student with her true teacher in my own dream, I am also connecting the student aspect of myself with a particular teacher aspect of myself. The dream self (the “I” character in the dream) is a teacher, too—but she is a kind of teacher that is closer to my waking identity, closer to my ego. The other teacher is deeper, less familiar. The relationship between the student and that deep teacher (the “Inward Teacher,” as Quakers call “that of God” within each of us) is beyond “me,” beyond my ego, beyond what I know of myself.

Dreams tend to humble the ego with subtlety and sometimes humor. Often, the central “I” character in a dream fades into the background, or becomes embarrassed, inhibited or diminished, while other characters seem increasingly significant. The narrator is forgotten as we get caught up in the story. In this way, a larger awareness, a larger sense of “Self” that we don’t ordinarily recognize, has an opportunity to emerge. Continue reading

Dream Composting

June 10, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

In my waking life, I am very happy in my work: I love teaching about dreams, facilitating dreamwork with individuals and groups, writing and exploring dreams in general… But a big part of my job is just the business of tracking a million details—and this can make me feel a bit crazy, even though I’m pretty good at it. I guess this sort of thing is part of most people’s lives these days: responding to e-mails, updating schedules and mailing lists, checking facts, creating new documents, planning and promoting events, social networking communication, troubleshooting website problems, etc. In the midst of the lists and reminders, it’s hard to find breathing space, and easy to lose touch with the meaning behind all this activity.

While all this is going on, I keep remembering why dreamwork is worthwhile—trying to let it help me stay grounded in my connection to the natural world, my desire to serve others, to learn and grow. Maybe I have another twenty years or so in this life, maybe less, maybe more—Am I experiencing this time fully, and giving myself to each moment? Where is this journey taking me, and how can I better participate in the unfolding process? I hope these are questions that we all take time to ask ourselves. We can also ask our dreams…

However, dreams are tricky—or perhaps “trickster-y.” They rarely give straightforward answers, and most dream-answers compound my questions with more questions. In fact, dreams respond to inquiries in the same way that waking life responds to dilemmas: through experiences that illustrate the nature and potential of the current situation. If my situation is complicated and entangled with my ideas about how things should be, then the experiences that come in response to my big questions will be similarly complicated and entangled. Continue reading

Compass Dreamwork Essentials

April 22, 2014 / kirstenbackstrom

Some of the blog posts I’ve been writing can get pretty abstract. In the past couple of weeks, quite a few new subscribers have joined the Compass Dreamwork blog, and as I reviewed what I was planning to post for this week, I realized that it didn’t give enough of a sense of what “dreamwork as spiritual practice” is really about. What is the starting point for this work?

It’s time to write about the essentials, to give you an idea of how I am approaching dreams in general, and how dreamwork can be a significant spiritual practice. You can find most of this basic stuff elsewhere on the website, but here I’m going to spell it out—so if you are just discovering Compass Dreamwork, this is a good place to start.

I don’t really think there are any “experts” on dreams. Just as in my work with death and dying, I’ve found that the more I explore and the deeper I go into the world of dreams, the more mysterious it becomes. But those of us who have explored dreams in depth for many years can come to have some familiarity with the territory, and can be good guides and companions for others who want to go further into dreamwork as a spiritual practice.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned, what I’ve come to trust, about dreams. I hope you will test this for yourself, and come to your own conclusions about what is useful to you and what is not.

Dreams are experiences. Just like waking experiences, some dream experiences are pleasant and some are unpleasant. What matters, from a spiritual perspective, is not “controlling” the dreaming and waking experiences so that they are all pleasant (which is impossible), but becoming aware of how we respond and relate to those experiences. Our relationship to pleasant and unpleasant experiences ultimately determines their value for us—as all experiences offer the potential for learning, healing, and opening our hearts and minds
The spiritual practice of relating to our dream experiences (or our waking experiences) can occur both as the experience is happening, and in retrospect as we remember and reflect on that experience. The dreams we don’t remember are still valid experiences that help shape who we are, just as the waking experiences we have long since forgotten still contribute to our lives. However, the dreaming and waking experiences we do remember offer more opportunities for reflection that can affect how we respond to future experiences, and can allow us to take a more active role in our own growth and development.
Dreams offer some unique opportunities, different from the opportunities offered by waking experiences. Specifically, dreams show us that there are many ways of looking at ourselves, others, our world, and our sense of “reality.” In our waking lives, we can become stuck in self-reinforcing patterns that come to define us, limit our understanding, and determine our actions. For example, dreams call into question our absolute certainties about things like the nature of time and identity (in dreams, time can be fluid, and the experience of “self” and “other” can be malleable). Dreams can also allow us to explore moral and ethical questions without causing harm to ourselves or others—we can try out “forbidden” things and come to understand their metaphorical significance, without taking them literally.
By becoming dream explorers, we enlarge our potential for coping with paradox, change and the unknown with courage and compassion. When we reach major turning points or crossroads in our lives, when one way of life falls apart (through illness, accident, crisis, death, loss of a relationship, job or home, etc.) and something new has not yet begun—we must cope with a major shift in our conception of ourselves and our lives. In dreams, we regularly have “threshold experiences” in a context that can help us to become more creative and flexible, so that we will be better able to cope with such “threshold experiences” when they inevitably occur in our waking lives. Three aspects of such experiences are especially common in dreams: paradox (contradictory truths can coexist), change (something must end in order for something new to begin), and encountering the unknown (instead of answers, we find an open-ended questioning process). In dreams, our expectations are turned upside down again and again. This is closer to the way things “really are” than the day-to-day routines we can come to take for granted.
Some dream experiences can give us a glimpse—a direct experience rather than an abstract concept—of that which is ultimately meaningful and sacred. Such dreams have had a profound influence on the lives of individuals and communities, have guided spiritual and scientific breakthroughs, and may serve to remind us of our interdependence with the natural world. Dreams include our waking perspectives and draw upon our waking experiences, but they go beyond those perspectives and experiences as well. Dreams can include everything—what we think we know, and more than we could consciously imagine. So where do dreams come from? They are ours, and they are beyond us.

These are some of the essentials of my own dreamwork practice. They’ve emerged in the course of my explorations, and they guide me as I develop the programs and services of Compass Dreamwork. Of course, this is only the beginning! In other posts, I’ll write more about how these ideas (and others) apply to actually working with dreams. Please feel free to share your own learnings, or to raise questions that we can consider together.

Category: Working With Dreams (Page 3 of 4)

Fair Enough: Word Play in Dreams

Lying Down Dreaming: Body Language in Dreams

The Dream Gatherers

Interview with a Dream Figure

Turning the Dream Upside Down

The “Unreliable Narrator” in Dreams

Dream Labyrinth: The Winding Path of Group Dreamwork

Humbling Dreams

Dream Composting

Compass Dreamwork Essentials

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