Image by Felix42

So far, in this post series about ways to work with dreams, I have mostly focused on ways of working with your dreams alone.   Today let’s talk about group dream work and how to start your own local dream sharing group.

If you are interested in dream interpretation, being part of a dream circle can be surprisingly accurate at finding the core truths in a dream, be them fears, future possibilities, or emotional hangovers from the past.  Unfortunately, the uneasy fact is that we are pretty bad at “seeing” our dreams ourselves.  This is especially the case if we haven’t been tracking our dreams for very long.  Bringing a dream into a safe group setting like a dream circle can quickly deliver many perspectives on what these dreams mean, and more often than not, bring wisdom that can really surprise the dreamer.

Essentials for Starting a Dream Group

It’s easy to start a dream circle in your neighborhood.  You don’t have to have a therapist amongst you, or someone well-versed in mythology (although these are helpful energies to have along for the ride).  The most important thing is that you collect a small group of people who trust each other, and feel safe enough to tell their dream and listen to feedback about what others think.

I have taken dream workshops with Jeremy Taylor, who is one of the strongest voices today for group dream sharing, also called group dream work.  Many of my tips and advice that follows comes from his methods and his books, which I will reference at the end of the article.

The only dream expert is you

In a dream group, working with shared cultural symbols can lead the way to personal and cultural transformation. image by Colbalt123

Taylor would be the first to say though that nobody “owns” the methods of group dream work; they have literally been with us for as long as we have historical records.   In fact, some social scientists believe that dreams are adaptive for us precisely because we share them with our community.

Dreams have a language that adapts to the medium of their expression, and they use this medium to reinforce social values and, sometimes, to question and overturn them.  In this way, dreams that are shared in a group necessarily have social critique as well as personal information about the dreamer.

In other words, when we share a dream in a circle, we dream for the benefit of everyone.

Despite the the social implications that we dream for everyone, an important value when discussing dreams is to acknowledge that the dreamer has the last word on his or her dream.   It’s a cognitive right, plain and simple, and no authority outside the dreamer can dictate the meaning of a private experience.   Remembering this will ensure your dream group a safe environment and a long life.

“If it Were My Dream…”

The flip side here is that every comment about some else’s dream is a projection.  This is a basic psychological fact: everything that we see we must recognize first, and that recognition means that the concept comes from within us.   As we used to say when we were eight years old:  it takes one to know one.  So when we discuss other people’s dreams, we are actually opening up the door to our inner lives too.   Jeremy Taylor suggests to start each dream comment with the phrase “If this were my dream,” to help the dreamer and the speaker remember that the comment is not a fact, but a projection.

10 Tips for Starting a Dream Interpretation Group

1. Find a group of people less than 12 and more than 5 for optimal interactions.
2. Meet regularly, and schedule a couple hours for the meeting. Once a week can be a big commitment, but it’s the best.  Twice a month will keep a group strong too.
3. What happens in the dream circle stays in the dream circle.  Agree to anonymity so you can discuss what you learned but without naming names once you are out of the circle.
4. Bring a dream with you that you want to share.  The one with the strongest need to share will come forward!
5. If you have formed the dream circle, you are acting as the facilitator, but the dream group does not need a formal leader if everyone agrees to some rules about watching time, keeping safety, and giving everyone an opportunity to have their voice heard.  Still, many prefer to have a dream leader, even if that person switches out every week.
6. Prepare for one or two people max to be able to share a dream in a one hour session.  The time goes by fast!
7. Give the dreamer the last word on what she has heard that night.  She does not need to say “yes” or “no” to possible dream meanings – let it soak in.  If she had a revelation, she can share it.
8. Start the meeting with a brief check-in about how your day/week has gone, with a focus on your emotional state.  This can relieve some projections from the get go and also builds safety.
9. It’s also nice to check in with the dreamers who went last week and see if anything new came to them after they had time to process.  Sometimes, especially for introverts, people need some time to chew on the new ideas about their dreams.
10. Watch for recurrent patterns of interpretation that may point to a group blind spot that is developing.  Especially positive themes. If every dream turns out to be about accepting new wisdom or a celebration of the goddess, chances are a communal blind spot has developed that is dancing around some of the darker themes that routinely show up in dream work, such as relationship issues, change, or coping with death.

Again, you do not need to be an expert to start a dream group!  All you need is a group that is enthusiastic about sharing dreams.  The rest comes with experience.

Highly recommended further readings if you want to start your own dream group:

Dream Sharing Groups, Spirituality, and Community. A free article by Kelly Bulkeley.
Dream Work: Techniques for discovering the creative power in dreams by Jeremy Taylor
Appreciating Dreams by Montague Ullmann, PhD.  (Jeremy Taylor’s mentor and renowned dream researcher).

The next post in this series is about dream honoring.

Dream sharing is ubiquitous across the world’s cultures and you can bet that dream sharing has been a standard human activity for as long as we have had the ability to:

1. Remember our dreams
2. and articulate them.

It’s Our Cognitive Heritage

Paleolithic rock art contains many of the features of archetypal dreams, including mythological creatures, abstract geometry, and the depiction of flying or falling.

That pretty much means we’re talking about an dream-centered behavior that reaches back at least one hundred thousand years, or as long as modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) have had a functional larynx.   Do we have physical evidence for this?  No, not directly.  But we do have some ancient rock art that dates into the Upper Paleolithic that happens to bear a striking iconic similarity to what we today call “big dreams.”  And as cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has suggested, “Humans cannot refrain from dreaming.”

The human visionary capability is simply part of our cognitive heritage.  However, I could be wading into bad science by suggesting that ancient humans talked about their boring dreams too, which surely existed in the ancient past as much as today.  Luckily, we don’t have evidence for that.  (What would an ancient human dream journal look like?  “Ate dried elk tendon for dinner again, tastes like feet.”)

In any case, as social creatures, we humans share our dreams, and typically we share them with those who we are most intimate with.  Across the world today, most intact dreaming cultures do their dream sharing with their kin and their friends.  It’s a domestic thing.

A smaller amount of dreaming cultures share in other settings, such as village meetings, in private to healers and shamans, and occasionally during seasonal festivals.

Taboos in Dream Sharing

Purple Shock by andraspfaff (CC 2.0)

Bringing dream sharing back into your life is pretty easy, but there are some pitfalls.  Some dreams are not meant to be shared, but the rules for that differs from culture to culture.  For instance, for the Dine (Navajo) people, sharing the dream from a vision quest could rob the dreamer of his power.

Because social taboos are frequently encountered in dream content, their telling is often highly ritualized.  A good example of this is the Iroquois people in the 17th century, who acted out their tabooed dreams twice a year, even if it meant admitting they had a crush on someone who is married, or violent feelings for a rival.  This special kind of dream-sharing seems to have functioned to “air the dirty laundry” in order to reduce its charge, and prevent unconscious acting-out that could escalate if left unchecked.

Which is why I wish dream sharing was a mandatory start before every meeting of the United Nations, by the way.  (hey, I’m a dreamer…)

There’s no way around it: if you engage in dream sharing you will brush up against some tabooed material.  Whether or not it is appropriate to share the dream is completely up to you.  For instance, sharing a sexual dream with, say, a co-worker can be grounds for sexual harassment.  Lawsuits aside, the way to share appropriately is to share safely and with good boundaries.

How to Start Dream Sharing Safely

Most importantly, you have to build some forum and safety.  You don’t want to share dreams around the water cooler, because it’s too conversational.  You want to dream share with someone who you know will listen, preventing the embarrassing yet sometimes unavoidable “I had the weirdest dream last night…” in which your “listener” proceeds to think about what they need to pick up from the grocery store.

There are no boring dreams, not if you have a good listener.  The key is reciprocation.  You share and they listen because they want their chance to share too.

The next key is habit.  I share dreams with my wife every morning while we are still waiting for the snooze to go off one last time.  It’s automatic, part of our daily routine.  If a dream has some power behind it, the topic will come up again over the breakfast table, or later in the evening.  We may explore possibilities of what it means, but I don’t want to get into dream interpretation right now — the main point is that sharing feels good, and it is rewarding in its own right.  It builds trust, emotional intimacy, and compassion.

It’s Only a Dream, After All

Finally, dream sharing is about listening and about not being judgmental.  Dreams are messy, and they contain submerged feelings, tabooed content, and, to be frank, a lot of dark shit.  So choose your dream sharing partner carefully (or dream sharing group — we’ll discuss group dreamwork later).  And that goes for yourself too: take your own dreams lightly and try not to get caught up in the drama if you have some really tabooed material come up.  Even Saint Augustine, the revered Christian saint whose lifework involved the concept of “original sin,” forgave himself for his dirty nasty dreams.

In this respect, it’s okay to say, “Hey, it’s only a dream after all.”  Not because it isn’t important or vital or contains an embarrassing grain of truth, but because that is what dreaming is for: to discover what we really think, feel and believe when our rationalizing and socially-mandated cerebral cortex has been dampened through the marvels of dreaming cognition.   No judgments.

So try it.  Open up to your friends, your lover, or your family about your dream provided the above safety criteria are met.  Make a habit of it.  Notice how the dream changes as you tell it, how parts that seemed unimportant now seem epic, or vice versa.  Watch for slips of the tongue, for puns, and for associations.

But don’t interpret the dream away just yet…. just let it breath; savor its taste in your mouth.   Even if it tastes like feet.

The next article is about how to start a dream journal to remember more dreams.

ScienceDaily

The studies cited investigated under which conditions do people find meaning in their dreams. Their results, surveyed from various groups of US commuters and students, indicate that, in the US, people are more likely to find meaning in their dream if the dream reinforces something they already believe.

The lead investigator is Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She suggests that

“people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires. This was also the case in another experiment which demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice.”

I” m not too surprised by these results. In the US, dreams are not part of polite conversation. This is not a dreaming culture, to put it mildly. While some US sub-cultures engage in regular dream sharing (such as African-American religious communities in the Southeastern US), most Americans who are interested in exploring their dreams must do so alone, relying on hackneyed dream dictionaries that they find in the Astrology section in used book stores.

The studies above suggest that, for the most part, normally neurotic people who grow up in a non-dreaming culture will only attribute meaning to their dreams when it can support a personal mythology they are already entrenched within. This is an important sociological finding. Unfortunately, it does not reveal too much about the nature of dreams themselves: only the way we let ourselves be influenced by dreams in the techno-rational West.

Dream Interpretation in Context

Today’s social pattern is not typical of dream interpretation systems. In fact, solo dream interpretation is mostly an artifact of Western civilization. Dream interpretation, which has a long and storied history, is usually a communicatory event. Anthropologically-speaking, while dreams can reinforce cultural scripts, they are just as likely to upset accepted norms and taboos. Indeed, dreams shared in public can uncover deadly secrets, reveal dangerous ecological behavior, and mediate disputes between family groups.

You don’t have to go to Polynesian islands to see dream cultures like this at work: there are many in the US, including the modern dream sharing movement that arose 30 years ago. In my experience, sharing dreams can break down psychological defenses just as easily as it can reinforce them. Bad dream work might reveal that you are finally reconnecting with the Goddess. Good dreamwork might reveal that your entire matrilineal line has suffered from a fear of men’s infidelity for centuries. Or vice versa.

By the way, another study published by Morewedge and associates indicated that their sample group of 182 Bostonians are more likely to not board an airplane if they have a dream about a mishap — more likely than if a government warning is issued about terrorist activity. Maybe the US is on its way to becoming a dreaming culture after all…

But I already knew this – this study just reinforces my belief in it.

Image cc: Plane Falling out of the Sky by oHoTos

I am indebted to Richard Wilkerson for this piece, who not only is a first generation cyberdreamer, but also pointed me in the right direction when I picked his brain a few weeks ago in San Francisco.

The article is called A Short History of Online Dream Sharing.

First, I just uploaded my guide to Online Dream Sharing to the original articles section. These are my top picks for places on the web to safely share and exchange dreams with other dreamers. All are peer-to-peer dream sharing sites, but many are run by dream researchers and professionals. The guide does not cover dream interpretation or dream dictionary sites (run away!).

Also included are two dream sharing sites where you can use their databases to do your own dream research – this is a great resource for students or for anyone interested in societal patterns of dream content.

Relatedly, check out this great blog about a psychotherapist’s view of dreaming. Psychotherapist Laura Lefelar-Barch has been writing some great introductory material on the importance of paying attention to dreams, the healing potential of dreams, as well as advice for remembering and interpreting your dreams.