The correspondences seem more than coincidental or contrived. Yet what purpose was being served by these dreams? We were trying to be helpful with our dreams, not just prove that we could dream "true." The possibly healing nature of the dreams became more evident, however, once I began the process of giving my own personal associations to my dream of being back in my childhood home.

Discussing this dream with Mary, we realized that it seemed to be describing the literal details of her home more than mine. The physical descriptions I gave of "mom" and "dad" in the dream fit Mary's parents very well, but not my own. Mary's mother always used the telephone in the kitchen. And it was quite characteristic of her father to lounge in the living room in his pajamas. Yet both our mothers played the piano and both complained about their playing being constantly interrupted.

The most emotionally potent image in the dream for me was seeing "mom" in the shower. I recalled an old childhood memory of walking in on my mother while she was taking a bath. In my memory, she got terribly upset, complained about her lack of privacy and made me feel guilty about invading her life. This memory seemed to have a strong emotional association with her piano playing, for I would always feel happy and content when she played, but somehow guilty if she were interrupted, as if I were personally responsible. From my psychoanalytic treatment, I had learned how such memories as these had formed part of my "mother complex." One dimension to this complex was an unresolved dependency, both disguised and heightened by guilt feelings about being the source of mother's unhappiness.

Mary responded sympathetically to my disclosures, for she could identify with them. She said that she, too, assumed that she was somehow to blame for her mother's unhappiness and for the frictions between her parents. She also now realized how her guilt feelings kept her from leaving home to begin a life of her own, thus maintaining her situation of dependency.

Three other dream helpers confirmed this analysis. They found similar guilt and dependency issues behind the images in their dreams. For example, the person who dreamed of having difficulty paying for her purchase at the drugstore realized that the theme of "paying for what you get" was exactly how she had to deal with her own difficulty in outgrowing her dependency on her mother. This person was also the one who dreamed about a library, and Mary indicated that her library fantasy reflected the same sort of issue, as she had not been able to face up to the task of paying for her own education.

Our group of helpers was becoming like a group therapy session. The  emotional  sharing  revealed  how  many  of  the