C: Oh. Where did you put your eyes?

J: We were putting our eyes on the flowers which are over here. (She indicates a space off the paper between the boulder and herself.)

C: Do you want to put some flowers in some place?

J: How?

C: I don't know. Where were they?

J: Over there ... so they won't fit on. (Too far off the paper)

C: I see. So you are looking the other way when the boulder's coming. And you stood still?

J: We tried to get away, but it was too close to us.

C: By the time you saw it, it was too close. So it came down and crushed you. You got awake... what? Having a hard time getting your breath?

J: Umm. And that's the bad part. I want to wake up so no more bad parts come.

C: Well, I think if you try staying asleep and calling, "dream friends" ... it might be your father. It might be a duck like Sally had to help her last time ... or Ruth called on a flying horse to help . . .

J: The thing that is going to help me is the mountain .. .

C: The mountain might help you.

J: . . . the only thing it did wrong ... it shook.

C: Since you created the dream, maybe next time you can have it not shake.

Jane came up with a great idea. I never would have thought of stopping mountains. She was beginning to show her strength, her sense of competence and power.

I knew nothing about these children or their backgrounds when I started the project. I used my observations of their behavior and what I could learn from what they told me. I examined my transcripts to see if the children's dreams fit with what I knew of their waking life during the workshops. After I drew my own conclusions and wrote them down, I gave them to their teacher to see if I was correct. Our pictures of these children were amazingly similar. The teacher was seeing about the same degree of change in their school lives as I was finding in their dreams and fantasies. The key to the amount of growth appeared to be related to the extent to which the child could involve himself in his dreams.

At the end of the workshops, I asked the children to think about and discuss what we had been doing and how they might view dreams differently now. Their spontaneous answers to my questions were my reward, for I realized that each child, in her own way, was aware of a new tool. Here is our conversation. Annie and Sally were six years old, Katie seven, and Jane, Wanda and Ruth were eight.