A dream is an experience we have while we are asleep. It becomes part of our personal history that shapes us and makes us who we are just as our experiences during the day become part of who we are. In particular, my perspective on dreams is that it is the story of the dream that changes us while we sleep. the dream story affects us in the same way that experiencing a play or a movie might change us. Reading stories, watching movies, seeing plays, having dreams - these all have personal value to the extent that they affect us, move us, change us. It is only natural to be affected by the stories we experience, whatever their form.

I would like to give you a feeling of permission to have a natural response to your dreams. In other words, if dreams are a natural experience, if their effect on us is as normal as the effect of experiencing a story, then it shouldn’t require a lot of expertise to reap their benefit. Getting help from dreams can be as natural as being moved by a theater experience.

Children love stories. They don’t need an English teacher explaining the symbolism and pointing out the various complexities in order for them to appreciate a good story. Children will frequently ask to have their favorite story read to them again and again. Simply hearing the story is having an effect on the child. The child and the story are in direct, mysterious communication. The story is something the child wishes to experience over and over - even the bad and scary stories, such as the fairy tales that often are like gruesome nightmares. In their innocent and direct appreciation of stories, children have something to teach us about dreams. We should be able to gain as much from our dreams and in as simple and straightforward a manner as children grow from hearing stories. As stories, dreams have the drama of a theater experience.

The ancient Greeks were famous for their philosophy of drama and the way they incorporated drama into their lives. They considered it to be an important social process. They realized that bringing people together to see the plays had an effect on the society, releasing tensions that were difficult to deal with, uplifting people, training them in the various ethical situations and issues. For the Greeks, drama and dreams were natural partners. At Epidarus, for example, both the theater and the dream incubation sanctuary were located within the same ceremonial center. The found that drama and the arts surrounding drama revealed the meaning of their humanity. Not too much has really changed in the last 2000 years – dreams, those nighttime dramas, still speak to those deep human issues that unite us.

What are some of the things in a play that move us? What is it about the story? How do we see what the story is? How do we even understand the story itself? We are never really taught to understand story but it seems very natural to us. We naturally tend to perceive events in terms of meaning, and not just raw facts. Many psychological experiments have been created to demonstrate that in the act of perception, we bring "meaning" to the raw facts. One of my favorite examples of this was an animation demonstration by Fritz Heider. In the cartoon, there were only two dots in motion. The motion was programmed mathematically. As one dot moved, so did the other a short distance away. When people were shown the cartoon and asked what they saw, they invariably saw one dot "chasing" another. There was nothing in the raw facts of the cartoon that specifically designated the act of "chasing." The mind of the observer added the meaning to the raw facts. "Chasing" was a direct and immediate experience for the observer. People were shown a mathematical process but they experienced a story - a chase scene. Experiencing events in terms of their meaning, in terms of a story, is very natural.

Besides being natural, experiencing events in terms of a story can be very important to us. When Roots was dramatized on television, it was interesting that several times the hero would recite the story of his origins and how he had gotten to where he was. First there was the Great Grandfather, who was a slave who came here, then there was the Grandfather, who did this and that, and so on. That was why he was here. Reciting that sequence was very important in giving him a sense of where he was and who he was. To the so-called primitive peoples, losing their heritage of the stories that tell how they came to be is as disastrous for them as it would be for us to lose our storehouse of scientific knowledge.

We each have our personal stories, the experiences we cherish, as well as the ones we wish we hadn’t had, that make us who we are, that give us a sense of direction or meaning. It is these stories that we share with one another as we become friends. Generally, the abstractions and raw facts we share with one another – our astrological sign, our blood type, our scores on the Rorschach test, or our job title – reveal less about us than the stories we tell about ourselves. We naturally relate to one another in terms of common experiences, and we discover that commonality by exchanging stories with one another. Hearing a person’s self-analysis may give us some understanding, but the stories the person tells give us a better feeling for the person. We can identify with the story and feel close to the person.

We are all familiar with the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." A picture tells a story; it arranges all the facts in a package that can be grasped instantly. In a similar fashion, a story is worth many explanations - a story tells it all! We can try to explain people, their behavior and their inner feelings by recourse to psychology, but a good story gets to the heart of the matter and is immediately understood. While we may scratch our heads for awhile before an explanation sinks in (only to soon forget it), the meaning of a story is often immediately understood in an unforgettable manner.

Did you ever wonder why, if dreams are like messages, that they rarely occur in the form of explanations, lessons, lectures or letters? They are most often simply stories. We experience them like a play at a theater, or a movie. There is something very basic about the story in a play. Why did Shakespeare say the world was a stage and we were like the characters on it? Life itself seems like a story. The story we call life is older than the invention of language, and so are dreams. It is more natural for dreams to appear as stories than as letters. Dreams are stories that we experience during the night and they have a direct and immediate effect upon us.

In dreams we can have the experience and be changed as a result of the experience. We can forget the experience but the change is there nevertheless. On that level the dream can go on accomplishing its goal without our attempting to understand it. I am not saying that interpretation is wrong. I am saying that there is a more basic level to a dream, it is very direct and we’re all naturally very good at understanding it.

There is a statement, for example, that a dream that’s not interpreted is like a letter that isn’t opened. There is truth in that. Until a dream has been interpreted or accepted as personally meaningful, there remains a level of the dream that has not yet been acknowledged. But the dream has its own dimension of reality, too. Dreams are like a chiropractic adjustment. They grab us, they affect us, they involve us, and they change us. They shape us and we have been changed by them. And for that purpose interpretation is not necessary. The immediate reality of the dream is the story that is experienced.

For example, the night before doing something I had never done before, I was really scared and nervous, asking myself why I had ever agreed to take such a risk, but not knowing how to get out of it. That night I dreamed of my father. In the dream, he was going off to work. He had just taken a shower and put on a fresh suit. He smelled really good as he said goodbye to me and walked out the door. That dream was similar to a memory. I recall various times when dad would wear cologne and would smell so good. I would be proud of him as he went out on his job. The dream brought back those memories. It left me feeling good, thinking about it uplifted my mood. Although I didn’t make the connection at the time, I realized later that the dream gave me the confidence to take the risk I had to take and perform the task I had agreed to.

The dream experience had its effect. The story of the dream, and the memories it evoked, did the job. True, the story can be interpreted. What does the story say? It is a story of confidence in meeting the outer world. In the story, my father does what dads do - he goes out into the world to support the family back home. There is dad, smelling like a rose. It is the father within us, that aspect that has knowledge and the confidence to use it, that can support those other aspects within us that need supporting, the more dependent sides of ourselves. In that sense my dream story contains archetypal, or universal symbols. Yet I did not need to know any of that in order to reap the benefit of the dream. Dad’s sweet smell of success was all the boost I needed.

There are so many theories about dreams today and so many books on dream symbols and how to interpret them. As science has become dominant in our culture, we tend to think like scientists, in terms of theories and explanations, even though scientific theory is devoid of human meaning, the kind of meaning that makes life worth living. And now we also have our science of dreaming. There seems to be so much to learn, so much psychological sophistication to develop, so much standing between us and our dreams. It gets very complicated, and we get self-conscious and nervous. Dreams seem to be too difficult to analyze, and we are afraid that we will miss the point of a dream or misinterpret.

But can you imagine being afraid to go to a movie because of a fear that you couldn’t figure it out? I cannot imagine someone saying, "Well, I don’t want to see Ghostbusters because I might not understand all the symbols." We’re not afraid - we just go and enjoy the movie. If we can analyze the symbols, that’s fine, and it will add to our appreciation of the movie. But it would be sad to avoid the experience of the movie for fear of not being able to analyze the symbols. Don’t let a feeling of a need for sophistication make you miss out on your dreams. True, dreams may contain symbolism, analogy and metaphor; and there are, indeed psychological dynamics and biological determinants in dreams. Nevertheless, dreams are given to us as stories. A dream is a theater experience that directly touches our sense of being.

When we respond to a dream directly, like a story, like a theater experience, what are the implications? What does it mean in terms of working with a dream, coming to enjoy it more or finding whether it has some application or practical value? How might we tap into that?

Instead of remembering a dream and immediately thinking of various symbols and what they might mean, first ask,

"How do I feel after having this experience?"

"Do I feel excited or a little bit low?"

"What is it that I desire?"

"How does the story of the dream affect me?"

Notice what we have to pay attention to in order to answer that question. Does it leave a certain mood or feeling? It may leave a certain appetite or desire or a lingering itch to accomplish or change something. What kind of an aftertaste is there to the dream?

For example, I had a dream in which I was standing on the running board on the side of a car. The car was going down the road really fast, and I was holding on for dear life. That was the dream. How did that leave me feeling? I was feeling scared in the dream; the motion was fast. It was nice to wake up and find myself in bed. I was stable; the bed was not moving; and that was a nice feeling. One of the effects of a dream was to somehow make me appreciate taking it easy or going slow or keeping my feet on the ground. The impact on me is that it slowed me down. It made me a little bit more security-conscious in some way.

After we have remembered a dream, it is important to remember it again and again and again, often calling it to mind during the day. If the dream is meant to be a story that affects us, that changes us, then by remembering it several times we can reinforce and keep that effect active. It is a way of reliving it. If some of the value of the dream is the experience of the dream, then we derive that value by remembering it over and over again. We will find, too, that by recalling dreams often, things will easily remind us of our dreams, because we have gotten used to bringing them to mind. And the thing that reminds us of the dream is telling us something about the meaning of the dream. There is a reason why that dream is brought to mind at this particular time, in this particular situation. It can be an easy and painless way to appreciate what some of our dreams mean, but we have to help that process out. If we remember a dream in the morning but then forget it, it is very difficult to be reminded of it later. However, if we ask, from time to time during the day, "What did I dream last night?" and then, if relive it, that practice makes the process of recalling dreams at meaningful moments that much easier.

In trying to realize the value of simply remembering a dream and rehearsing it mentally, we often come up against the unpleasant dream. Who wants to remember an unpleasant or scary dream? Maybe it’s okay for kids to want to hear a scary story over and over again, but we grown-ups have work to do and don’t need the useless upset, right? Well, it is right that many dreams, in fact, are unpleasant. That, along with the fact that we don’t seem to be able to survive without our dreams, suggests that the unpleasantness in dreams is serving a purpose. The purpose seems to be to help us realize or anticipate the negative consequences of some attitude or stance we are assuming in our life. The negative emotion in the dream is like a bad taste in our mouth in the morning. It automatically steers us away from the attitude we previously held or were contemplating. I don’t know what free-wheeling attitude I had the night before I dreamed of riding on the running board of a runaway car, but believe me, the next morning, I was a more humble person! the more I rehearsed that dream in my mind, the more humble my mood became. So even without knowing the intent of the dream, the specific aspect of my being that it was referring to, I assume the dream did its job and my rehearsing it helped even more.

After remembering a dream, examining its emotional effect upon you as you rehearse it, the next important dimension to look at is the story itself, its theme or plot. What is going on in the dream? What is the essential plot? Let’s examine the plot of a dream I had:

"I am standing in a barnyard, and I see that the horse has gotten loose and is walking away. I want to holler after it. ‘Wait!’ But I can’t think of the horse’s name. I say, ‘Charlie,’ and then think, ‘No, that’s my dog.’ I keep hollering different names, and I can’t remember my horse’s name. I think, ‘Gee, it’s just going to walk away and leave me.’ I’m really feeling despondent; then I get a nudge and there’s the horse. He’s come back. I’m really happy and I put my arm around the horse and start singing to it. I sing some cornball songs that I’m making up in the dream. At one point I hit a real high-pitched note – la la – and both the horse and I roll over backwards because he’s singing too. It’s like ‘horse laughter’ because I’m being so corny. We’re rolling on the ground together with our la la’s."

That was the dream. What is the essential theme of that dream? Several possible ones are: Thinking something is getting away from me; finding something that I thought I had lost but that was there all the time; thinking I have to have control but finding control is unnecessary. (The statement about control might go a bit beyond what is actually in the dream. It is a good idea to keep to the story.) The theme is something that we are able to grasp all at once, in a single snapshot. So, I would say that the theme of my dream is that something I felt was lost was actually there all the time.‘

I had this dream the morning of a workshop on dreams and poetry. I was concerned because I had not given this workshop for a long time. In the past I had spent a lot more time writing poems from my dreams, playing around with them, making pictures and so on, but I hadn’t been doing so much of that recently. I had this dream that morning and, in the course of giving the workshop, I used the dream to do my poetry work. It dawned on me that the dream was expressing that I had not lost something just because I hadn’t been dealing with it for a long time; it was still there.

Working with a theme from a dream can be helpful, even if you can only abstract an approximate theme. Use the theme as a perspective by which to view your life situation. Ask yourself, "How does this theme reflect my current life situation?" What correspondence can you find between the theme of the dream and life events? If you were to use that dream theme to frame your perspective on your life, what would you find? What feelings or thoughts are evoked? For example, in my dream, the theme seems to reflect my feelings about my poetry ability. When I picture those feelings from the perspective of the dream theme, I experience some relief about the continued presence of my creative talents. Before I worked with the theme, the dream seemed unrelated to me. Once I abstracted the theme, I recognized immediately what aspect of my life was being portrayed.

Identifying the theme is not going to give us all there is to a dream, but it can give an awareness of what to orient to, the basic skeleton of the meaning. Then we can add little things on to it. An outline has value in that it gives some structure. We know what the basic structure is and what is simply detail. "Frustration" and "control" in my dream seem to be refining details for better understanding the basic notion that something seems to be getting away although it is there all the time. It is helpful to get used to thinking in terms of themes. The theme points to the critical or central truth that will give us some kind of orientation for working with the rest of the dream. Then we may want to go on to the details: frustration, the name of the horse, etc. Why was there a problem with names and not more about the horse not being tied up very tight? Why did I call it the names of my other animals? These things are little details we can work with better once we have a feel for the general structure.

Another aspect of a dream is its characters. One thing that has always fascinated me about dreams is the symbolism. Often dream symbols are taken from the material of our waking life, as with my dream of "potato chips and mayonnaise." However, through the ages one of the reasons people have maintained such an interest in dreams is that images sometimes appear which we have never experienced in our waking life. Where do these images come from? One theory says we come into the world like a blank tablet; then through our experiences our minds start filling up, and we start learning things. But when we have dreams with images in them that we have never experienced before, we realize that there is something missing in that theory. So, symbols can be fascinating. However, they can also be frustrating, because how are we ever going to figure out what all those symbols mean?

When we see a play or read a story, we are exposed to a lot of symbolism, but often we don’t think about it as such. When we experience a dream, it has a direct impact that we relate to. A movie would not be as effective if we just sat back and said, "Oh they’re showing me a lot of symbols here. I wonder what these symbols mean?" These are the things we talk about afterwards. While the movie is going on, we are really responding to the story; and it is having its desired effect. We are being affected by the symbols.

How does this work? How can symbols affect us if we don’t know what they mean? Symbols remind us of things through association – they resonate with vague suggestions and we are reminded of a lot at an unconscious level. Some symbols trigger subtle, instinctive responses. For example, a snake is a very ancient symbol. It brings up a thousand images in our imagination, it immediately stimulates all kinds of fantasies. You can’t say, "snake means sex" or "snake means energy" because even if that were true, it is only partially true. We don’t know what snake really means, but we really know it means something to us, many things, in fact! There is something going on that makes it possible for us to be affected by symbols that we don’t even have in our experience. We can be moved by symbols, and yet if we are asked what a certain symbol means, we might not be able to explain it. What we could say about that symbol is small compared to how much it moves us.

So, association is one good way to explain how we seem to understand symbols. Another way is that we unconsciously empathize with the symbol. We imagine being that symbol. We might imagine what it would be like to unexpectedly encounter a snake when we hear the phrase, "He’s like a snake in the grass," and something is triggered within us. We need to remember what we bring to a symbol. The expert symbolist Carl Jung would say we bring all of humanity’s experience on the planet with us when we encounter that symbol.

It is quite interesting how Jung discovered archetypes and the collective unconscious. He was at a mental hospital, and a patient who was looking out the window called Jung over. He said, "Look! The sun has a tail and it’s wagging in the wind." Jung had been reading about an ancient myth involving the solar wind, and how the tail that wagged from the sun created the wind. So that was fresh on his mind. When the patient had his "hallucination," Jung was really struck by it. He knew the patient’s background and was willing to bet that this patient had never heard that story and had never in his personal experience come across that symbol. Yet he was experiencing it there in the sky. From that Jung deduced that we bring with us much more than what we have experienced in this lifetime.

In working with our dreams we can intentionally empathize with any symbol in the dream. We can pretend we are that thing and see how we experience things from that perspective. One reason that I believe in Jung’s view of the collective unconscious is that very often in empathizing with a symbol we come up with things that fit from a universal point of view, even though from personal experience we don’t have that kind of knowledge.

I dreamt once that I was in a sporting goods store looking at a glider - one of those sail planes that glides around without an engine. The man in the store told me that there was a special sale on that day. If I were to buy that plane, then for the rest of the time that I owned it I could get two lifts a week into the air from Penn Central. I thought that was really a neat idea because, when you buy glider airplanes, you’re still not up in the sky. You have to find someone to get you up there. So it was attractive to think that twice a week I would get free pulls from Penn Central. And I saw a locomotive going down the track, getting up speed, with the little plane following until it picked up enough speed to lift into the air. I spent a long time trying to figure out that image. I kept trying to think of all the things that I did twice a week, about planes and what they meant, of the goal directedness of the locomotive. I came up with a lot of interesting ideas. Finally I took some time to empathize with the image – not just a mental empathy, but a physical empathy. I went outside and pretended I was a glider. I stretched out my arms and soared. I felt what it was like to be a glider airplane: very quiet, very free, moving about. Then I played a locomotive: going very straight down the track. A part of me didn’t like it because I couldn’t go off the track, but another part felt there was a lot of energy that was channeled because of the track. I could make big explosions inside, but I didn’t have to worry because the track directed that energy and took me in the right direction.

Then I tried to imagine myself as a glider being pulled along in the air by a locomotive. I tried to do both at the same time, which was the image given me in the dream. It was quite an experience. All of a sudden I went into something similar to an altered state of consciousness. I could experience very directly the feeling of being both a body and a spirit simultaneously. I was in the world of cause and effect (which is like a train going down the track – once it’s set in motion, it goes right on), and at the same time I was spirit, totally free, totally without materiality. They were simultaneous realities. I was given the immediate experience of it through empathizing with a dream symbol. I would never have suspected, just thinking about it, that this symbol could have had such potential and provided me such an important type of experience. Empathizing is a very natural thing to do. It does not require much expertise. You do not have to be a psychologist to it. If children can get so much out of stories without having the stories explained, there must be ways for us to get great value from our dreams without having to know a lot.

Another important aspect of working with dreams as a theater experience is looking at the characters in our dreams. Even as in our daily life, stories in the dream involve things that happen between people. People are very important to us, and we know that in our dreams they often represent parts of ourselves. But I am more concerned with conversations we have with these characters than about what they represent. Just because a dream is over does not mean the story has to end. We can have continuing conversations with our dream characters. We have all probably had a conversation with someone and then later imagined how it could have gone differently. We ask ourselves, "What would have happened if I’d said this or that instead of what I did say?" It is just as natural after a dream to have imaginary conversation with the people in the dream.

I once had a dream in which I encountered a strong man who looked really mean. I walked over to him, wondering if he would bother me. He raised up his head and he was in chains. Rather than feeling safe and walking on, I said, "You’d better not bother me." He broke a bottle and threatened me with it, and I pulled out a knife. I wondered why if he was chained, I would be afraid of him, pick on him and try to start a fight. So I started talking to him and said, "That’s funny, you’re in chains and here I am picking a fight with you." He said, "Yeah, I know. You’ve kept me chained up all this time." I asked, "I’ve kept you chained up?" And he said, "Yeah, you don’t want me to do very much. You have got all your stuff to do and you don’t want to have any time for play; so you’ve got me chained up." We went back and forth. In the course of that conversation, he got me to agree to unchain him. What was interesting was that I had been feeling kind of low for a few days, and I hadn’t been doing very much. What he was pointing out to me was that I was getting too mental. All of the things I was doing during the day were so mental that I wasn’t allowing myself to go out and have some physical activity. He wanted to have fun. He wanted to use his body. He said that he would rake my leaves if I let him. I thought that was a good deal because I thought raking leaves was boring. So there was a combination of conversation, then a little empathy and role playing, and I became the strong man. I went into the yard and let him rake leaves and it felt really good to me. He was very good at raking, full of energy, and I found that I wasn’t depressed anymore. It lifted me.

There is no great psychological expertise guiding that process, though from a psychological point of view, it made good sense. It was just me having a natural conversation with a dream character. Talking to him and hearing his suggestion was very helpful. I ended up painting a picture of him, unchained, to remind me always that all work and no play makes for a pretty boring life. So, conversing with dream characters is something we can all do. Gestalt psychology and Psychosynthesis both stress dialoguing, but we can bring so much psychology to the process that we forget we have a natural way of carrying on pretend conversations.

I want to remind you again that we are not stuck with how our dream ends. This is especially important with the so-called nightmare or with a dream that leaves us really troubled because of the ending. We can go back to the dream, while we are driving to work or washing dishes or whatever, and experiment with different ways of ending it. We can talk to different characters, get their ideas in the dream about what they might try, and even bring different characters in if we want. We are allowed to expand the range of people in the dream. This kind of an approach first really came to life with the Senoi indians. They taught their children how to cope with negative figures in their dreams and how to bring dreams to a different ending. People think they have to study the Senoi method, but we don’t have to study any method if we just allow our natural imagination to work on our dreams. We can just sit down with a dream and start playing with it. If we empathize with all the characters and let them speak, have some dialogue with them, try to shape the story and flesh it out, we can end up expanding a dream into a more elaborate and meaningful story.

This approach to dreams is a way of taking psychology and turning it into art. Psychology - in the sense of understanding ourselves, gaining better self-awareness, improving ourselves - need not be a process of gritting our teeth, need not be scratching our head and trying to somehow figure out ourselves and the life, as if it were all a big puzzle. Through natural ways of working with dreams, it is possible to move into the realm of arts and crafts and play and games and accomplish the same thing. It is a place where art and psychology cross over. The Greeks had their temples for healing and their temples for shared artistic experience in the same location. To them, healing and the arts were very much related to one another. We don’t have to separate the two. We might look at opera, for example, as taking Primal Scream and raising it to an art form. The singers take all that emotion, channel it and make it beautiful. Our dreams are doing that as well, taking our touchy feelings, our intense emotions, and making drama out of them, so that we can experience our feelings in an aesthetic and meaningful way.

Beneath the surface appearance, there can be a lot of nature’s own sophisticated psychology in our playing with our dreams. In their dramas and in their pantheon of gods, who often appeared in the dreams, the Greeks seemed to be paying tribute to the fact that unconscious feelings are like gods because they can take over and sway our lives. Such factors are eternally human and larger than life. When we dialogue with the scary people in our dreams, when we draw pictures of the images and symbols in our dreams, and then stand before them and imagine new conversations and scenarios, it is like we are wrestling with the gods in our lives. We pay them tribute and seek their blessings. It is only natural to do so.