I have been a professional dreamworker for over 20 years and have never heard a dream that didn’t excite me. Dream work is always a path of personal growth and will stimulate creativity for all members of the dream group.
At the Love and Power Institute our dream groups use a method of group work sometimes called the “if it were my dream” approach. Participants are taught to preface all commentary with this statement and to keep the observations in the first person. Doing so allows each person to take responsibility for their own observation based on their experience and does not require any special training or knowledge. The benefit of this approach gives permission to every group member to fully participate in interpreting the dream thus benefitting as much as the dreamer themselves from the emerging meanings. Each member thus has an opportunity to personally reflect on the themes presented by each dream in light of their own lived experience.
For example, in a recent dream group, a dreamer –let’s call her Sarah–presented a dream that had the image of a fish: “I am with a few friends, and I am helping the local people dress the fish they caught for eating. Apparently, I am quite knowledgeable on the subject and they come to me for advice,” she recounted. Using the preface “if this were my dream,” group members offered comments based in their personal reaction to the fish image. One said the fish brought to mind the idea that a fish does not know it is living in water, just as we rarely notice that we breathe air. Another said the use of the expression, “dress the fish” reinforced the dream’s statement that the dreamer was “knowledgeable, as though she were a chef or an experienced cook, especially of fish. Another said he associated the image of fish with Jesus’ loaves and fishes miracle in the sermon on the mount and thus the dream might be about communal nurturance. Sarah herself confessed that she had been recently troubled by doubting her competence in her work and the dream was telling her that she need not be so troubled and so on.
This work, which may take up an hour or more on this one dream, brings three gifts to the group participants: First, every member of the group, whether they contributed directly to the work or not, has an opportunity to reflect on how the comments are true in their case which can lead to individual “ah-hahs.” This can be life changing. Second, the work itself stimulates creativity which a musician once likened to the experience of a group jam session. And third, the experience itself generates community among the participants which is deepened the longer the group stays together to work their dreams.
There are many, and I am among them, who believe that dreams are not just the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud said, but is also the path to the evolution of humankind. We are, after all, part of nature and share an instinctual base as members of the same species. At the end of work on a dream I will ask the group members to apply the wisdom of the dream to the whole of humankind as though the dream carries a message for us all. The image of the fish, therefore, may be telling us and all of humankind that we need to nurture all of humanity in order to survive.