The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (27 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships
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may be surprised to notice the fears as well as the feelings of comfort that come out of doing this together. You can also give each other massages, either back and foot or full body, to enhance your trust of each other and to get to know more about your own and your partner's physical likes and dislikes.
The Power of Nonverbal Communication in Dreamwork
You can also use your nonverbal experience to help you interpret your dreams. This may be particularly useful when you and your partner have been unable to decipher a dream that one of you has had. A great deal of valuable knowledge, of which we are often unaware, is stored in our physical experience. We start out in the world as infants, interacting with the world through our bodies, and this continues to be a valuable source of information in both our waking and dreaming lives.
Observe your partner's gestures, eye contact, and tone of voice as he recounts a dream. There may be some important clues in these nonverbals about the dream's meaning. To focus more closely on how your own or your partner's body "speaks your dream," choose an emotionally charged word, action, or character from one of your dreams. Close your eyes and focus on the symbol or situation you've selected. Locate the physical sensations in your body, exaggerate them, and become attuned to any feelings or thoughts that come up. Ask yourself what the function or message may be that is connected with the way your body responded. For example, if you are feeling stifled in your dream, it may remind you of a time recently or in your childhood when you experienced that sensation, and that may be a clue to the dream's meaning. You can also slowly begin to move in response to your feelings. That is what one newlywed, Madelyn, did to get insight into the message behind this partic-
 
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ularly troubling dream that she knew was somehow related to her previous marriage.
Running for Bus No. 30
I am running to catch a busNo. 30. I stop one bus, but the annoyed driver tells me it's not No. 30. I keep running, but I find no bus No. 30. A man stops his car to offer me a ride. I get in; he moves closer to me and asks me to stay with him. I say no, and begin to get very upset.
Madelyn was troubled by this dream and asked for help from a friend, a fellow dreamworker, who suggested they go outside to try working it out in movement. They ran for a while as if running to catch a bus, but then Madelyn felt the urge to stop and run in place. Finally, in a burst of energy, she ran swiftly across the yard. In thinking about that movement experience, she said, ''I realized that the bus number represented the age of thirty, when I ended my first marriage and became 'unstuck' (no longer stopped or running in place)." Completing the divorce gave her new energy that she could now put into a new relationship. The message of the dream, she believed, was that "I could 'move on' powerfully into my current marriage without fear or distrust. It was something I knew before, but it was only through the movement that I came to experience it fully." Madelyn shared this insight with her husband, and it helped them both become more aware of the barriers that existed between them and how to get past them.
 
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Taking Responsibility for Creating Your Couple
The most difficult, but perhaps most important, thing to achieve in learning to communicate effectively with your partner is to take responsibility for the condition of your relationship. Rather than looking at your couple communication as something that "just happens," realize it is possible to take charge of how you want it to be. Like active listening, your couple also needs
active speaking
, which means being fully aware and fully responsible for what you both say and how it is perceived. You then become not a victim of circumstance, but the director of your fate and your relationship.
Clearly, this way of behaving is easier said than done. Our culture and our language are not set up to support people taking responsibility for their own lives. We are born being taken care of, and we often continue to expect that kind of care-taking even as adults, putting our partners in the role of our parents. That arrangement may work for a while, but eventually one or both partners will get tired of it, leading to conflict. Some couples may try to "fix" things by switching roles (e.g., the one who worked to put the other through school now takes his or her "turn" while the other works); others may develop a feeling that they are no longer compatible and seek to end the relationship. One partner may experience a feeling of betrayal, while the other feels confused by new attempts to ''change the rules." In any case, neither one is happy, and no one knows what else to do.
When you and your partner are dissatisfied with your relationship, it is time to take more active control over your life and the state of your couple. Rather than maintaining a passive attitude toward what is happening, you can take responsibility for creating a new reality in which anything is possible. Although
 
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this may seem unrealistic in your everyday life, it goes on every night in your dreams. You are constantly imagining possibilities and visions in your dreams that can be applied to your relationships. Just as your dreams are your own creations, so, to a large extent, is your reality in waking life, which you construct through your perceptions and beliefs about the world.
One prominent dreamworker, clinical psychologist John Weir, has created a system for describing this process, which he calls percept language, that looks at dreams as taking place "entirely inside me . . . They are . . . my own doing. I 'do me' when I 'dream me.'" By learning to take responsibility for your dreams through the use of this new language, which we have adapted as
dream language
, you can get more in touch with your ability to direct and take responsibility for your waking life. Dream language helps you look at your life from this perspective by holding you accountable for each aspect of the dream. Here's how it works.
Learning to Use Dream Language
As with any language, there are a few basic rules. The first one is to speak always in the present tense as if the dream is happening now ("I am flying," not "I was flying"). As you have seen in recording your dreams, this is important for keeping the dream and your feelings about it alive. The next rule is to use the phrase "I have me . . ." at the beginning of every sentence or verb phrase to remind you that you make all the actions and feelings in the dream occur. This counters the attitude that events, feelings, thoughts, and dreams are all visited upon us. For example, "That confuses me'' becomes "I have me be confused.'' Similarly, all passive verbs become active ones: "I hurt me" rather than "It hurts."
 
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Next, "own" the dream and all the aspects of it as part of yourself by adding the phrase "part of me" to all the adjectives and nouns (except ''me"). For example, ''Bob is chasing me" becomes "I have the Bob part of me chasing me." This serves to emphasize that you are responsible for everything in the dream all the objects, images, and events, as well as the feelings you have about them. You invented them out of your unconscious.
Finally, all pronouns such as
it
,
that
,
this
,
what
,
one
, and
you
, become personal, that is,
I
,
me
,
mine
. Thus, "It's really beautiful" becomes "I'm really beautiful," or "The flower part of me is really beautiful." Doing this personalizes the content and allows you to own every element in the dream each time it occurs. When you dream of someone or something that exists in your waking life, they represent your own perceptions of them, which are your personal creations. Dream elements have multilevel meanings, allowing even an exact replica of an event or belief from waking life to offer useful insights. If you think of your dreams as reflections of yourself and explore and appreciate them with that in mind, they will reward you with many opportunities for constructive and creative growth. As John Weir says, "I discover my uniqueness by taking ownership of myself and my experience."
Another way to look at it is that when you dream about someone, that dream character represents not only that person in your waking life, but also those qualities in yourself that resemble that person. If you dream about your son or daughter, for instance, the dream is telling you about the child part of youthe part that may need to be nurtured and protectedand about your ongoing relationship with your son or daughter as well. If you dream about being chased, think about what you are running away from in yourself in addition to trying to relate the dream to some actual event in your daily life. When you
 
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dream about your partner, be sure to look at those aspects you attribute to him or her as also being a part of you. The results of this kind of inquiry are usually quite revealing and can be very useful when communicated to your partner. That is what Rachel found out when she used the dream language technique to work on the following dream.
The Bluebird of Happiness
There is a tiny bluebird loose in the house. I think it is beautiful and try to catch it so I can keep it. I finally grab it, and it struggles to get away. One wing gets tangled and breaks. I have squeezed it too hard, and now blood is dripping from its mouth. It flutters away, trailing drops of blood. I feel terrible and am afraid it will die.
At the time that Rachel had this dream, she was passing up travel opportunities because she felt guilty about spending time away from her husband, Kevin, who was a homebody. She resented "having" to stay home and felt angry at him for "keeping" her there. When Rachel used dream language to own each part of the dream, she came to see that it was she, not Kevin, who was keeping the "free as a bird" part of her trapped. She then shared this with him and asked him how he felt about her traveling. She was pleasantly surprised when he said, ''I prefer that we spend time together, but you should do whatever is best for you, and we will work it out together as we go."
Dialoquing with Your Dream
Once you have translated your dream into dream language, you can get more information about the various parts of yourself by role-playing or "dialoguing" with them. By acting out the parts of you in the dream and speaking them in the first-

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