The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (3 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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these new relationships is a difficult job, however. The mystery of love is an elusive one, and the solutions to relationship problems are not easy to recognize. One place we may find new ideas and guidance for working on our relationships is in our dreams. As "The Wake-up Call" shows, dreams can have some important things to tell us, if we are prepared to look and listen. We are at a time in history when people are ready for a "wake-up call" that reveals new possibilities about their relationships.
In our culture, we aren't accustomed to believing in the power of dreams. To be called a dreamer usually implies an inability to deal with reality. The opposite is actually the case, however. Research shows that people who are deprived of dreamtime become disorganized in their thinking and increasingly irritable and anxious. Thus, it seems that just having dreams is necessary for healthy functioning. Moreover, dreams, fantasies, and visions are parts of everyday life that we can acknowledge and use systematically to open up new horizons.
Many people are not aware that everyone dreams every night, several times, and the mind creates daydreams constantly if we let it. These dreams can empower us to explore new models for our relationships by revealing our deepest emotional and psychological needs. They can provide an alternative way of viewing reality beyond everyday awareness. Telling someone about a dream is an intimate act that can encourage more communication and enhance the development of empathy. By interpreting and creating dreams together, a couple can expand and develop their communication skills while having fun in the process.
There are no obvious answers to how either couples or dreams function, and there is no structure currently in place to help us find those answers. In addition, men and women have little language in common when it comes to expressing themselves. In the words of author and poet Adrienne Rich, it is like
 
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"walking on ice": "At this moment . . . there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us."
That's where dreams come in, giving us access to powerful personal images and an alternative "language"a language of the creative unconscious that functions beyond our everyday understanding and outside our waking habits. Dreams can put us in touch with our intuitions and deeper truths in ways that may be unavailable to our normal conscious thinking. In these respects, couples work and dreamwork seem to be natural partners for exploring the mysteries of loving relationships and for creating new possibilities for the future.
Dream Sharing: Finding a Common Ground
Much has been written and debated about the biological and sociological differences between men and women. Not surprisingly, the dreams of women and men reflect these variations in their content, form, and themes. Though some of these distinctions have changed over time as the roles of men and women evolve, many of the gender differences in dream content reported in the 1940s remain. Following are some of the gender characteristics documented by Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle in their book
The Content Analysis of Dreams
.
Men's and Women's Dreams
Women, who have traditionally been more concerned with the home and family, have more dreams that take place in familiar settings and involve family and other familiar people. Their
 
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dreams also reflect many themes of intimacy and fear of loss of their loved ones. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women. Women's
 
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dreams focus on color, clothing, jewelry, hair, and facial features of dream characters. Men's dreams tend to have more unfamiliar and professional characters in them and are concerned more with issues of power, success or failure, and money. Females today, as compared to women studied in the 1940s, dream about sexuality as often as men do, but their erotic dreams still tend to take place with a familiar partner; and when they dream about sexual contact with someone else, they are more likely than men to feel guilty about it. Men's sexual dreams more often involve making love with someone other than their waking-life partner.
Though men and women have the same number of dreams, women tend to remember and share their dreams more often than men do. They also report more nightmares and psychic dreams than men do. In general, women's dream reports are longer, and they can recall more details of the content. Women are more willing than men to get close, make eye contact, and be touched by others, all of which play an important role in sharing and exploring dreams with another person. This difference in communicating about dreams reflects the unique ways that men and women express their feelings in general. Both sexes have the same emotions; they just don't express them in the same ways.
Compared with men, women generally have a natural inclination to be intuitive and share their feelings. Brain research indicates that this may be related to the distinct ways that men's and women's brains are physically organized: Women use both hemispheres of the brain more equally than men do, giving them a more balanced base from which to operate. Dream content is certainly also related to the strict roles and expectations that men and women are subjected to in our society. Whatever the reason for these differences, the big question is not which
 
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behavior pattern is "better," but rather, how to make the most of these differences as individuals and as a couple.
Both the picture language of dreams and the process of working on dreams tap internal sources of information. Women may have a greater interest in dreams because dreaming is one form of the nonverbal, emotional mode of experience to which they are more attuned. Men, however, have the same opportunity to access the dreamworld as women do. In fact, their natural tendency to be more focused and less distractible can bring a unique perspective to working on dreams. For example, in "The Wake-up Call," Peter got right to the point about the problem situation and his feelings. No need for a long, complicated story; he felt anxious and guilty about not living up to his responsibilities in our relationship. Sharing this dream gave him a way to talk about feelings he had had for years, even before we ever met, about not feeling acknowledged. Like many men, he had withheld and internalized these feelings rather than expressing them openly. But being the "strong, silent type" has been linked to a variety of mental and physical disorders such as depression, heart problems, and shortened life span.
Times are changing for men as well as for women. Men do not need to view being in touch with dreams and visions as giving into some mysterious feminine characteristic; rather, they can see it as using both sides of the brain and the entire self to share feelings about the past or present and to construct plans for the future. Discovering and working on dreams can allow men to access more of their creative, emotional inner selves and put them on the course of fulfillment in their relationships at home and at work. By exploring the domain of dreams with a partner, men can come to see that sharing dreams is not giving up control, but expanding their field of power and effectiveness both personally and as a couple.
 
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Women will need to support men in this kind of sharing because of the natural inclination females have to report their dreams and feelings. It is time for women to heed the words of Alfonso Montuori and Isabelle Conti in their book
The Partnership Planet
: "We have responsibility not just to create but to co-create." The process of figuring out how to work on dreams together can be practice for working out other issues in a relationship as well. Dreamwork as a couple then becomes a way to overcome the rigid boundaries and roles that may restrict more creative and productive ways of relating. In their book
The Mirages of Marriage
, marital therapists William Lederer and Don Jackson alert men and women to the powerful control they have over these roles:
The behavior pattern, attitudes, and temperaments of the male and the female are not inherently rigid. Despite the habits and cumulative forces of society, the man and woman can determine for themselves what role each will have in marriage. When they are unable to do this, then the marriage either will fail, or will be merely a numb, routine affair. Trouble is caused not by the vast differences (which don't exist), but by the inability to choose and activate the desirable or necessary role.
Because our dreams can put us in touch with the unrecognized, undeveloped parts of ourselves, paying attention to dreams can be very helpful at this time of changing sex roles. The renowned psychologist Carl Jung and others stated years ago that there is something of both the male and the female in all of us, and that the more we know of both these parts, the
 
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fuller our lives can become. Women can use their dreams to develop the traditionally masculine qualities once denied them: assertiveness, independence, leadership, and power. This is a crucial task as women struggle to expand their options both within and outside of the traditional home and family. Dreams can help women make this transition by revealing strengths that may have gone unnoticed at a conscious level, as in this dream of Carol's:
Getting Off the Horse
I'm going to a meeting. I see Dave there and want to be with him, but he's too busy and surrounded by other people. Then I go to meet Bob at a parade. He's dressed in full uniform and riding a horse. He gets off the horse, and we walk away holding hands. I feel excited.
Carol had this dream before leaving on her first big business trip. She felt anxious and disorganized until she worked on the dream. She imagined Dave telling her that being busy professionally could be a lot of fun. Then she envisioned Bob "getting off his high horse" and telling her that it is easy to be organized and on time (in step with the parade) when she wants to be. "This dreamwork," Carol said, "helped me feel more relaxed about my masculine side and excited about the trip, which turned out to be a smashing success."
In a similar way, men can use their dreams as a safe place to discover and explore the more "feminine" parts of themselves that so many of them have ignored or resisted acknowledging for so long. This dream of Stewart's is a good example:
Communicating Well
I'm in Germany, and I run into Jane. We catch a cab to the airport together. I don't speak the language, and I'm worried

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