The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (7 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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are usually experienced by one member of the couple and then shared with the other, this last form of dreaming is generated by a couple together.
Visioning dreams involve three basic steps:
1. Making a proclamation of what can be (stating the vision).
2. Agreeing to work together to make the vision come true.
3. Establishing specific steps to take to accomplish the goals.
In many cases, the "designed futures" of visioning dreams require some support from outside the couplefrom friends, family, or members of the community. As you "vision" your future, you can incorporate roles others might play. For instance, if Bill wants to go back to college for his master's degree, he and Maryann may vision a two-year period where he uses flex time at his job to commute to a nearby college. Perhaps they see her as working two Saturdays per month to help raise tuition money. Together, they might then imagine a Saturday tradeoff between themselves and another neighborhood family, when they would babysit everyone's children one week and then have another family sit their children the next. This would free up space in their schedule for Maryann's overtime.
Darlene and Morgan have been married for more than five years. Although they describe themselves as being happy and enjoying their relationship, each of them had recently confided in a friend that they felt their relationship lacked the passion and spontaneity it once had, especially since the birth of their two-year-old son, Ricky. A friend suggested that they work on a visioning dream for their couple. The process began with each of them writing down the potential they saw for themselves if everything went exactly as they would like. Each wrote down their own vision of what they saw. Darlene wrote:
 
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I see us laughing and having fun. We are going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, eating by candlelight and looking deeply into each other's eyes. We order champagne and drink it slowly, flirting and holding hands under the table. We have a gooey chocolate dessert with whipped cream. We talk about our wedding night and how much we enjoyed sleeping late, reading the paper, and making love all day.
Morgan wrote:
I see us sitting by the pool, drinking mai-tais. We take turns rubbing suntan oil on each other's backs. All the while, we are laughing and splashing each other. We feel so playful and carefree.
Darlene and Morgan read out loud what they each wrote. They both remembered that it had been quite a while since they had a good laugh together. It seemed like they had been taking everything too seriously lately, what with the baby and all. Morgan was worried about trying to get a promotion at work and making more money to pay for child care so that Darlene could go back to her career. Darlene was worried about leaving Ricky with a sitter but really wanted to start working again. They just hadn't had time to have fun together, just the two of them. When they shared their separate visioning dreams, they saw that they had something in commonthey wanted to have more fun. They agreed to try to do so.
From what Morgan and Darlene had written and expressed, they created a vision, a dream about the future they wanted for themselves. They then set about planning how to fulfill this
 
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promise to their couple. Within a month, they had planned a dinner out at a fancy restaurant and a weekend away, when Ricky was visiting his grandmother. They were soon drinking champagne and laughing and rubbing suntan oil on each other, just like in their visions. They had visioned a future of having fun and then actually caused it to happen.
Darlene and Morgan's simple solution shows how quickly visioning allows you to break through "what is" and get on with "what's possible" for you as a couple. All you have to do is imagine together!
Child's Play
Our dreams have been with us from infancy, when the majority of our snoozing is REM sleep, the kind during which all mammals dream (yes, it's true, dogs, cats, and monkeys also dream!). We begin remembering our "sleeping" dreams as young children, and we may remember most vividly those dreams that are especially frightening to us. Anyone who has comforted a child awakened by a nightmare knows the feeling of closeness that results when the conversation moves beyond "That was only a dream" to inquire about the possible meaning of the dream: "Did the mean boy in your dream chase you across the street? How did you feel? What would you like to say to the mean boy?" As the child gains power over the dream situation by finishing or changing the dream, you can almost feel him fill with confidence.
Similarly, a child's "stories" and "fibs" also reveal her wishes and fears. Just as adults' daydreams express so much more than what is on the surface, so do a child's fantasies. At about age two, children begin to learn the difference between what is real and what is unreal. They may develop imaginary
 
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friends or begin recounting elaborate yet impossible tales that they swear are true. These daydreams''the kitchen caught fire yesterday, but then a hand came out of the wall and put the fire out''reveal a great deal about the little dreamer; in this case, the child is imagining how chaos is restored by forces beyond her imagining. In the course of their day, parents of young children sort out the many plot details of countless little tales, perhaps recognizing that "the monster under the bed" is a symbol for their fears of growing up. These insights can occur just by spending time together sharing the child's dream and remembering your own childhood.
Children are not the only ones whose playful minds reveal more than they realize; nor are parent-child relationships the only ones that can grow through dreamwork. Couples, too, can grow by sharing dreams with each other, both privately and in the presence of their children and others. For couples, dreams are vehicles for sharing intimate and exciting information in the present, and for creating a future together and a path to reach it. Through dream interpretation, guided fantasy, and visioning, couples can make dreamwork seem like child's play. And we believe the couple that plays together stays together! In the next chapter, we explore some techniques for dreamwork and
dream play
that you can do with your partner, family, and others.
 
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Chapter Three
Learning the Three Rs of Dreamwork:
Recalling, Recording, and Reviewing Your Dreams
To take advantage of the many treasures of the dream world, you must learn how to access and make use of them. Like learning the three Rs in schoolreading, writing, and 'rithmeticyou have to master the three Rs of dreamworkrecalling, recording, and reviewingin order to get the most value from your dreams. Unlike the traditional education system, however, you don't need special skills or instructors. No money, specialized equipment, or sophisticated knowledge is necessary to explore the dream universe; a Ph.D. in dream interpretation is not required. All you need is the desire and the will to embark on the journey into this inner world. Being interested in your dreams is, in fact, the most crucial factor in being able to remember them, which is the beginning step on the path to being able to benefit from them in your waking life.
To get the most value from a dream, the first thing you have to do is to be able to recall it. Remembering dreams is a
 
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possibility for anyone, even someone (perhaps your own spouse) who says, "I don't dream." This is because, as we know from the laboratory studies of REM described in chapter 2, everyone has several dreams each night, though we generally don't remember most of them. If you woke up your partner during REM sleep, chances are very good that she would be able to recall a dream, even if she is usually unable to do so when waking up naturally. If you woke up after every REM period, you would likely be able to recall as many as six dreams in a single night. Awaken your partner during some other part of the sleep cycle, called quiet sleep, and he would probably remember nothing at all.
You may be a vivid dream recaller who regales your partner with elaborate tales of your adventures in dreamland. If your partner is a poor recaller, he may wonder how in the world these images manage to stow away in your mind each morning. The fact is, people who believe they don't dream create a self-fulfilling prophecy of a "dreamless" reality for themselves. The opposite also holds true, however. As you expand your awareness about dreams and delve deeper into your own dreamworld and that of your partner, your dream life will grow.
Whatever your level of dream recall, you can improve it if you so desire. People who prepare themselves to notice their dreams and who enjoy sharing them are more likely to remember them. Any attention you or your partner pays to your dream life can help increase your dream recall. Some of the things you can do with your dreams include sharing and listening to them, reading about them (such as what you're doing now), recording them in a journal, "programming" or planning dreams, making a drawing based on a dream, and acting on advice or insights gained from a dream. These and other methods of reviewing your dreams with another person are explored in this and later

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