Working with Dreams

I started paying attention to my dreams closely about 10 years ago. I was working with a mentor who was trained in dreamwork, and he encouraged me to begin recording my dreams. I rarely remembered my dreams, but noticed that as my curiosity about my dreams grew, the frequency of dreams that I remembered upon waking also began to increase.

One night, I had a dream that inexplicably shook me to my core. I remember waking in the middle of the night, writing every detail so it wouldn’t be forgotten. The dream involved getting chased by a buffalo. I found a pond filled with lava to put between me and the buffalo, and as it charged into the lava, I caught the buffalo’s eyes as it sank. It occurred to me that it was never trying to hurt me, it just wanted to be near me, and that I caused its death by running.

A few days later I was collaborating with a musician friend, writing instrumental music. We decided to create a soundtrack to the dream story, which you can listen to below. I brought the dream to my mentor, who walked me back into the dream story in the present. We found an area in nature that had a similar open field, and he helped me get back into the dream as fully as possible in order to feel what the dream was asking me to feel: fear, regret, and grief.

To this day I still don’t have a story about what this dream “means” in a cognitive sense, but I do have an embodied understanding of what the dream was wanting me to feel. Engaging with this dream through dreamwork changed me in ways that continue to unfold even now 10 years later. Much of my own personal work has revolved around getting into contact with the emotions that the dream evoked.

James Hollis talks about dreams having a compensatory nature, in that they nudge us towards the areas of our life that our conscious mind is neglecting. As a therapist, one of my central guiding principles is that every person possesses an inner intelligence that knows exactly what is needed, and it is my job to listen for and help you listen for this voice. Dreams are one powerful yet subtle way to access this deeper intelligence.

In the style of dreamwork I practice, we don’t work on the dream, we allow the dream to work on us. Rather than only analyzing symbols, you’re invited to re-experience the dream in the present moment. Sometimes that means creating art, spending time in nature, embodying a dream character, or simply noticing how the dream continues to show up in your daily life. We often get ourselves into a bind by trying to understand something that is longing to be felt. Dreams rarely give us explanations. More often, they give us another chance to feel what our waking mind has been trying to outrun.

The dream in full, scored a few days after it happened.