Dogma has no place with dreams.

Tenet 5 in Jeremy Taylor's basic hints for dream work: "When talking to others about their dreams, it is both wise and polite to preface your remarks with words to the effect of "if it were my dream...," and to keep this commentary in the first person as much as possible."

First part - the classic IIWMD preface - It's truly helpful. An easy, safe way to start a sentence about dreams.

Last part - "keep this commentary in the first person as much as possible." Hunh. That makes for an AWFUL lot of "I".

I was in a group which used this approach exclusively and it was not to my liking.

First, I don't like saying "I" a lot. To excess, it feels arrogant and self-centered.

Second, I'd hoped to connect to people and dreaming, and instead, it felt like, as everyone spoke their "if it were my dream" piece, one after the other, each person threw up a plate of glass between him/herself and the dreamer.

It was sad to witness. It was isolating. There was a lot of talk but not a lot of unity or connection. There were 20 people arranged in a spiritually-appropriate circle, all behind plates of glass.

In truth, I'm spoiled with being in a small, tight, ongoing dream group. We think of dreams - even the teeniest fragment of a dream - as a gift. We face each other, we attend fully to each other's dreams without interrupting until the floor is open to thoughts and queries. We sometimes use the IIWMD approach, but loosely, making room to ask (gently, respectfully) how the dream might apply to her waking life.

Maybe the full-on "IIWMD, plus first person" approach is necessary for larger groups (<10-15), to which participants don't expect to maintain a long-term relationship, to keep people from going armchair-analyst and leveling their interpretations at innocent dreamers.