House of Games: Shadows in Dreams

Dr. Margaret Ward: What is the animal?
Incarcerated female patient: The animal?
DMW: You said in your dream, you saw the face of an animal.
IFP: I don't know how to say it. It was...
DMW: Yes?
IFP: It was a... I...I want to say... I don't know how to say it.

Dr. Margaret Ward: Listen to this. In her dream, she saw a foreign animal.
Dr. Maria Littauer: What is the animal?
DMW: She cannot think of the name. The animal is saying "I am only trying to do good."
I say "What name comes up when you think of this animal?" She says...
DML: Yes?
DMW: It is a lirg. It is called a lirg. If we invert "lirg", a "lirg" is a "girl". So she is the animal and she is saying "I'm just trying to do good."

Ward did some wordplay, which is a fun way to derive meaning from dreams.

Let's look at some more.

First, it's an interesting technique to ask for the name of a foreign dream animal. It's a difficult question to answer: What name comes up when you think of this animal? I wouldn't know whether to invent a name for it or to say who I thought the animal represented. If I were doing this, outside of a Mamet screenplay, I would probably start out with, what's that foreign animal like, and get more of a description and a better sense of the dreamer's reaction to it.

Second, in keeping with the spirit of the film, which runs in the underworld, in the shadows - "foreignness" is another sign of possible shadow emergence in dreams. The Shadow is part of us. It's the stuff we'd rather not know about ourselves, the stuff we'd rather not exist. We may fear it or despise it, try to ignore it or dispose of it. But it's ever there.

"I'm just trying to do good." If something strange, feared, or reviled said this to you, where would you go with it - What would you think? What would it mean to you?

House of Games

Some films are worth watching more than once, as you pick up different layers each time. I would argue that House of Games is one of those. It was released in 1987, and yes, for those hunting for 1980s dating elements, there are some shoulder pads - but frankly, they fit the rather severe, controlled persona of the main character, psychiatrist Margaret Ward.

You can IMDB the details - things start rolling with Ward's interest in the underworld of confidence games and her connecting with Mike, a self-professed con man.

If you want to watch a film about delving into the shadows - encountering The Shadow - this is a good one. The environment is dark. The plot moves forward in back rooms. The main characters are criminals, people who operate outside the rule of law. Nothing is as it seems.

There is some great Shadow elements to the dialogue as well:

Mike to Dr. Ward: "There are many sides to each of us. Good blood. Bad blood. Somehow, all those parts have got to speak. You know what I'm talking about."

Mike to Dr. Ward: "And you learned things about yourself that you'd rather not know. I'm sorry for that."

***********************
Aside: one of the people Dr. Ward and Mike, her con man mentor, take advantage of (they "borrow" his hotel room and bed for a time) is a broker for E.F. Hutton. This little detail was cute then (money laundering, near-collapse), and, interestingly enough, because E.F.Hutton was absorbed by Citigroup, it's cute now.

One Card Will Do

To counter thoughts of data sufficiency and other quanty things, I'm taking a course on tarot with Anya Weber at the Brookline Adult Ed.

It's a really nice class with a blend of all kinds of different people - men, women; tarot geeks, tarot curious; pairs of friends, people flying solo; many backgrounds, many reasons for coming.

I like Anya's style in general - and I like how she took time in the first class to point out the artist's vision in tarot decks she was showing us. Many think "you see one tarot deck you've seen them all." But that's not true. There are many built on the Rider Waite structure - but there are plenty of others. I like all kinds of decks - and am drawn to whatever works in the moment to stimulate ideas and connections.

At the end of the first class we had an exercise: Pose a question for the week and draw a card. I wanted to share what I did here, while it's fresh in my mind.

The card: Magus (magician) from the Thoth deck.

While looking at that card, I played some little games with myself - mostly paying attention to my automatic responses, to where my eyes went in the card, and to where my brain went. It wasn't easy - like following a small white cat under furniture.

First thought: Crap, what does this mean? I don't remember anything the book said.
Second thought: Ok, relax. There won't be a quiz.
3rd: This card is blue with graph things sort of containing a guy in the middle.
4th: This guy is golden. He's got a lot of things in the air and he's nicely balanced on one foot. Everything seems to work out for him.
5th: There's this darker creature - monkey? - on the bottom right. Don't know what his angle is - he's climbing up from below, might be trying to knock the golden guy off his balance for whatever reason. If I had to say, I'm probably most like the shadow monkey and less like the golden guy. I'd rather be the golden guy.

That was the most lesson-like thought that occurred to me of all of them: be like the golden guy instead of the shadow monkey.

Cut to "waking life" event: Ran into a perfect version of the golden guy at work.

In the situation, believe it or not, I became aware of the lower-level shadow monkey emerging in me - and became aware of my agreement with myself that I was entitled to be golden too. It's hard to describe how all this came to mind at once - it was very fast.

We had a perfectly fine conversation. Shadow monkey left the picture in that moment. I felt balanced.

That's an example of what can happen when you work with a single card.
The layers of images, numbers, and colors can be evocative, you can make choices based on what you see, and you can carry those choices forward.

Good stuff, Maynard!

Recurring Dream Theme: Being in Grocery Stores

With due credit to the Clash, I never seem to be lost in a supermarket. Instead I wander among well-stocked aisles or produce sections. Or I'm in the entry, with the interlocked silver carts, or at the customer service counter.

It occurred to me, after working a dream featuring one version of "the grocery store" theme, that grocery has the sound of the word "grow" in it. I liked that. It hadn't occurred to me before today - and I've been having these kinds of dreams since graduate school.

One thing that's difficult about recurring dreams is that they acquire recurring stories. The grocery store theme, I thought, was about my having nothing but being among plenty (This was particularly true in graduate school). Thing is, once you think you know what the dream's about, the more likely you are to dismiss it. And that's when you lose the chance to explore it.

That's what I've been doing lately with recurring dreams - purposefully getting curious about "that same old song." It's yielded fruit!

Recurring Dream Theme: Hair Washing Discoveries and Thank Yous

So the hair washing dreams have been dormant for a while. Wonder if whatever needed to be washed out was. Those who left comments left very apt ones - y'all certainly saw more than I did. What did I hear once, looking at your own dreams is like trying to read a letter with the back of your head. Such blind spots!

In short, the family business got attended to, the household was deconstructed. Things got "cleaned up" - the kitchen was where we did a lot of the work, and I did have to actually use my mom's Dial soap.

I didn't think of this before, but the five stoves of different sizes evokes for me my family: my mother, father, my two brothers, and me. Our stories were in the house that my husband and I cleaned out - and I brought a number of sentimentally valuable things with me - to keep their fires alive, I guess.

I'd like to make another point here, and that is that even after sharing a dream, offering and receiving comments and insights, and pondering, sometimes you still you don't really "get" a dream until a later time. And that's ok. If the issue is an urgent one, another dream will come.

Recurring Dreams and 30 Rock

In “Goodbye, My Friend,” Frank Rositano and Jack Donaghy share recurring dreams of being overpowered by female bodybuilders.

Tina Fey to New York regarding non-product-placement references to McDonald's: "Also, the upcoming story line where Liz Lemon starts dating Grimace is just based on a recurring dream I have. Seriously, though, it's not product placement."

A rash of recurring dreams among the 30 Rock team?

All about large, powerful, sometimes-purple things.

But why Grimace - and not the Grape Ape? hmh?

Triangulating

From here: "Triangulation is an approach to data analysis that synthesizes data from multiple sources."

And from here: "In order to successfully triangulate, known features must exist on your map. In other words, you must have some idea of where you are ..."

And don't you have to know where you are to have a better sense of where you are going?

So.

I've been honing and polishing the BCAE Diving Into Your Dreams class I'm scheduled to teach soon - and was looking at different ways to record dreams to share with my class.

From moseying back into the social psych world (here), I remembered that James Pennebaker, social psychologist, has shown that some forms of expressive writing have physical and mental health benefits.

In the Writing and Health section of one of his sites was listed the following topic to write on: "Something that you are dreaming about."

Many of the journalingjournal books that were recommended on that page do have sections on dreams, which was funny to me, as when I was really into Writing Down the Bones freewriting, I never really noticed those dream parts.

Of note, to get those benefits from expressive writing, according to the tested protocol, you have to "really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts." Indeed, most journalingjournal book sections on dreams don't promote this kind of digging.

BUT - In the dream enthusiast community, when we work with dreams, which are ripe with all sorts of utterly personal content, we explicitly follow the emotional narrative and attend to the "energy" or "juice" - or even lack thereof - because that is where paydirt is!

I say let's move forward by bringing these two separate disciplines, expressive or therapeutic writing, and dreamwork closer together.

Care to join?

Why I traded in my morning pages for a dream journal

It started with signing up for a course based on Writing Down the Bones. That's where I learned of the freewriting practice, putting pen to paper for a certain period of time, not stopping to review or correct.

I like to write. I prefer writing well - but I liked the discipline and freedom of freewriting. Discipline: don't edit. Freedom: no edits.

The Artist's Way and Bird by Bird also found their way into my hands. I started Morning Pages, adding the discipline of an early start time to my practice. I discovered certain writing methods have demonstrable healing effects.

But I got tired of applying discipline with no tangible goal. My pages were dreck. That was okay, but it was also not okay. (Can I write something other than dreck?) I got lazy, laying the same narrative onto different prompts. I got sick of reciting the contents of my refrigerator and writing "I can't think of anything more to write." and "I'm bored with this."

Someone creative, learned, and wise invited me to apply to join her selective dream circle: "You're creative and quick, you'd like this." Guess she knew that creative people tend to dream.

I joined and learned that keeping a dream journal was good practice, as it lets you witness how your dreams are consistent, or change, over time. It was easy for me to narrate what came to me during the night, easier than writing for the sake of strengthening my writing muscle. It was almost as if some inner playwright, with a better sense of the dramatic than I have in waking life, was doing the grunt work for me, and keeping me entertained.

The dreams that come - and they seemed to come more, now that I was paying attention - continue to interest me enough to keep writing them down. My dreams are not really bizarre, though sometimes they include strange details or novel objects, and not often epic. But there are interesting emotions that arise in the dream scenes - uneasiness, anger, elation, wistfulness - and some version of me is present, as observer or character, in a scene just "off " enough to make me curious: What did I do that for? I wouldn't do that in waking life!"

The Morning Pages went by the wayside - now I just write out my dreams as I recall them - and fold in any work done with the dream material.

The freewriting practice, though, still holds. Putting pen to paper without stopping to review or correct seems to help the dream material travel more easily from the ethereal to the everyday.

Why is it?

That dreams are consulted for powerful answers, but seldom for powerful questions?

How to provoke a dream enthusiast

Publish an article in the New York Times about dreams. Looking in the Times archives, it looks like that happens twice a year to twice a quarter.

John Tierney's What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever Your Bias Says was sent to me by Anya and served as the object of a lively discussion among my dream group.

One thing I really appreciated was the piece included a link to the source paper's pdf. For your convenience, the paper is here.

What kind of surprised me, and pleased me in a funny recognizing sort of way, is seeing a journal that wasn't Sleep or Dreaming or Jungian, or at least something clinical and therapeutic, but JPSP - the journal I came to know and fly toward in my preparation for the publish or perish path I didn't really end up taking.

So I plowed in.

Into the researchjournalspeak and the very lovely charts and path models.

What struck me is that the paper is more benign than what was in the Times and seems less about dreams and more about judgement.

First, people tend to believe that dreams contain meaningful information or reveal hidden truths.

Next, dreams impact judgement.

Also, pre-existing beliefs impact how meaningful dreams are considered.

Yeah, okay - so? These things make sense, and aren't all that provocative.

Something did strike me, though. I noticed was that the participants were laypeople - which is great for generalizability of the research results - but there are some extra things to know about your average person-on-the-street ...

In general, people who are at a distance from the whole dream scene, tend to:
- believe dreams are weird, bizarre, woo-woo, or spooky
- be most familiar with pop culture's version of Freud and Jung
- be most likely to go straight to a published dream dictionary for a given meaning

They are less likely to look curiously and open-heartedly at dream material, assume it's not presented to tell them what they already know, and ask open-ended questions about layers of meaning the material might have.

I'm here to change that :)

Exercise: Dream and Tarot Integration Mandala

For this exercise, you'll need a writing instrument, a piece of paper (I use butcher paper), a tarot deck, and a dream of some sort.

Optional: I also use a plate (to trace a circle around) and colored pens.

1. Write down a dream narrative and the date you had the dream
2. Title the dream without thinking too much - write that under your dream narrative
3. Within the dream narrative, circle the image (person, place, thing, event, action) that most attracts or repels you
4. Draw a serving-plate sized circle under your dream narrative
5. Pull a tarot card from a face-down deck
6. To the left side of your circle, record which deck and card you drew
7. Study the tarot card you pulled then put it to the side
8. Without looking at the card again, what aspect of that card comes to your mind first

Now, about that circle you drew - that circle is your mandala. It integrates.
You'll be representing two things inside the circle, however you want to represent them.
One thing is the image from the dream that most attracted or repelled you; the other is the element from the tarot card you drew.
Put these two images together within the mandala however feels right to you. Do what you want with the images - create a scene with them, create a pattern with them, whatever you choose. Add elements into the mix as they feel right to you.

When you feel your mandala is complete, give it its own title (again, without thinking too much), and/or write a sentence condensing what your mandala means to you at this time.

If you are inclined, you can also write a "powerful question" to bring from this exercise into your daily life.

I tried this exercise over the weekend, to flesh out a grocery store dream (another recurring image in my dream repertoire - see hair washing for another). Here are the gory details:
-The key image was fake grass - the kind that produce sits on in a grocery store.
-The tarot card I pulled, from the Thoth deck, was 3 wands, pointing down (reversed?) - a very yellow/orange card. My eye was drawn to the intersection of the wands and the flaming star there.
-It's hard to portray the mandala that emerged in "print" - Basically, I drew in the center of my circle a core of yellow with orange flames, and bordered it all, including flames, by fake green grass. Apples and oranges rested at the bottom of the mandala. And I put the number 3 in blue above the fruits.

The sentence?
Basically the mandala looked really, really feminine. It looked like things were still early in whatever process - still "gestating" or "cooking" - and that there's still a lot of fake mixed in with the real.

The conclusion:
I need to relax and let things cook. I also need to be mindful of that fake stuff - it could stifle the flames or be ignited by them - neither of which is very good.

The question:
1. What's the fake stuff?
2. Do I need to intervene - or will it simply get burned off in the cooking?

6 Ways Dreams Inspire

The last post concerned how Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had a memorable vampire dream that she developed into the best-selling book.

How else can dreams inspire? Here are six ways:

1. A dream tutor or mentor gives direct instructions on how to do something. Imagine if you could call on Coco Chanel to resolve a tricky sleeve issue, or President Lincoln for coaching on your oratory.

2. The dreamer strolls around a personal dream gallery or library, fixing on one outstanding work to bring into waking life.

3. The dreamer recreates the script or story that is dictated in the dream. The dream story that grew into Twilight is certainly not the first of these occurrences.

4. A model or subject appears in the dream to be represented in an art form or design. In Deirdre Barrett's Committee of Sleep, a sculptor was commissioned to create a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt. According to Barrett's narration, Eleanor Roosevelt appeared to the sculptor in a dream - but to the scuptor, it wasn't the pleasant experience of being handed a likeness on a silver platter, rather, the dream embodied a sense of overwhelm and forced her to "look at reality in a manner I don't ordinarily."

5. A dream image, either central and numinous or incidental, suggests a solution. The classic example of this is the dream that inspired Elias Howe, of sewing machine fame, to move the eye to the tip of the needle. In the dream, he was captured by cannibals who put him into a pot of water to cook him and kept pushing him back into the pot with their spears. Thing is, each spear had a hole through it, like a big sewing needle, but near the head rather than the tail.

6. In the dream, the dreamer takes a different point of view, which allows a difficult or blocked story or project to come forth more readily. For instance, an adult dreamer can take on the voice of a child, or a dreaming man becomes a little girl (As with Stephen King).

Best-Seller Twilight: Sourced From a Dream?

According to March 2009's Vogue, Stephenie Meyer "woke up with a dream reverberating in her head. It was a vampire dream. She had not dreamed of vampires before, had not been reading about vampires. To this day, she has not figured out why vampires"

Happily for throngs of us, she transcribed and developed what came. From her website:

"I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book."

Dreams are terrific creative resources. For one thing, they do their conjuring without much effort on our parts, while we sleep. Stephenie Meyer's Chapter 13 seems to have benefitted from dream dictation, where the dreamer mostly needs to recreate in waking life what the dream has already put together.

In future posts, we'll talk about several more ways dreams can provide us with inspiration.
A great book on the subject is The Committee of Sleep by Deirdre Barrett. Please share any and all ideas and comments that come to you as well!

What if a tornado fell in love with you?

Neko Case, of the New Pornographers, is out with a new release, Middle Cyclone. It caught my ear in the interview I was listening to that many songs on this record come from dreams, like “This Tornado Loves You” and “Prison Girls.”

She counts 17th, among the 17 things that she loves, "Remembering My Dreams." In the Paste Magazine article, she lists at least four...

"But the best dream I’ve had lately was where my grandma called me on the grey princess phone, and I answered it in the middle of a big green pasture. She passed away a year ago, but she was calling to tell me she was feeling much better and wanted me to know she was looking out for me. ...“Do you have anything else to tell me?” She thought about it for quite a while. She finally answered in a soft and serious tone, “Make sure you have your say.” She said it like she was telling everyone, so I thought I should let you know."

Among the best gifts a dream can give are comfort, reconnection with a loved one, creative ideas, powerful questions, and wisdom. Thank you, Neko Case, for sharing these gifts with us.

For another example of a reconnection dream, visit this dreamcurrent entry from October 2008.