In this post I continue my look at the Wisdom of the Dream conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston. To read the previous posts in this series just click on the following links:
In this fourth part I will discuss the experiential dream group facilitated by Jill Fischer and take a quick look at the talk offered by Soren Ekstrom called, Dreams as Narrative and Embodied Metaphor.
Dreams in the Body
Jill Fischer is a Jungian analyst who is a longtime researcher of dreams and facilitator of a very powerful, experiential form of dream group experience. Her work is with what she calls “embodied dreamwork” and focuses on the experience of the dream rather than on a merely intellectual interpretation of a dream.
This is, in fact, an aspect of dreamwork that C.G. Jung insisted on, but which is often lost in many practitioners’ desire to understand the meaning of a dream. According to Jung:
“On paper the interpretation of a dream may look arbitrary, muddled, and spurious; but the same thing in reality can be a little drama of unsurpassed realism. To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper.”
For Fischer, the value of dreamwork is in the increased sense of vitality and energy that it can bring into a person’s life, a fact that I have observed countless times in my own dreamwork with the individuals I have worked with.
This kind of revitalization means the awakening of the emotional and feeling life of the individual, and this requires the aliveness of the body. As I have noted in another post, a dream image is not just a picture, it is a psychosomatic experience with both a mental aspect and a physical, emotional aspect to it.
This approach to dreams is a non-interpretive method in which the individual pays attention to the affective responses and sensations as they are experienced in the body. To truly experience dreams, says Fischer, requires a body that can feel into the dream.
The Body in Dreams
The dream, when approached in this way is not an idea or a series of ideas. It is a place that we visit. The dreamer, in this form of dreamwork, is asked to return to the dream and “walk through it” as if the events were happening in the present moment. We return to the environment of the dream in a mindful, embodied way.
In other words, to experience the dream in the body, we have to feel our body in the dream, in the world that the dream presents to us.
Many approaches to dreams start by extracting something from the dream. We search for an interpretation that we can take away from the dream. Though there is value to this way of approaching dreams, embodied dreamwork gives priority to the dream itself and allows the images to lead.
In this way we do not, so to speak, “barge in” to the dream’s world, but allow it to invite us in.
This is a powerful approach to dreamwork that often yields unexpected insights. In my own experience I have found it to be very effective in helping my clients to move through their barriers and roadblocks.
Embodied Metaphors
Jungian analyst Soren Ekstrom also looked at the relationship between the body and dreams. In particular, he sought to explicate the metaphorical nature of dreams.
Dreaming reflects our life experience, in that the logic of both is not a strictly causal one, but rather one of story.
The images of dreams, Ekstrom explained, are metaphors that are derived from our embodied experiences, that is, they are generalizations from lived experience. For example, to express the experience of, say, an argument, we use the metaphor of struggle: “argument is struggle.” So we say, someone won an argument, or they can’t defend their point of view.
I have looked at the bodily aspect of metaphor in an earlier post called Imagination and the Brain. One of the fascinating facts from this research, as Ekstrom points out, is that there is no difference in the brain between an event in lived experience and the same event in dream experience.
The usual way to describe this phenomenon is to say that the brain (and by extension the human being) experiences an imagined event as if it were real. This grants physical experience a greater reality than the imaginal experience, which is usually dismissed as “imaginary.”
C.G Jung, however, had a different view regarding this:
“Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world…The psychic alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even ‘unreal’ ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing ‘external.’ We may call them ‘imagination’ or ‘delusion,’ but that does not detract in any way from there effectiveness…We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.”
What we learn from the work of Jungian analysts like Jill Fischer and Soren Ekstrom is that the psychic includes both the physical and the imaginal, the body and the soul. You cannot separate the one from the other, nor can you privilege one aspect of being over the other.
Dreams present us with a holistic experience that unifies mind and body and reacquaints us with the wholeness of who we are.
In the next and final part of this series, I will discuss the talk given by Kimberley C. Patton of the Harvard Divinity School titled, Divination Through the History of Dreaming
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I am a dance/movement therapist who studied with Mary Whitehouse, a dancer whose own Jungian analysis prompted her to develop a form which she called Movement in Depth , now commonly referred to as Authentic Movement. It is the most Jungian form of dance therapy since it grew out of dance, dream, the body, and active imagination in movement. Mary’s work has influenced my work for 40 years. The choreographer of this eyes closed movement practice is psych, the same energy that is the writer of dreams. I hope you will check out the work of many dance therapists all over the world using this form for personal growth, therapeutic insight and healing, source for art and choreography. Read Joan Chodorow’s writing. She is an analyst as well as a seasoned Dance therapy pioneer.
Thank you, Heidi.
I was first exposed to Authentic Movement several years ago when I was in the theater and I can attest to its depth and power. I also had some exposure to it during my training at the Jung Institute of Boston. I agree that it is a wonderful way to experience psyche — a kind of embodied, waking dream. I’m glad that you have added this insight to this post.
Take good care,
Jason