The Art of Dreaming: A Creativity Toolbox for Dreamwork
220
The Art of Dreaming: A Creativity Toolbox for Dreamwork
220eBook
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Overview
A clinical psychologist offers a revolutionary approach to dream analysis—through artistic expression: “A jewel.”—Robert A. Johnson, author of Inner Work
Dream books that guide readers to work with their dreams invariably ask them to write their dreams down, or perhaps record them. The Art of Dreaming stands apart from all other dream books in that it invites readers to work with their dreams in whatever medium is most natural and beneficial to them. For some, that might in fact be writing or talking, but for others it might be drawing or painting or working in clay or dancing or dramatizing or recreating movement or maskmaking or working in multimedia or creating poetry. This book is a beautiful integration of dreaming and creativity, one that takes readers to a place where they can work with both the essential and deep messages from their dreams.
The book makes use of illustrative icons to clearly indicate to readers the art medium for each activity, enabling them to go directly to the type of activity that most appeals to them.
“Mellick, a clinical psychologist and registered expressive arts therapist, details a multitude of ways to decipher your dreams…describes visual, vocal, and theatrical methods for cracking imagery.”—Library Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609253325 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Mango Media |
| Publication date: | 05/22/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| Sales rank: | 1,022,055 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Poet, artist, and writer Jill Mellick, Ph.D., is the co-author of The Worlds of P'otsunu, and author of The Natural Artistry of Dreams. She travels and teaches internationally, focusing on the use of the arts for psychospiritual dimensions and has been in private practice for many years as a Jungian-oriented clinical psychologist and registered expressive arts therapist. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
Marion Woodman, Ph.D. (Hon.) is the author of many widely respected books, including the bestselling Addiction to Perfection. She lives in Canada.
Read an Excerpt
The Art of Dreaming
Tools for Creative Dream Work
By Jill Mellick
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 2001 Jill MellickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-332-5
CHAPTER 1
Entering Your Dream World
A dream tells you where you are, not what to do; or, by placing you where you are, it tells you what you are doing.
—James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Let me invite you to enter into your dream world in new ways, both innovative and traditional, and to enrich your psychospiritual development through expressive dream work. If you have experience in working with dreams, I invite you to dip into this chapter to revisit and make more conscious your assumptions about dreaming, dream theory, and dream work. I also invite you to entertain holding paradoxical views and contradictory theories about how dreams operate—in time, in space, cross-culturally, and across media.
If you are new to dream work, I invite you to walk with me in this new realm with curiosity and openness to many theories and approaches, any one of which might become relevant and helpful to you at a particular moment or for a particular dream.
Most important, I invite you to join me in deepening your dream experiences by expressing them through a wide variety of creative arts, both verbal and nonverbal, including visual art, movement, poetry, myth, fairy tale, dramatization, wordplay, imaginative journeys, art media, and ritual.
Dreams prove that in our inner world we are effortless and talented creative artists—superb wordsmiths, mythmakers, fine artists, and craftspeople capable of simile, metaphor, symbol, and imagery unbounded by the cognitive restrictions of waking life. By using simple multimedia arts practices, we can let our dreams express their artistry in our waking world as well as in our dreaming world.
Some practices in this book assume the value of symbolic interpretation. Others provide ways to bring understandings from dreams into daily life. Others offer ways to nurture imagination. Still others focus on narrative threads that weave dream fabric. Many break out of linear storyline (especially conventional Western storyline), inviting you to experience your dream as a nonlinear art-form such as haiku, collage, claywork, or body experience. If you suspend disbelief and embrace each new approach as a possible lens, you can discover those practices that most enhance both your dreaming and waking lives.
Receive Dreams as Messengers from Another Realm
Dreams haunt us with their images, words, sounds, and feelings. They often influence our inner and outer lives. They disturb, amuse, intrigue, haunt, and inspire. They are messengers from another realm, with their own logic that is antithetical to daylight logic.
Dreams use the narrative structure of the soul, a logic that dispenses with cause and effect, that exists in a timeless, spatially unbounded universe where we are allowed to do the impossible: to occupy two timeframes or places at once; to be our current age but in our childhood home; to change our sex; to be older and younger; to experience the consciousness of two people at once; to see events from different perspectives simultaneously; to be in the present as well as the future; to be both dead and alive. Wiser and more humorous than we, dreams remind us that we are subject to larger forces and influences than we tend to acknowledge on a daily basis. Many of our most profound images surface from dreams.
What happens if we let our dream world constructively intersect with our waking life? What if we pay creative attention to our dreams, consciously allowing their imagery, patterns, and forms into our waking consciousness? The wisdom of the dream can balance or affirm our waking attitudes. The heart of the dream can beat in our actions and in the presence we bring to situations.
We do not always need to "understand" or interpret dreams to receive their gifts to heart and soul. Rather, we can circumambulate them, respect them, let their images feed our imaginations and lead us onward, just as a glimpse of ocean or lake renews and orients and refreshes us on a long drive. Fine plays and films leave images hovering in awareness—the hand reaching out across the car seat, the old letter being opened, the long shadow across the lawn. They also engender feelings that linger in the heart—inspiration, paradoxical whimsy, poignancy. Even a film in an unfamiliar language can still touch something universal in the depths of the heart.
Treat Your Dream World as a New Culture
My approach to dreams has its roots in curiosity, since childhood, about my own dreams. The wisdom of Carl Jung, Jungian theorists, and other selected theorists have watered and fertilized those roots and shaped my understanding. So has a lifelong interest in and involvement with other cultures' worldviews.
My first undergraduate anthropology class was held in a dreary basement auditorium in a formal sandstone building bordering the quadrangle. February marked the humid height of summer in Australia. High, small windows at grass level framed the sky. As I listened to the lecturer talk about how we could study different cultures, something irrevocable happened: my spirit soared out of my uncomfortable body, escaped through those high windows into the cloudless sky, and hovered over the map.
Even though I had been raised with an active appreciation for other cultures, at that moment I saw with silent shock that I still had a culture-bound, ethnocentric worldview. I began to understand that I could look at my own culture as well as look out from it. I felt freedom and rumbling anxiety: never again could I put cultural blinkers on and trot unthinkingly through my environment. I did not forget that moment; at the first opportunity, between undergraduate and graduate studies in English literature, I traveled to Papua and New Guinea, where I spent time with the Atzera and Fore tribes.
When my spirit escaped through those windows that blistering summer day and flew around, peering down at my own and other countries, I did not know the experience would eventually inform the way I would look at dreams. Years later, I came to realize that dreams, too, are a different culture, and that even the ways we treat and tell our dreams are culturally determined. I do not believe that we can use one culture's norms and belief structures to view another's without clouding the cultural integrity of each. The context in which we live, in which we dream, in which we tell our stories, is central to our inner and outer worldviews. And the structures of our lives, dreams, and stories are inseparable from their content.
This approach runs contrary to the beliefs of certain psychoanalytic theorists who analyze dreams from third world cultures, assuming that the narrative structure and content of the Oedipus myth, for example, is a universal template for any culture's psyche and dreams. It also runs contrary to contemporary groups who lift spiritual rituals from one culture and re-enact them within their own, divorcing them from the unique cultural context that engendered these rituals.
I do believe that we can stand back from our own culture and be receptive to others. We can better understand how we construct our templates for realities, both inner and outer. We can also add new awarenesses from other cultures' perceptions, cultures more sensitized to certain experiences than our own.
My personal heritage includes several cultures, and, having grown up in Australia and lived most of my adult life in California, I consider myself bicultural. I have also been fortunate to be able to travel widely and to work in other cultures, including years with the Pueblo Indian communities of the southwestern United States. However, no matter how many ceremonials I attend in the pueblos, I shall always be only a welcomed visitor, never a participant. Nor shall I have more than a superficial understanding of the dance's religious context, no matter how many books I read or feeling I have for the ritual. Nevertheless, I can better appreciate the role of ritual drama, the spiritual impact of slow, repetitive dance and low singing, and the appearance in religious ceremonial costumes of nature symbols—rain, cloud, mountain. I can breathe in the experience and feel it enrich the breath of my own culture. I can include ritual, dance, art, nature, symbol, and song with more care, intent, depth, and fidelity in my life.
Our dreams, too, enact themselves in a different culture, which we can only ever partially understand. So we must be wary of the preconceptions we bring to our dream culture from our daytime culture or from other cultures. By learning from other cultures' ways of structuring and receiving stories, dreams, images, and experiences, we can enrich our perceptions of and responses to dreams. Free of the constraints of our answer-addicted, deterministic culture, we can open to new secrets, new themes, new ways of listening and attending.
Almost all cultures, across seas and time, have regarded dreams as guides for unmapped spiritual, emotional, and physical—even cultural—territories. There is, too, wide cross-cultural agreement that "big" dreams carry special significance for the individual and even for the whole community. For example, in the Senoi tribe of Malaysia, individual dreams are important to the whole group; in classical Greece, visitors to the healing center at Epidaurus slept in a dream chamber until they had a special dream that opened the way to healing; in certain shamanic tribes, those desiring a big dream or an encounter with their guardian spirit set themselves aside to fast until a dream guide appears.
Freud considered dreams the "royal road" to the unconscious, to inner worlds of personal history, trauma, and primitive need. Jung believed that dreams draw from not only a personal well of experience but also from a vast reservoir of universal human experiences, responses, images, metaphors, symbols, and mythology. Jung observed, from deep work with his analysands and himself, that dreams perform restorative, corrective, compensatory, prophetic, and developmental roles in our psyche; that to attend to our dreams is to attend to the cry of the soul. While putting forward the most comprehensive, culture-sensitive, and open system of dream theory to date, Jung also believed it is wiser and more fruitful to approach individual dreams with humility and unknowing because dreams speak on many levels at once, just as a piece of art does.
Familiarity with Freud, Jung, or any other respected dream theorist whose work is consonant with your personal acculturation is helpful but not crucial for fruitful dream work. In fact, interpreting dreams by exclusive and unquestioning application of a template from one theoretical system can be dangerously misleading at times. The theory must take into account the culture, the individual, and the nature of the individual dream with which we are working. To apply a theory blindly is to make assumptions about the dream culture without traveling with an open mind. We become souvenir hunters, missing engagement with the vibrancy and mystery of the unknown culture, bent only on collecting and carrying a heavy suitcase of artifacts that will fit into our predetermined decor.
Work Creatively with Contradictory Dream Theories
The more I read dream theory, the more convinced I am that opting for a single approach deprives us of the richness of diverse perspectives. Those who impose universal truths ignore cross-cultural diversity. Those interested solely in cross-cultural differences miss archetypal or universal patterns. Those who believe the dream is basically verbal dismiss the observation that dreams use synaesthesia (the mixing of the senses) or originate in the visual area of the brain. Those who focus on narrative and content can forget that the way we tell stories in our culture is just that: the way we tell stories in our culture. Dream theorists also take oppositional positions, of which the following are a few:
• Dreams don't exist.
• Dreams are meaningless productions of the brain.
• Dreams mean the opposite of what they say.
• Dreams are all about the past.
• Dreams are all about the future.
• All dreams are ordinary.
• All dreams are sacred.
• Most dreams are ordinary and some are sacred.
• Dreams are only about and for the dreamer.
• Dreams are only products of and produced for the community.
• Dreams preserve the culture.
• Dreams create the culture.
• Dream images use clear symbols that we can interpret.
• Dreams images are not symbolic but purely imagistic.
• We must know the personality and history of the dreamer before we can understand the dream.
• We only need to understand the symbols to understand the dream.
• Dreamers' concerns can be interpreted the same way across cultures because the underlying psychological dynamics are the same.
• We need to know about the dreamer, the culture, and universally generated symbology to fully understand a dream.
• We understand the dream when it just "clicks" inside.
• Feeling a dream "click" is suspicious; sometimes we just make it fit what we want to believe.
• Dreams should always be grounded in daily reality.
• Dreams are their own world and should never be co-opted to serve daily life.
• Dreamer's concerns can only be interpreted within their cultural context.
• All dreams have the same underlying structure.
• Each dream creates its own structure.
• Dreams are primarily verbal.
• Dreams are primarily visual.
In view of this wide and well-argued dissension in dream theory, entertaining many possibilities but taking none as absolute truth seems wiser. There is a time for understanding the implications of dreams for waking life, for making travel to dream country purposeful; we come to learn, to interpret, to understand the symbols, to learn the language, to understand the customs. But there is also a time when traveling to a country is an end in itself, when we can let the journey nourish and sustain us without our needing the experience to change our lives.
Not all books on dreams are rooted in experience and wisdom. Many simplified and illustrated guides to dreams and their symbols have the sensitivity of an elephant on ice skates and the reliability of politicians' economic predictions. The Jungian theory of archetypes and other symbolic theories are easily mimicked but rarely accorded the subtlety or spirit of inquiry they deserve. It is easy to seduce with gross generalities. It is even easier to be seduced by them. They give certainty where there is none. Be wary of books that offer easy and authoritative solutions, particularly to approaching dreams. Jung believed that we must be ready at any moment to construct an entirely new theory of dreams. He maintained a spirit of inquiry and eternal curiosity about his research. For him—and for us—the dream itself is the final authority on itself, and we are forever the students.
Find Your Dream's Organic Art Form
Most theorists assume a dream's narrative structure exists almost independently of its substance, like a frame waiting for a painting, or a survey for answers. Many even believe that if the dream (as it is reported in words) lacks a defined beginning, middle, and end, something is awry or unformed in the dream or dreamer.
We have a dream experience. Then we reconstruct the dream in memory. Still later, we use words to represent the memory of the dream. The actual dream gets further and further away. Language reduces dreams from several dimensions to just two, and customarily reduces perception to linear descriptions of past, present, and future.
So often, we treat the words as though they are the dream. Sometimes, they are, indeed, vitally connected to the life force of the dream. More often, they are a pale and flat record of a rich and timeless experience. We are accustomed to using this one artistic medium (words) in one particular form (story) to express dreams. However, there are other, more flexible ways to "re-member" and express them than conventional storytelling. We can express dreams in the art form that best suits them, in the art form whose structure is most akin to their innate structure.
When we can loosen our attachment to the linear structure of the sentence by exploring poetry, painting, movement, sculpting, and cross-cultural arts, we open ourselves to new ways of nourishing and being nourished by our dreams.
In Woman Native Other, Trinh Minh-ha points out that stories from different cultures are structured in different ways. Each story creates its own structure. She adds that it is not only self-limiting but also oppressive to force Western "beginning-middle-end," cause-and-effect story structure onto another culture and then to evaluate the narrative or retell it in that mode.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Art of Dreaming by Jill Mellick. Copyright © 2001 Jill Mellick. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Marion Woodman
1 Entering Your Dream World
2 Merging Dream Work and the Expressive Arts
3 Expressive Dream Work in Five Minutes
4 Expressive Dream Work in Ten to Fifteen Minutes
5 Expressive Dream Work with Nightmares
6 The Care and Feeding of Dream Figures and Animals
7 Expressive Dream Work with Recurring Dreams and Series
8 Enriching Dream Work in Croups
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A Special Acknowledgment to the Dreamers and Artists
Index
About the Author
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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