Dream Interviews
If you read my last dispatch, you know that my month-long online odyssey into the realm of sleep and dreams has taken a sharp and surprising turn into some heavy-duty self-analysis. Lots of spooky stuff swimming around down there in the dreamy primeval shadows, it seems. Lots of crazy dreams. Whatever could they mean? (Remind me to tell you the one in which my cats, speaking in a haughty French accent, trade murmured sarcastic remarks about my haircut.)
Our Final Descent Into Dreaming
Where was I? Oh yeah, it's time to dream on. Today we begin our final descent into the realm of dream interpretation, and I'd like to start by offering, for your consideration, everybody's favorite archetype of the modern high priest of dream analysis — the venerable, bearded, wise and tweedy shrink. He's the guy that Gayle Delaney — author, therapist, renowned dream worker and honored Princeton Ph.D. — is right now shamelessly aping. ""Your dream of za cat iss a reflegtion of your veminine zide," she says, stroking her chin portentously and glaring like a zealot. "Za cat, you zee, iss alvays za veminine i-deeeel."
Then Delaney frowns and lurches forward in her chair. "No it's not!" she cries. "The cat in your dream means only what it means to you, the individual dreamer at the time of a particular dream. What gives anyone the right to say they understand your dreams better than you do?"
Well, how about, years of rigorous training? Fancy Ivy League degrees? Widespread professional recognition. Not hardly, says Delaney, who has those things herself. "The bottom line," she says, "is simple: No one knows your dreams but you.
The Personal Meaning of Dreams
"Listen, you don't need a therapist to tell you what your dreams mean," she says. "As the dreamer, you're the dream's producer. The dream symbols are metaphors you've created, and only you can say what those symbols really mean."
You understand, don't you, that in psychiatric circles, this kind of inflammatory talk is blatant heresy? After all, it's a commonplace of our reasoning, enlightened society that only the wise, trained therapist can unravel and explain your dreams. Guys like Freud and Jung made quite a pretty penny with that notion, thank you, and in the process, they founded famous approaches to dream analysis that have become pillars of modern scientific thought.
Dream Interviews: Better Interpretation
Delaney doesn't seem to care. "My goal," she says, "is to show dreamers and professionals alike that the traditional systems of dream interpretation have no place in modern dream work."
She's outraged, for example, when therapists filter every dream of every patient through the distorting bias of some rigid dream theory.
"Take the Jungian archetype of The Old Man," she says. "If you see an old man in your dream, he's supposed to represent wisdom. But it just doesn't hold up. In one person's dream, an old man might represent feebleness and decay; in another person's dream, he might represent warmth and kindness. It all depends on the dreamer."
Finding the Meaning of Your Own DreamBut if we scrap the therapist-centered method of dream analysis, who will noodle out for us the crucial cryptic messages encoded in our dreams?
Simple, says Delaney; we can do it ourselves. "You don't need a therapist and you don't need a knowledge of formal dream theory," she says. "You just need to learn how to ask yourself the right kinds of questions to help you discover what a part of you already knows."
And that, in a nutshell, is the logic behind Delaney's innovative "dream interview" technique, in which dreamers, with or without the help of a therapist, consider a series of simple, pertinent questions about their dreams. Delaney says it's the most reliable method of dream interpretation going, because it shifts the focus from therapists, who can only guess at a dream's meaning, to the dreamers themselves, who already, on some level, authentically understand their dreams because they invented them in the first place.
Delaney claims that even the most puzzling dreams can be gently and naturally unraveled by the interview technique. The benefits, she says, are substantial: You'll gain applicable insights into your work, your hopes, your loves, your life. Best of all, you can learn to do it at home.
In my next dispatch, you guessed it, we'll give the old interview method a spirited test-drive, using another of my own dreams as the subject. Could I be more vulnerable and giving with my innermost feelings, already? It's like turning my deepest primal thoughts into crash-test dummies, then parading their mangled forms shamelessly across the Internet, to be oogled by every Tom, Dick and modem-packing Harry.
But I do it, as always, for you. So I hope you'll read my next dispatch, because you're invited, if you can stand it, to join in on yet another glimpse into the ongoing, ever-fascinating, slumber-centered Mystery of Me.