Meet the Dream Maker—The Wise, Mysterious Other Within
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Lisa Marchiano. Let me tell you a little bit about Lisa. She’s an award-winning author, podcaster, and certified Jungian analyst. With Sounds True, she’s released two previous books that draw on the fierce wisdom and healing power of fairytales, a book called The Vital Spark on reclaiming outlaw energies and finding one’s feminine fire, and another book, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself. Along with fellow Jungian analysts, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, Lisa hosts the podcast called This Jungian Life, a podcast that has now been downloaded more than 10 million times. And as a podcaster, let me tell you, that’s an impressive number, an impressive number of listens for a podcast on Jungian analysis applied to daily life. Along with her partners, Debra and Joseph, Lisa Marchiano has created The Dream School, which is a 12-month online learning program. And in addition, with Deborah Stewart and with input from Joseph Lee, Lisa Marchiano has written a new book. It’s called Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this Insights at the Edge episode: Dream Wise. Lisa, welcome.
Lisa Marchiano: Thank you so much. It’s so good to be here.
TS: Falling in love with dreaming. When I dropped myself into the book Dream Wise, I felt that’s a possibility you could fall in love with dreams and dreaming, and I’m wondering if that happened for you and if so, what that journey was like to fall in love with dreaming.
LM: I think I’ve been in love with dreaming for a long time and when exactly I fell in love with dreaming would be hard to say because when I look back through my journals, even when I was in college and I wasn’t interested in any of this stuff, there were dreams. I was writing down my dreams and I was speculating about what they might mean, and I didn’t do such a bad job as a 19, 18-year-old, but I think when I really started to fall in love was when I found young and I started reading young when I was 28 and immediately started writing my dreams down and was just astounded by the insights and the beauty and the comfort and the mystery in dreams, and they’ve been my companion ever since. I’ve always kept a dream journal since that time.
TS: You offer a statistic, it’s from a 2001 survey in Dream Wise that about a third of us don’t even claim to have recall of our dreams. And I wanted to start there because I think this notion of falling in love with dreaming is real and alive probably for some small section of the population. And then there’s probably a lot of people who have some other kind of relationship to dreaming that’s more complicated. Like, oh, it’s just this thing that happens or I can’t really remember my dreams, I’m frustrated, I don’t really know, but a third of the population doesn’t even recall their dreams or they say they don’t at all. What do you make of that?
LM: Well, the astounding thing about dreams is that they’re always there. We all dream every night. So there is this incredible source within us of creativity, wisdom, and guidance that’s there if we can turn to it. But in some sense, dreams are kind of like an endangered species. It is difficult to recall dreams, and it’s likely that the alarm clock is one of the great enemies of dream recall. And of course, most of us stay up late with lights on or even looking at screens, and then we wake up to an alarm clock, maybe the first thing we do is look at our phones. So we’re immediately transported out at that kind of dreamlike, liminal space in which we might recall a dream and we never remember a dream. I also think that our attitude toward dreaming can impact how often we recall dreams. So as you just said, a lot of people will be dismissive of their dreams.
I have people who come for analysis, who are interested in their dreams, who will come in and say, well, I had a dream last night, but it wasn’t really important. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on a second. Every dream’s important. Even if you have just a little snippet of a dream, write it down, talk about it, care about it, because when you turn toward the dream maker, when you turn toward your inner life, it becomes more abundant in its gifts to you. You will recall more dreams. You’ll begin this conversation with the dream maker.
TS: You have an appendix on ways to help with dream recall, and I want to get there in just a moment, but first we have to address this notion of the dream maker. What does that mean?
LM: It’s a term that kind of evolved organically as we were drafting the book. And I love actually that that’s how the book is framed. It’s become really important to me, but I’ll say this, when you wake from a dream, it’s so frequent that I have a dream and I think I could never have come up with that image consciously in a million years. I would never have put those two things together. I would never have imagined that. I think a lot of us have those kinds of experiences. So what part of us is crafting these dreams when you spend time with them and you gain an insight from them about your life, that’s so astonishing, that is so eloquently expressed in these images. Who’s doing that? What part of you is doing that? There is such a strong sense for me in any case that there is some subjective other, there’s some part of me that really is other that’s creating the dreams. If you want to talk about it as the inner companion, but who is it that makes the dreams? It is some part of us that wants to be in dialogue with us. It wants to communicate. It’s knocking on the door every night with these astonishing images.
TS: Okay, the key word that you used is some other, and in Dream Wise you define the dream maker, you say a wise, mysterious other within who creates our dreams. And I thought, why think of it as other? Why is that important? I could imagine someone’s, yeah, dream maker, but that’s just some deeper layer of my own unconscious. It’s not some other.
LM: Well, but one of the key things and the reason why it’s helpful to work with dreams is because the dream maker carries the perspective of the unconscious. So it’s something different. It’s some alternative way of understanding your life. It’s a totally different way of looking at the problem. One of my favorite quotes from Jung, and I’m just flipping here through it, is he addresses this. He says, in each of us, there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves, when therefore we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution. He can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude, the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. So the dream maker is other, and that’s important because we don’t know everything there is to know. And wouldn’t you want to hear this other perspective? Wouldn’t you want access to that different attitude that might help you see your life in a totally different way that might lead you out of your impasse or help you understand why you’re stuck somewhere?
TS: Now, another thing you say about the dream maker that I thought was important to question, the dream maker wants us to thrive. And I thought, well, what if someone says, look, the dream maker is neutral. It doesn’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. How do you know it wants us to thrive?
LM: Jeremy Taylor, the dreamwork says, dreams always come in the interest of wholeness and healing and growth. And I think that’s true just because that’s the evidence that I have, Tami, both from my own dreams and people that I’ve worked with. I mean, I’ve worked with people who were really objectively pretty stuck in their lives. And when we turned to the dreams, there were these clues, this trail of breadcrumbs that led us to some surprising place that ultimately had an impact on the person’s outer life. They’re not just interesting images that we can explore. They want to nudge us in the direction of growth and individuation.
TS: Now, you mentioned that dreams could be looked at our understanding of dreams as an endangered species because of the introduction of the alarm clock and so many of our modern habits. And I said, well, you have an appendix in Dream Wise that really helps people with dream recall, and you offer a few very clear specifics that I found really inspiring right here at the beginning of our conversation. One was to have a notebook right next to your table. I was like, okay, the second was to write something down every single morning. So talk a little bit about that. What if I wake up and I’m like, ah, I’m kind of groggy. I’m not sure.
LM: Well, so if you have a notebook next to your bed, and by the way, I have a pen that has a little red light at the tip. So even if I wake up and it’s dark, I can just start writing without having to turn on a light, and I’ll often just write no dream called, and that’s it. And then I’m in the habit of the first thing I do when I wake up is reach for that notebook. And so eventually that just becomes habitual. So your unconscious is going to register that, oh, shes going to reach for that notebook. Let me give her a dream. So it’s creating a habit. It’s forging a kind of pathway in your brain that that’s what you do in the morning.
TS: You also suggest to people that they write a personal letter to the dream maker declaring their interest and intention to recall their dreams. So I wonder if you can talk some about that and how this declaration in your experience makes a difference.
LM: Well, as I said a minute ago, I’ve grown so fond of our framing in the book of the Dream Maker. I think ultimately what this book is about is about creating a relationship with the dream maker. You already have some relationship with the dream maker, but the point is to develop a stronger relationship. And so what better way to begin than by writing a letter to the dream maker and letting the dream maker know, I’m here, I’m listening, I’m interested. It is a fact that if you write down your dreams, your dream recall will improve. And I think that’s because the unconscious sort of perks up and says, well, someone’s listening. And so it becomes more juicy and more alive, and it is like an ongoing conversation. You start to get images that repeat, and you can be like, ah, there’s that image again of the airport in Russia.
LM: Gosh, I always dream about that. Whenever this other thing is happening, and you can kind of chuckle, it almost becomes like a personal joke between you and the dream maker. I was telling someone earlier today, I have a dream office that is a fascinating place, and it’s always in a state of construction, often it’s quite a mess, but it’s always being built. It’s almost never completely finished. And it’s kind of a commentary on my professional self, which is, it’s not done. I’m still building on it. It’s kind of a little bit of a mess because I’ve always more to learn.
TS: James Hollis, who gifted the book with a foreword said two things that really struck me. One I just want to bring out here in the beginning, which is that if you live to 80, you’ll spend years of your life approximately dreaming. You said, it’s this natural state we all go through. And I thought, wow, that’s a lot. Thank you for the math, Jim. And then secondly, he said that he doesn’t believe that there’s such a thing as a bad dream. He doesn’t believe in bad. And I wanted to bring that up because in thinking about establishing this relationship with the dream maker, what came up for me is nightmares that I’ve had in the past. And I think many people do have nightmares through the course of their life and thinking like, God, do I really want a relationship where I’m going to be saying yes, I want to recall my dreams, including these nightmares can be really quite painful,
LM: Very distressing, very distressing, and they’re not uncommon. And dreams tend to be more negatively toned in terms of emotion. They’re negatively toned. Dreams are more common than positively toned ones. But what I will tell you is when you turn, Jung said, the face we turn toward the unconscious is the face that looks back toward us. So if we’re frightened of the unconscious, if we’re trying to keep it out, it’s going to present to us as a kind of threatening interloper that’s trying to break down our door. But if we turn toward the unconscious with a friendly face, that’s the face that will look back at us. So for example, and I think there’s a similar dream to this in the book, and someone dreamed of being chased by a gigantic snake, and in the dream, she was a person who was doing a lot of psychological work, and in the dream, she stopped running and turned toward this gigantic beast, and it turned into a little playful puppy.
And it is true that I’ve seen this again and again, working with people, you have a very frightening dream. But then the next time you have a similar dream, it’s a little bit less frightening. Maybe you can kind of get a little bit curious about the vampire who’s chasing you, and then the next time you have a frightening dream. It’s not a vampire at all. It’s something that’s a lot less threatening, and then you wind up having a picnic at the end of it. So actually, the more we do dream work, the less threatening the dreams are usually dreams are usually very frightening. I think nightmares come to get our attention, so we have to, if the dream maker knows that it has our attention, it’s less likely to send us frightening dreams.
TS: What would you say to someone who’s trying to solve a certain kind of problem in their life and they want the dream maker help? How might they go about that?
LM: So there’s a wonderful practice called dream incubation that we don’t actually talk about in the book, and one of the reasons that we didn’t cover it is we couldn’t cover everything. There’s also a really lovely book that was written by it, written about it recently called Dream Guidance. So if you’re interested in dream incubation, I would send you to the book called Dream Guidance. But if you can ask your dream maker a question, you can write about the thing that’s bothering you that you want help with in your journal, you can formulate a good clear question, kind of muse about it as you’re falling asleep, and then see what you wake up with. And the dream maker will often send you a dream that is helpful in answering the question. I use dream incubation a lot.
TS: Can you give us an example of a question you asked and a dream that came to you as an answer?
LM: Yeah, I can. Sometimes when you do a dream incubation, you don’t get a dream, you just wake up knowing something. And that actually happened to me when I was writing the Vital Spark, because I had the draft, the manuscript was due to the editor. I had it mostly done, but I didn’t have a really clear idea about what the main idea was, which is not a good place to be when you’re four weeks out. So I did a dream incubation and I just woke up in the morning. It was just really clear what the main idea was and what the main image was, and I was able to make those edits and it really pulled the book together.
TS: I want to ask you more about that, Lisa, because in my own experience, I’ll just be personal here for a moment, I often wake up with an answer to something and it’s like, anyway, something I’m working on a project or something and I just wake up. It’s the first clear thought and I go, bam. I never attributed that to the dream maker. I haven’t quite known what to attribute it to.
LM: Yeah, well, that’s lovely. That’s your relationship with the unconscious. Some people might call it your muse, but of course it’s the unconscious, right? When we go to sleep, our conscious mind is out of the picture and the unconscious reigns, and during that time, your unconscious was chewing on your problem and presented you with this answer in the morning. And when I do dream incubation, I would say about maybe half the time I get a dream and about half the time I wake up with a thought that I just know in the morning. So to me, they seem to really come from the same place.
TS: What do you feel from your experience working with so many people are the ways that people approach their dream and stay on the surface and don’t actually get to potentially some of the deeper meanings and life lessons that could be inherent in the dream? What are those, if you could call them, I don’t want to call them mistakes exactly, but surface level ways of relating to a dream.
LM: Probably the number one thing is people say, oh, I know what it means. Oh, I had a dream, but I know what it means. So let’s say that you have a dream where let’s say that you’re in an argument with a business associate or a friend and you have a dream about that person, and she’s arguing with you in the dream, so you wake up and go, oh, I know what that means, having this argument with her. And so I dreamed about it, but as we say in the book, dreams are always going to tell you something that you don’t know. So if you wake up right away and you’re like, oh, I know what that means, and especially when it’s a dismissive, I know what that means. I don’t need to think about it can almost guarantee you haven’t understood the dream. So like I said before, dreams bring this other perspective in, and that’s why they’re so hard to understand.
I mean, I’ll tell you, Tami, I work with people’s dreams all day long. We do dreams on the podcast. I’m an analyst. I mean, I probably hear three or four dreams every single day, but I will wake up with my own dreams and be like, I have no idea what this means. The reason I can hear other people’s dreams and have often an immediate idea at least about where to head with it, but my own dreams are so mysterious to me because I’m attached to my ego orientation. I’m attached to my ego attitude, my conscious attitude. The dream is bringing me something totally different. So of course, immediately I’m like, I don’t understand that it’s real work to get behind that. So when you have a dream about your colleague, let’s say, and you’re having an argument, the dream, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening and waking life.
But if you actually say, well, wait a minute, what’s a little different about how is the argument we’re having in the dream maybe a little different from the one we’re having in waking life and how does she look a little different? And what could this be telling me? One of the points that we make in the book that’s a great place to start is, and Carl Young said this, the ego attitude is probably wrong. So if you have a dream about your coworker and cursing you out and you’re like, ah, she’s, she’s so terrible in the dream, think to yourself, what if my ego attitude is wrong? What if she’s actually right? What would that look like? How would I understand that? And it’s hard to do, but if you can entertain that, it often just flips something and you have this new way of looking at something and you realize that the dream is not actually, it’s probably not about that outer life argument. It’s probably about something, an inner attitude, because dreams are mostly about the inner world.
TS: When you say, and you say this clearly in the book that dreams usually tell us something we don’t know. How are you so convinced of that? Someone might say, no, actually the dream is just processing and reflecting what happened. It’s not necessarily pointing to something I don’t know, and that the dream maker wants me to know.
LM: Well, I will just amend it by saying, sometimes dreams tell us something we know, but that we’re trying to avoid and the dreams like can’t forget about that. So sometimes it’s not brand new, sometimes it’s not some startling new insight, but it’s just something that the dream maker wants to remind us of and doesn’t want to let us forget about. But if you’re asking how I know that the dream is prodding us in a growthful direction in this BBC interview toward the end of his life, this interviewer asked, J, do you believe in God? And Jung thinks for a minute, and he said, I do not believe I know. And I think what he meant by that is he had had so much personal experience of something transpersonal, and I feel that way about dreams, Tami. I mean, I don’t have dreams of research that conclusively proves that dreams are meaningful, but I know they are because I’ve lived with them now for decades and seen the difference that they’ve made in my life, and I’ve seen the difference that they’ve made in the lives of the people that I work with.
There was one woman, for example, who was in a bad way in just about every aspect of her life, and all she wanted to talk about was dreams, which I usually try to avoid because sometimes that’s defensive and we do need to know the dreams are usually talking about your life. So I want to know something about your life too. I don’t just want you to come in and talk about dreams. But her dreams were consistently leading us to exactly the thing we needed to talk about both in her outer life in terms of work and relationships, but also in terms of things that had happened to her. She had a lot of trauma early on in life, and the dreams just week after week just brought it all forward. It was pretty much the only thing we did was talk about her dreams. But after a year and her half, she was in a relationship, she had a new job, she had expand, expanded her career options. She had totally reworked some important relationships in her life. I mean, the outer world, her outer life had changed because we had been working on the dreams, and I’ve seen things like that again and again.
TS: What I noticed in engaging with dream wise is I felt invited to have a relationship with the dream maker such that I would lean in to the dream maker, having my best interests at heart and instructing me at night, even if it was sometimes difficult, but that it felt like it was an exciting sort of growth school, if you will. So that was the sort of orientation I felt you were inviting me to take on and try. And I have to say it worked. I was like, oh my God, I’m starting to have this deep sense of honoring dreams and the dream maker. Now you listen, as you said, to three to four dreams a day from people on average. What are you listening for when you listen to someone share their dreams with you?
LM: Well, I think a big thing that I’m listening for is emotion. Actually, that’s a big one. What were the feelings in the dream that always matter so much? And it tells me so much about what the dream might mean. So I’m interested in general in what the dream says, and in particular, especially clinical work, what might the dream be saying about that person’s challenges? Because people come into analysis and they have things that they want to change in their life, and I’m assuming that the dreams are going to help us. So I’m definitely interested in how this might relate to major life themes. But then when it comes down to sort of understanding the dream, I mean, it’s all of the stuff in Dream Wise and emotions being a key part of it, and that’s a really important chapter in Dream Wise. There’s not been a lot that’s written about how to understand emotions and dreams, but we know they’re really important.
So I always ask people, well, what were the feelings in the dream? It’s difficult for me to interpret a dream without knowing that. And when we were drafting the book, I found myself saying, what is it I’m doing? When I ask for emotions, when I ask someone, well, what was it like driving that car in the dream? And the person says, oh, it was great. It was really fun. And then suddenly I know something. How do I know what I know? What is that telling me? It’s kind of like it’s an implicit process. I’m taking in that information and then I’m using it somehow sort of intuitively. But what I really wanted to do with the book was take that implicit knowledge and make it explicit. So sort of like how would you teach someone in a book to tie their shoe? You’d have to sort of reverse engineer it and make it very explicit. And so that’s what we tried to do in the emotions chapter is positive emotions probably means this. Did you feel angry in your dream? Consider that it might mean this. And it was really exciting to do that. It was difficult, but I was really happy with how that turned out because I think it’s such a key part of understanding a dreams meaning
TS: Since you’re emphasizing emotions, tell us when we have positive emotions in a dream, what does that mean and what does it mean when we have anger? And let’s go ahead and put fear in there too.
LM: Okay. So I think in general, when you have a positive emotion about something in a dream, you can assume that it’s something good. You can sort of take that at face value, and that might seem pretty straightforward, but sometimes we dream of things that are very upsetting to our conscious personality, but in the dreamer, like, Hey, yeah, this is great. I think there’s an example in the book of someone’s having sex with their father and it seems really great, and you wake up and you think, oh my God, what did I just dream? But if you just say, okay, wait a minute, whatever that means, maybe it’s something positive, and in fact it on a symbolic level might mean that the dreamer is growing closer to some positive qualities embodied by her father, so she’s going closer to these positive aspects. So it is something good.
I think what we wound up saying for anger is that there’s roughly two possibilities. There’s either that the dream maker is sort of showing you, Hey, look at how you are relating to your unconscious. You’re relating to it defensively. You’re demeaning it, you’re angry. And there’s one of my dreams that I talk about with this as an example. We have, I think like 160 sample dreams in the book to give you a sense of how this plays out. Or it could be that the dream maker is going like, absolutely, you should be angry. That’s good that you’re angry. That’s a helpful emotion. And one of the ways that you can tell whether, which how the dream maker feels about the anger is the end of the dream. Does the challenge in the dream get resolved? Did anger help get you there, or is it sort of a stalemate? And the dream ego is really in a huff at the end of the dream, and there’s no resolution in sight. The dream maker might be saying, look at your defensiveness. Look at your attitude. Your attitude’s wrong. You need to listen. You need to listen to the unconscious. And then fear in a
TS: Dream, I’m being chased or something like that. Someone’s trying to kill me, someone’s breaking into the house, any version of that.
LM: So fear often represents something that we have decided is not allowed in the personality. And so if, for example, okay, let’s say we’re not allowed to be angry. Let’s say we’re a person who doesn’t feel comfortable with our own anger, then we might meet in the dream of very, very terrifyingly rageful person and who’s maybe chasing us or something or some other image that might be an image of unbridled rage. And the invitation is to make friends with it, to turn to face it, whether or not you do that in the dream or perhaps you do it later in an active imagination. Because often the thing that’s chasing us in a dream is an unclaimed potential that wants to have a relationship with us. And it only seems frightening from the ego perspective because for one reason or another, we’ve been taught or we’ve been told, or we’ve just assumed that this is something that we shouldn’t allow ourselves.
TS: Now, it’s interesting to me that you’re emphasizing emotion, and one of the things that you said earlier that I want to pick up on that was a little bit of a loose thread for me is that in general, when we dream negatively, valenced feelings, emotions come up more than positive emotions. What do you make of that?
LM: Well, that is actually a research finding, and in some ways it’s not surprising because most of the time the dream maker is kind of telling us what we can do better. It’s bringing up conflicts. There are dreams that are like, you go, girl, that’s great. That’s wonderful. Sometimes we’re in crisis and we get a beautiful healing inspirational dream as a way of saying, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, but your average dream is like today went okay, but you could do this better. Here’s something you didn’t pay attention to. So the dream makers always kind of most of the time giving us a little bit of constructive criticism, and it relates to most of the time inner conflicts. So it makes sense that they’d be a little tinged in a negative fashion.
TS: Now, you mentioned that this naming of the dream maker is something that you came up with in writing Dream Wise, which I find really interesting. I didn’t know that. What did young call this function in the psyche that you’re calling the dream maker?
LM: Well, I mean he might refer to it as the unconscious, but also, and we do get there at the end of the book, I think that dream maker is the self with a capital S. So Carl Young, who was an associate of Freud, he was born in 1875. He died in 1961, and he was a very important thinker and psychologist and the founder of the analytical psychology, one of his big ideas was the self, and he capitalized the first letter, and it is kind of the transpersonal center of the personality. So he said that it was the center and the circumference. He also said you could call it the God within. So it is a kind of inner wisdom that we all have that we often sense. I think it’s Socrates had his little voice that he consulted, and that’s perhaps an image of the self. And I think that the dream maker is the self too.
TS: So you mentioned Lisa, that even though you interpret dreams for the people calling up on the podcast and for your clients and you work with it all the time when it comes to your own dreams, it can be tough. And as I was reading Dream Wise, I was reflecting on dreams that I’ve had over the past couple years, which is a time in my life of a lot of transition, and I kept having yet another possibility, and yet not being quite sure is that what the dream meant. And just to be honest with you, I felt both excited and frustrated too. And I wonder what you can say to people who are working on their own with the dream and are having this like, God, I’m not sure I’m quite, I think, oh, I thought I got it, but then I went into blurry zone. I’m not sure. Maybe I didn’t quite get the deepest meaning of that dream.
LM: Well, first of all, I don’t know that you can ever fully understand a dream. So there is an attitude of humility that I certainly have that Jung definitely had. So you don’t expect that you’re going to go in and it’s like an exam that you’re going to take and you’re going to get a hundred percent. There is an attitude of approaching it with humility and a little bit of reverence. And then I would say that sometimes you have a dream and you sit with it and you work with it and you really have an aha, and it’s often a kind of embodied feeling. You can almost feel a little subtle shift, and it’s like, okay, I think I got that. That was really helpful. It changes your perspective. Maybe you even have a different way that you’re going to respond to a situation because of a dream.
Sometimes you sit with a dream and you work on it, and you work on it, and you work on it, and maybe you appreciate it a little bit differently and you’ve thought about it some different ways, but you never really got that click. And then maybe you just appreciate the dream’s, mysterious otherness, and that’s it. And that’s all you’re going to get from that dream at that time. But perhaps you’ll get another dream. If it’s important, the dream maker will send you another dream and maybe you’ll get the next dream, or maybe you’ll come back to that dream in five years and then it will make sense. So I think you can’t have an expectation that every single dream is going to, now I know what it means. What I will say in terms of feeling the frustration, like I said before, one of the things that’s so hard about working on our own dreams is being able to get out of the conscious attitude.
And that is the main thing that we were trying to do with this book is how do you do this on your own? It is generally easier to do dream work, either with an analyst or even with a kind of knowledgeable friend or a dream group. Dream groups can be wonderful, but if you’re going to work on your dreams alone, how do you do that? And we were designing the book for that purpose. So throughout the book, there are 69 what we call keys, and they’re little prompts, and you apply these prompts to your dream, it kind of slows you down. It helps lift you out of that ego bound perspective so that you can maybe see something a little bit differently. You don’t have to go through all 69 prompts to unearth a little nugget. If you take a dream, let’s say that you have a dream that kind of stays with your fear for a few days.
It’s got a lot of energy. The weekend comes, you have a little bit of time, go back to that dream, it still has life in it, and then just pick a couple of the keys. Once you’ve read through the book, all of the keys are at the back. You can just flip through, just pick one, start somewhere and just try it and see if anything turns loose. When you apply that key, then go on to a different key and try that one. See if that does anything. And I usually find that if I go through about five or six keys, usually I’m like, oh, that’s something I hadn’t thought about. That’s a new perspective that helps me in some way. And I think it’s that little element of surprise like, oh, I didn’t see that. Then we know we’ve got something. But is it ever possible to exhaust a dream? I don’t think that it is.
TS: Do you think, Lisa, you could give us an example, and maybe this is an example from one of the dreams in the book or from your own life or a client’s life and applying some of the keys to it so we could see this, how it plays out.
LM: Okay, well, let me look at this stream that I really about the gold watch. So this is a dream that a man had. He was a man in midlife and he was anticipating retirement, and after a long career, he felt burnt out and disillusioned. And so here’s the dream. I’m holding my gold watch and I notice that one of the tiny screws has come out while I try to find it, several other pieces of the watch fall off and I realize I will need to take it to the watchmaker. There are two old men who fix watches. They have set up their shop in a hotel room, they’re irascible and taciturn. They look at the watch and tell me it’s a cheap movement and not worth fixing. I point out that the case is made of gold. They tell me it’s just gold plate. I point out to them the 14 karat stamp, but they tell me that is only true of a small part.
Most of it is just gold plate. They hand me my watch back in many pieces, the crystal is cracked, and it wasn’t before I brought it in. I complained to them that they cracked the crystal, but they insist I gave it to them like that. I am leaving with it in a plastic bag upset that my watch is in pieces and that they don’t understand its value. So I will tell you that this dreamer felt kind of angry and upset in the dream, and he was kind of angry and upset when he woke up. He was like those damn watchmakers. And he kind of tied it to a feeling of being cheated at work that someone wasn’t appreciating his contributions at work. So in other words, he sort of mapped on a conscious attitude onto the dream and thought he understood it. I’m just going to randomly pick up a couple of the keys.
One of them is personal associations. That is kind of just what it sounds like. What are the memories and the feelings that come up around a dream element? So for this dreamer, the personal association was to the watch. The watch was a watch he actually owned. It was his first significant purchase in life. He had bought it with some money that his grandparents had given him after he graduated from college. So his grandparents had been the children of immigrants. There had been great hopes placed in him. He finished college and they gave him this money, and he bought this watch and he set off on his kind of heroic journey of establishing himself in a career. So the watch then really represented these values associated with the first half of life, like academic achievement and professional recognition in the outer world. So then that’s interesting, right?
We can say, well, okay, so the watch doesn’t have value anymore. The values that guided the first half of life, they don’t have value anymore. It’s worthless. It’s cheap, it’s falling apart. I think even this image of gold, that’s an archetypal image. So we could look at it. Archetypally gold is a big, big symbol that appears all the times and myths and fairytales, and we know that whatever is gold is of supreme value, and it’s really transpersonal value in the archetypal sense. It’s, it’s not just kind of crass material stuff. It shines. It never tarnishes. The Aztecs thought it was the excrement of the sun, which I think is such an incredibly charming image. So it’s something kind of celestial of the sun. It’s solar, it’s the color of the sun. So it’s interesting because this watch in reality is gold, but for him, the watchmakers say, no, it’s not.
It’s not really gold. There’s only a tiny part of it that’s gold. So in other words, these first half of life values only a little bit of it is something that is really enduring, that the rest of it was right for a while, but is no longer correct. Now you have to find a new orientation. The other key that is relevant here is the dream ego is probably wrong. So I’ll just read that key so you can get a sense of it. The dream egos attitude is likely to be wrong, although we tend to align with the perspective of the dream ego as we consider our dreams. It’s most often the case that the assumptions, feelings, and attitudes of the dream ego are off base. Trying out this assumption with every dream is a good place to start. Consider the following questions. What if the attitude of your dream ego is incorrect?
What if the dream elements that seem bad or challenging are in fact bringing something valuable? What if you assumed that anything your dream ego finds wrong is actually helpful in some regard? So if we apply that key to this dream, the dreamer was upset with these watchmakers and thought they were just out to cheat him. But what if we said, okay, what if the watchmakers are right? Well, the watchmakers are bringing something incredibly important. They’re telling you, forget about these old values. It’s time for something new, this as garbage. Take it home in a plastic bag.
TS: Lisa, you introduced this phrase, the dream ego, and I want to make sure that everybody’s tracking with you. I think a lot of times when people think of the ego’s perspective, they’re thinking of their waking ego looking at the dream. But what is the dream ego?
LM: Yeah, the dream ego is the I in the dream. So in this dream, for example, it would be the dreamer sees himself take the watch to the watchmakers. And it’s a great question, Tami, and glad for the chance to clarify. The thing is that usually the dream ego, so whoever the eye is, when we say in the dream, I went to the watchmakers, it usually is more or less aligned with our conscious attitude. Sometimes it’s not, and that can be interesting too, but most of the time it’s like, yeah, that’s me.
TS: And you’re saying that we need to question the dream egos experience and not necessarily think it’s orienting or understanding the deeper possible lessons or corrections that could be coming from the dream.
LM: Well, in a way, you can think of every dream as a little piece of theater that the dream maker produces to show you what you look like from its perspective. So for the Gold Watch dream, for example, the dream maker saying, Hey, look, I’m trying to tell you over here that these first half of life values of outer world achievement and academic recognition and professional advancement are worthless. But you are taking that message and behaving in a really hubristic arrogant way and acting like I’m wrong. It’s why it’s a good practice to always say the I in the dream felt angry. The I in the dream felt scared. The I in the dream felt disgusted. What if the I in the dream got it wrong? It’s not always the case. There are pretty much no absolutes. Sometimes the attitude of the dream ego is spot on, but most of the time it’s at least a little off. And so it’s a good, it’s one of the keys that’s good to maybe try applying all the time. There’s only a couple of them right now.
TS: What’s interesting to me is that within these 69 keys, there’s a lot to work with as you just demonstrated. I can imagine though, somebody has a dream like that and they go online and they type in broken watch dream. What does it mean? And it’s a very different approach. What broken watches, who knows what that might say? And you’re out of time, you’re this who knows all the, and I wonder if you think there’s value in taking something from a dream and typing in those kinds of questions and seeing what pops up or not. Is it just confusing?
LM: Well, young was very clear, and we concur that she really can’t interpret a dream without having the dreamers associations. And I think also the dreamers life context, because like I said, the dreams are commenting on our lives. So sometimes these dream symbol dictionaries, the dream symbols, well, there’s one that for example, online that says, I think it’s something like if you dream of a bagel, it means something’s missing in your life. And it’s like, well, no, I might love bagels. I might hate bagels. I might’ve been eating a bagel when my fiance broke up with me. And that’s what I think of when I think of bagels. So just like with this stream, I mean, yeah, watches, you could do a lot with watches, it’s symbols. There’s like you said, they obviously relate to time. We could do all kinds of things. We could amplify them with archetypal imagery, we could be curious about their function, but this was a particular watch that the dreamer owned that had a particular unique significance to him. And without knowing that, we would not have gotten at the meaning of the dream.
TS: Now, earlier you mentioned active imagination and you have a chapter on active imagination. In Dream Wise, how might someone employ active imagination, either using this dream as an example or just in general to help them find the deeper meanings of their dream?
LM: So active imagination was Jung’s technique of dreaming the dream onwards. It’s a way of engaging the dream imagery while you’re awake. And the metaphor that we use in Dream Wise is that if dreaming is scuba diving, active imagination is snorkeling, you’re awake, you’re peering into the unconscious and inviting it to dialogue with you, but you’ve sort of got one part of you in the conscious world. So close the door, turn off your phone and sink into yourself a little bit, and then maybe see if you can have a conversation with the watchmakers. So we offer, there are many different ways to do this. We offer a bunch of them in the book, but the thing to do would me go to the watchmakers and say, well, what do you mean my watch is worthless? And then see what they say. You’re kind of inviting the unconscious to talk to you.
And it might be that the watchmaker says, well, you thought it was really valuable and maybe it served you well for right now, but get rid of that watch because there’s something else coming. You got to make room for something new. I don’t know what they would say, but it will allow you to kind of deepen into the meaning of the dream. You brought up this question about frightening dreams before. I think if you’re having nightmares, engaging in active imagination with that frightening element of the dream often is a way to depo potentiate it because you can invite it to bring its message forward. And often, as I said before, it really has something valuable and maybe even helpful to tell you.
TS: Now, as much as you emphasize that knowing the personal associations are important in order to really understand the context as we go to interpret a dream. I pulled out this quote from Dream Wise where you wrote about how Marie Louise von Franz, who is one of Yung’s closest collaborators who studied fairytales, said that a universal theme and that she couldn’t identify many, but that this was a universal theme in fairytales, is that when an animal talks to you, heed what it’s saying, listen to what it’s saying when an animal talks to you. And I thought, okay, that’s great. Great, great counsel. So I’m curious if you have any sort of universals that you might say about dream experiences, even without knowing all the context and personal associations. You mentioned your office and that you’re dreaming, you’ve had this recurring dream about different construction projects or rebuilding projects or redecorating, whatever it might be in an office. Okay, so it’s something about your work that’s still changing. Are there any other sort of universals of interpretation?
LM: Yeah, I mean, I would say that there are no absolute universals, but we do talk in Dream Wise about what young called relatively fixed symbols, and thank goodness for them because it kind of gives you a place to start. So water is often a symbol of emotion or the unconscious. If you dream of the ocean, that’s a pretty good image for the unconscious for lots of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily mean the ocean equals unconscious, but it’s a pretty good place to start. Let’s see, a tree. Trees are symbolically related to the image of the great mother. So it might be that if you have an important tree in a dream, that that image, a snake is often associated with death and rebirth. One of the things we do recommend are simple dictionaries. These are different than dream symbol dictionaries that are going to tell you that a bagel equals something’s missing. But these are archetypal dictionaries that will bring in imagery from religious systems and fairy tales and myths and give you a sense of the kind of archetypal resonance of particular images. So yeah, those kinds of relatively thick symbols can kind of get you started.
TS: You mentioned the power of sharing your dreams, even with a few friends or having a dream group of some kind. And I’m curious, let’s just say a few people, they’re listening to this and they’re like, I’m going to start a dream group with my friends, and part of me hits myself in my head and says, what’s going to happen? These people are just going to project onto my dream. That’s not going to be helpful. I better pick the right people. Oh, I might as well just go find an analyst, but I can’t afford an analyst. I don’t know, I’m just making stuff up. But I’m trying to imagine how people get that kind of support in their life.
LM: Well, you mentioned in the introduction our program Dream School, and one of the things that happens in Dream School is there’s the option to join dream groups, and we provide some structure and some guidance for those, and people just really, really love them. So that’s one possibility. There are lots of dream groups, and there was a dream worker, Montague Ulman, who created some guidelines for working with Dreams in Groups. And those you can find out more about his work online and you can kind of take hold of his main ideas, which kind of just provides a structure so that you don’t get people just telling you what your dream meant. But I often find that there’s a kind of magic about coming together to talking about dreams. It usually works even though you think it might not. So if you have an interest in doing it, just maybe take that impulse seriously and see what you can find. And there may be existing dream groups in your area.
TS: I pulled out this sentence from Dream Wise, our unconscious is ahead of our conscious mind, and I found that inspiring, and inspiring in terms of wanting to have a relationship with the dream maker. I thought, well, if the dream maker is ahead of the me that’s trying to figure out my life and my waking hours, that’s really important. So tell me what gives you that clarity.
LM: Well, in some ways it’s not so mysterious. There is a lot of information around us all the time, and we can only take in a tiny fraction of it consciously. But we know, and neuroscience is totally bearing out that the unconscious is sort of picking up on all this stuff all the time. So for example, we unconsciously pick up on the subtle facial movements and these tiny micro expressions of the faces of our partner, for example. And so our partner might say, yeah, I’m fine. I had a great day at work. But some part of us knows that that’s not the whole story. We read it. We may not even consciously be aware of it, but we’re reading something. So there’s a lot that we know that we don’t know that we know, but it comes out in dreams. You have this great, he had this great analogy for this.
He said that Dreams can sort of predict the future, not in a kind of strange, magical way, although there are really precognitive dreams. That certainly happens, but more in a kind of everyday way. The same way that the weather forecasters. They look at areas of low pressure over here, and there’s an area of high pressure here, and the temperatures are rising over here, and they can say it’s probably going to rain on Thursday. So I think dreams kind of do that. They sort of present us with probabilities based on the tremendous amount of information that the unconscious is taking in around us all the time.
TS: Finally, Lisa, what is your hope for the readers of Dream Wise?
LM: I hope that people fall in love with dreaming and feel companioned and inspired and in touch with something deeper.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Lisa Marchiano. She’s the author of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, 69 different keys to working in a very deep way with your dreams. I have to be honest with you, we’ve just scratched the surface in this conversation. This is one of those books you can live with for a very long time and keep learning from great work. Lisa, you pour yourself into your books with so much intelligence and heart.
LM: Thank you so much. Thanks.
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