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Are the dreams we have when we’re sleeping just a bunch of nonsense, or is there some method to their madness? Well, it was 33 years ago when I did my master’s thesis on dreaming and experience tells me there’s a lot to be learned through our dream life.

My first real focus on dreaming came in the late 70’s as a Novitiate at Pecos Benedictine Monastery just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. What a journey in the mountains that was, literally and figuratively. As members of that religious community, each of us had a “spiritual director,” who counseled us. And part of that counsel was an exploration of our dream life.

This particular monastery held the work of psychiatrist Carl Jung, MD, in high regard. Jung was a student of Freud. Jung eventually had his own student, Fritz Perls, MD. I’ll come back to that.

Two distinct memories related to dream work during my life in the monastery come to mind. One was the story of a fellow novitiate. She (yes, this was the only Benedictine monastery in the world at that time that had both men and women living together) shared with all of us a powerful dream experience she had.

Becky described a series of horrible nightmares about a terrifying monster climbing down from deep in the mountains and into her room to attack her. She was absolutely petrified by the thought of this fiendish creature. So together, she and her director began to unravel this recurrent dream.

As part of that unraveling, Becky was taken through an exercise. At the start of the weeks-long process, Becky’s director asked her to imagine somehow communicating with the monster that visited her at night. Becky immediately reacted with tremendous apprehension. It was completely beyond her capability at the beginning of this dream work to imagine the looks of this creature that scared her so, much less speak with it.

[By the way, this form of dream work entailing dialogue with aspects of a dream is fairly common, especially under the Gestalt approach which was formalized by Dr. Perls.]

Becky eventually, through the gentle guidance of her director, found a way to start some kind of communication with the beast of her dreams. Becky called on her active imagination. Surrounding the monastery was a tall, wrought iron fence, with large gates at the main entrance. Becky began her dialogue with the mountain monster by imagining that she could hide behind the gates of the monastery and yell up to it in the mountains. In response, the monster would growl back. Of course, everything in Becky shuttered in these early attempts.

As weeks passed, Becky began yelling questions at the monster in the mountains, and the monster began offering primitive replies. Over time, Becky began to feel some shift, and her communications with the beast felt safer. Later, through role playing, Becky and the monster were visible to each other. And in the end, Becky was standing on one side of the monastery gates and the monster just on the other. That’s a lot of trust. But the payoff of that trust was that Becky discovered something very healing through the dream.

We’ ll continue Becky’s journey and mine next week, along with more information about dream work styles.