Tag Archives: Perls
In the first half of this article, we explored my introduction to dream work when living at Pecos Benedictine Monastery during the late 70’s. Two dream experiences there left significant impressions on me. Becky’s story was one of them. A brief encounter with a renowned author who did a quick analysis of one of my dreams was the second.
Becky was being visited in her dreams regularly by a horrific monster that would come down out of the mountains surrounding the monastery and attack her. Initially her fright was paralyzing, but through dream work with her spiritual director, Becky experienced something shift. Using a Gestalt-type dream exercise, Becky eventually was able to imagine talking with the mountain monster. The only thing separating her from the creature, as her active imagination formed the experience, was a wrought iron gate at the entrance to the monastery.
This close encounter with her nightmare monster shifted for Becky a dialogue that was once unfathomable, into an exchange that felt relatively safe.
So, what’s the point? In the Gestalt system of belief, all parts of the dream are highly loaded symbols for parts of the dreamer. For example, in Becky’s dream, the mountains represented some part of her, as did the gate around the monastery, as well as the monastery itself. In keeping with the Gestalt approach, the mountain monster was also representing some aspect of Becky.
What Becky discovered was that the monster represented her own healthy power that she was cut off from. As she became acquainted through the exercise with the mountain monster, she was refamiliarizing herself with this powerful aspect of self. But since Becky had been separate from her healthy power for so long, that power had come to terrify her. This became apparent as Becky activated the mountain monster symbol through the dream exercise.
But as Becky got to know her own power shown to her as the monster, she felt safer in the world. Imagine Becky speaking these words as she role-played the awful beast of her dreams: “I AM THE MOST POWERFUL!” As she felt those words come out of her, Becky began to integrate the strength of her demon. Imagine the force of the mountain monster now her ally.
The second dream work experience that left a lasting impression on me was related to one of my own nightmares. Morton Kelsey was an internationally recognized Jungian author and dream work expert who came to present for all of us living at the monastery back in 1977.
During the presentation break, I was privileged to snag five minutes of Mr. Kelsey’s time. I gave him a brief description of a disturbing dream I’d had. He made one statement about my dream: probably no more than ten words. And while I had some understanding of the meaning of his words at the time, it’s only been in the last year that a more complete comprehension has landed with me. Given only a three minute description of my nightmare, Mr. Kelsey knew something about me that took me almost 40 more years to see.
This is the healing potency of our dream life and why I explore it with clients whenever possible.
Most are familiar with terms like Oedipal Complex and Oral Fixation. These terms were coined by Sigmund Freud, MD. Freud’s approach to dreams tended to focus on our brokenness, as those terms reflect. His acclaimed student, Carl Jung, MD, took a slightly different approach and believed that our dreams showed us more than just our limitations.
Jung was most fascinated with imagery and a skilled artist himself. In observing ancient cave art and petroglyphs from around the world, Jung noticed symbols like the spiral showing up across the globe. His studies also informed him that people from all walks of life and any where in the world might have very similar dream images. He concluded that all humans share access to a core source of wisdom: the Collective Unconscious.
Jung’s student, Fritz Perls, MD, took dream wo
rk one step further. Not only did Perls, like Jung, believe that dreams reflected more than our limitations: he believed all of us have an “instinct for wholeness,” and that this push for wholeness is reflected in our dreams.
Perl’s fundamental believe in the goodness of humankind won me over and became the cornerstone of my thesis. Operationally, this believe in the wisdom of each person takes the therapist out of the business of “interpreting” dreams, and into the business of supporting others in interpreting their own dreams. This is done by sponsoring clients in exercises that allow aspects of the dream to literally speak for themselves, thereby providing the dreamer with his or her own interpretation.
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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.
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