This waking life | In your dreams …

Dream Alchemy in Phnom Penh

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, last month, giving a workshop on Dream Therapy to creative arts therapists, which attracted Phoenix Jay of Phnom Penh’s The Advisor to interview me for their cover story. It’s a broad ranging yet deep interview, which you can read in full here – it includes a discussion of trauma, Jung, Freud, and an interpretation of Phoenix’s recurring dream and her response. I’ve picked out some extracts for you as a taster:

Extract

Jane Teresa:
If someone comes to me with a dream, my prime focus at first is to answer their questions. Why did you have this dream? Let’s have a look at it and explore it together. Let’s discover from your dream more about your mindset; about your unconscious mind, about how your past experiences are influencing the way you’re experiencing life now. Let’s put a window on that, without judgement. The next thing I have in mind is, whatever this dream is about, I want to help that person to experience a bigger and better life because of what they understand about themselves through their dreams.

Extract

Jane Teresa:
Say you told me about a dream and I said: ‘You’ve got an unconscious belief that you’re really sick and you’ll never be well.’ You could go away and do a whole New Age affirmation – ‘I’m really healthy; I’m fighting fit’ – but we all know that doesn’t work.

Phoenix Jay:
I didn’t want to be the one to point that out.

Jane Teresa:

There’s no point talking to your unconscious mind using rational everyday language because it’s not going to understand.

[Laughs] It makes us feel good but generally it doesn’t work. And the reason it generally doesn’t work is because you’ve got an unconscious belief to the contrary. Because your unconscious mind is so strong, it usually drives you more than your conscious mind. So in that somewhat silly example, just to keep things simple, if you were someone who wasn’t particularly looking after your health, it would be because you’ve got unconscious beliefs: ‘If I was healthy I’d have to do this, that and the other. I want to be the victim. I’m going to make sure I’m unhealthy.’ In reprogramming that, you can then be released from it: ‘Why did I think it was so important to be sick? That’s stupid, isn’t it? I’ve got a new unconscious belief that’s supporting my conscious intention and my conscious mind.’ So you start creating a healthy lifestyle for yourself. You wouldn’t be seeking a cure for your health, finances or whatever if they were all really good – and the reason they’re not good is because they’re being unconsciously driven by something else. There’s no point talking to your unconscious mind using rational everyday language because it’s not going to understand, but if you use the language of your unconscious mind – your dream symbols – you can really create quite stunning changes and there’s where I get really excited about working with people.

Extract

Phoenix Jay:
So, the big question: does the key to the future of human evolution lie in breaking down the barriers between the conscious and
unconscious mind?

Jane Teresa:

Know thyself: We’d treat each other with greater kindness and compassion and forgiveness – and with that, everything changes.

One hundred percent! If you could say 101% and it made sense, I’d say 1,000,000%. It’s been touched upon by so many cultures throughout history. The one that springs to mind is the Delphic Oracle from Ancient Greece. It’s the place you went to consult the oracle on your future. Above the door, in Greek, is a sign that says: ‘Know thy self.’ Look within first. If we could all understand our unconscious minds more thoroughly and in that gain understanding of our greater being and what life is really all about, then we wouldn’t act in the ways we do. Even if everyone was just a metaphorical drop of water in the great ocean of life, if every little drop of water – drop by drop by drop – got it and looked within, we would all treat each other so differently. We’d treat each other with greater kindness and compassion and forgiveness – and with that, everything changes.

Read full interview

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Episode 138 The Dream Show: The facts of life

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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What a fluid world we live in, a world where yesterday’s fiction frequently becomes today’s fact (think sci-fi and technology), and yesterday’s fact can easily crumble into fiction (think scientific research disproving previous findings).

What a job our dreaming minds have, every night, processing our waking life experiences, sorting the facts from the fiction, the fiction from the facts, updating our individual understandings of life. Your fact might be fiction to me, and what I see as an absolute fact in my life experience might be decidedly fiction according to yours.

And so we dream weave our pictures of life as we individually know it.

Episode 138 explores these themes, and also looks at how you can use dream alchemy with feel-good dreams to help consolidate the positive shifts such dreams reflect. Listen

PS The Dream Show is four years old today!

(Our next show, episode 139, will be released in four weeks, on 31 May 2013.)

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

“What does the nightmare in A Nightmare on Elm Street mean?” asked Steve and Abbey, presenters of the PowerPack breakfast show where I interpret callers’ dreams.

I’m a movie lover, but horror is not my genre, and it took a few arm twists before I agreed to download it so I could answer the question.

“Don’t watch it alone,” Abbey warned, “I wouldn’t.”

So I watched it with my husband, Michael, and son, Euan, and right from the start we giggled with relief. Thirty-one years on, the movie was interestingly benign from a horror point of view. Maybe it was the acting style, maybe it’s the sophistication of today’s persuasive movie techniques, or maybe I’ve just listened to so many nightmares during my twenty-plus years as a dream analyst that it didn’t engage my horror buttons.

Our first exciting moment came when Euan said, Is that Johnny Depp?

Our first exciting moment came when Euan said, “Is that Johnny Depp?” and we realised we were watching Johnny Depp in his first major movie role, aged 21 but looking about 14. As Nancy’s boyfriend in the movie, he came to a very sticky end. Or did he?

How much of the movie is about a dream?

When Nancy wakes from a nightmare, is she really awake or has she slipped into a dream within a dream? Is she awake at the beginning of the movie? Is she awake when she goes back to school the morning after the first death? Is she awake when she visits the sleep laboratory? If you’ve seen the movie, how did you feel in the penultimate scene where she steps into the dazzling bright morning light, and walks towards the car? Was she awake then?

Craven named the villain after Fred Krueger, the boy who bullied him during his adolescent years.

Written and directed by Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a slasher movie, slasher being a horror sub-genre. I’m glad I didn’t know that going in. Craven named the villain, Freddy Krueger, after Fred Krueger, the boy who bullied him during his adolescent years, so it’s interesting that Nancy and her friends are all adolescents who live in fear of Krueger and what he’ll do to them.

The movie is celebrated as one of the first to intelligently explore the boundaries between illusion and reality – and between dreaming and waking life – by manipulating and confusing the audience. Craven’s original ending (spoiler alert) was for Nancy to kill Krueger by ceasing to give him her energy and time, and then to wake up and realise it had all been one long nightmare, but the studio, New Line Cinema, asked for a twist ending. Both endings were filmed, and the movie was released with the twist ending where the whole plot is a dream within a dream within a dream, with no awakening. Craven pulled out of the proposed A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel over the twist ending.

In the movie, Nancy and her friends all dream the same dream. Two of the friends die during their sleep, slashed to pieces by their nightmare ghoul, Freddy Krueger. Nancy and her boyfriend realise the same fate awaits them, so they try to stay awake for days, and days. This idea was inspired by several newspaper articles Craven had seen about Khmer refugees fleeing the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocides who were so frightened by their nightmares that they tried to stay awake. Several died in their sleep when exhaustion prevailed.

Craven was also inspired by Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright, which explored the way we each dream up our experiences.

Craven was also inspired by the 1970s song, Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright, which essentially explored our differing perceptions of the world, our illusions about reality, the way we each dream up our worlds and our experiences.

So on one level the film explores illusion and reality, while on another it runs past some sleep theories. Nancy is taken to a sleep laboratory where we learn a little about REM sleep and dreaming – only to realise, of course, that this episode is a dream. We learn about how staying awake for days is fatally detrimental. Severe sleep deprivation kills. And we learn about false awakenings, the dream in which you dream that you wake up but you continue in the dream.

Let’s get back to the original question:

“What does the nightmare in A Nightmare on Elm Street mean?”

In the movie, Freddy Krueger was a real life child murderer who escaped jail due to a paperwork error. The parents killed him to keep the neighbourhood safe, but his ghost returned to take revenge on their children by killing them in their sleep.

It’s helpful to look at everyone and everything in a dream as reflecting something about the dreamer’s conscious and unconscious feelings and beliefs. Freddy Krueger represents danger and risk, and the more we try to sanitise life and play safe, the more these energies are called into being. In Craven’s original ending, Nancy wakes from her dream once she confronts Krueger then withdraws her attention and energy from him. In life, when we face our fears, understand them, deal with them, then withdraw our focus and energy from them, they disappear. In this context, the nightmare is about facing – or not facing – fears about danger, risk, and safety.

In Craven’s original script, Krueger was a child molester, not a child murderer, which is telling.

The other strong thread in the movie is adolescent promiscuity (remember, this is the early 80s), and loss of innocence. In the nightmare, teenage promiscuity leads to slashing, mutilation, destruction, death. No matter how much parents try to protect their adolescent children, the teenagers naturally explore their sexuality, and the results – loss of innocence, guilt, emotional trauma, an end to childhood – are reflected in such nightmares. In Craven’s original script, Krueger was a child molester, not a child murderer, which is telling. As a dream analyst, I notice how common it is for young teenagers to experience violent dreams as they encounter the conflicts of leaving childhood behind and growing into independence.

Finally, for Craven, perhaps the movie is an unconscious working of the bullying he experienced as an adolescent. Bullying continues to cause pain well beyond school years – it can haunt an individual for a lifetime unless it’s confronted and addressed. Maybe Craven did just that, via Nancy.

Have you seen the movie? What did you make of it?

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Camouflage and the facts of life

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 4 Comments

I was looking through the window, settling into blog-writing mode while watching the play of sunlight and shade move across a particularly beautiful rock, when I realised that part of the rock wasn’t rock at all. It was a large, sunbathing, frilled lizard.

I tried shifting my gaze in an effort to blend him back into rock, but I couldn’t do it. Camouflaged one instant, revealed forever the next. My world shifted. The rock solid fact of the rock was shattered in an instant. What I had known to be true was no longer true, and there was no going back to the old way of seeing and believing it.

Yes, it’s only a rock. Yes, it’s only a frilled lizard. But it’s a true story, or, at least, it is until the next unexpected revelation.

“Look, there!” I imagine saying to someone else, “There, on that rock. It’s a frilled lizard!” And some will see it, and some won’t. Camouflage is a good trick, finely honed by nature to protect through deception.

The lizard has scuttled away now, and the rock itself will never be the same again in my personal little world because I’ll always see it now as the lizard rock, and the rock that found its way into this blog. And so things change.

I was at a party last weekend where a group of us were enjoying a free ranging conversation when someone piped up, “But what are the facts? I’m only interested in the facts!”

“But what are the facts?” This kind of thinking always reminds me of butter and margarine.

This kind of thinking always reminds me of butter and margarine. When I was a child, butter was suddenly declared unhealthy due to its saturated fats. We switched to margarine, a healthy choice based on science, we believed. A few years later, margarine was declared unhealthy due to many factors, and we switched back to butter. You know the story. It happens all the time now, and not only in matters of health and nutrition. If I were to dream of butter or margarine, I’d probably be processing dilemmas around perception, what – and who – to believe. Or saturated facts.

In fact, the fact is, many facts change, and facts can get us into as much trouble as they can also help us out.

One of the most enlightening fact-finding missions you can embark upon is to explore your dreams.

One of the most enlightening fact-finding missions you can embark upon is to explore your dreams. Your dreams don’t yield universal facts. They yield personal facts – your personal beliefs about the world based on your experience of it. Best of all, your dreams yield your unconscious personal beliefs, the ‘facts of life’ that unconsciously drive the way you see your life and the way you live it.

Discovering your personal unconscious facts of life helps you to understand why you see life in the way that you do, why you respond to life in the way that you do, why you experience life in the way that you do. Once you become aware of your unconscious facts of life, the camouflage drops away, and you see yourself and your life in a new way. You may feel, looking back, that you have been deceived by those unconscious beliefs. Yes, yes, and yes, but be kind to yourself because you put them in place to protect yourself from dangers that once felt real.

As I said earlier, camouflage is a good trick, finely honed by nature to protect through deception.

Facts change. A sign at Manly Library, viral on Twitter, Photo: @Dane_Murray

(I took a five minute break there to stretch and make a cup of tea before reviewing what I had written. I flicked to the news screen at the same time, and this title jumped out at me: “When fact becomes fiction”. It’s the story about an Australian library that tongue-in-cheek proposed to move Lance Armstrong’s non-fiction books to the fiction section following “the disgraced cyclist’s own confession that his inspirational story is a lie”. I’ll leave you to ponder the context.)

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Episode 134 The Dream Show: Alchemy for all seasons

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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You’ve heard a lot from me about the healing power of dream alchemy, but can alchemy techniques be used for healing or personal development outside the realm of symbolic dreams?

To set the scene and remind you what dream alchemy is, there’s the story of a dream alchemy visualisation I did for one of my dreams many years ago, with powerful results. Then we move on to explore how dream alchemy can be used to treat PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) sufferers whose flashbacks occur as literal-replay nightmares.

Finally we look at using alchemy practices beyond the world of dreams. Instead of working with your unique dream symbols to reprogram specific unconscious beliefs, waking life alchemy, carefully created to suit individual needs, helps shift limiting unconscious perspectives. Waking life alchemy is something I’ve developed and offered in The Compass, and use regularly with my mentoring clients. In this episode, I give you a taste of waking life alchemy, a recipe you can take and apply to your situation. Let me know what results you get!

Listen

(Ahem, although you’ll hear me announce this episode as Episode 135, it’s not. It’s 134. We only noticed when it was too late, all packaged and complete for you to enjoy.)

(Our next show, episode 135, will be released in four weeks, on 8 February 2013.)

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Samsara Alchemy

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 6 Comments

I saw the movie Samsara yesterday, and awoke this morning with a New Year alchemy idea for you to do. I’ve called it Samsara Alchemy, and as I type those words something deep within jumps to attention and formulates a concept for a book by that title, so I take a note to self.

In Sanskrit, Samsara means continuous flow, the repeating cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth – impermanence, the ever turning wheel of life. Samsara, the movie, (directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson), is a visual meditation on this theme, filmed over more than four years across twenty-five countries and five continents.

According to the Samsara website, the movie “explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation.”

The best way to enjoy the movie is to immerse yourself in its flow, to suspend (or at least quieten) the intellect’s need for information, location, and details. Flowing frees your mind and allows you to experience a Buddhist perspective of life’s dramas.

Some of the images are confronting – death, destruction, factory farming – while others are heart-achingly beautiful. Recurring close ups of eyes staring unmoving into the camera – or the camera staring deeply into eyes – interplay with panoramic bird’s eye views of the startling patterns we create as we move through life.

A favourite for me was the recurring theme of watching the sun move through a building or landscape, throwing patterns of shadows and light, followed by moonlit shadows and the passage of starry heavens before rebirth into morning light.

Mecca Ramadan

Patterns, patterns, recurring patterns, up close and grandly sweeping, patterns, patterns, recurring patterns, life, death, rebirth, continuous flow, Samsara.

Does Samsara speak to you of circles or spirals? Do you see a pattern of evolution, or devolution, within the grand recurring patterning of life (a spiral), or do you see one ever-repeating cycle, always returning to the same place (a circle), though perhaps seeing it with different eyes?

The countdown begins. Those of us who follow the western calendar are living the last day or two (give or take time zones) of 2012, about to mark the end of the old year and greet the birth of the new. Instead of writing New Year resolutions, I encourage you to immerse yourself in a Samsara Alchemy. This is what to do:

Samsara Alchemy

Begin by sitting quietly, perhaps after a meditation, and let some images come to you from your personal life during 2012. Write down the images that come to you. They might be obvious (the big events, both highs and lows), or they might surprise you (an image of a forgotten event or experience). Review your list. Make sure you have a mix of highs and lows, and a mix of mundane and unusual. Make sure your list includes some dilemmas you encountered during the year as well as some insights and epiphanies you recall.

If this seems difficult, begin again. Remember that Samsara means flow. Let it flow. Don’t approach this logically. Let images come to you.

If you enjoy words, simply take a piece of paper (as big or as small as you like), and write a single word for each image or thought that came to you. For the images that had a big impact on you, write the words in big letters, and for the images which were less impactful at the time, write the words in smaller letters. (Think of tag clouds on blog posts.) Arrange your words anywhere on your paper, at random, all over the place, or in a pattern. When you’ve finished, step back from the snapshot picture of your life in 2012, and let it speak to you.

If you enjoy art, create an artwork from your collection of 2012 images. Draw, paint, sculpt, collage, or choose any medium, then step back from your remembered vision of 2012, and let it speak to you anew.

The idea of this alchemy is to borrow the vision of the Samsara filmmakers to create a meditation on (to paraphrase the filmmakers) “the wonders of your personal world during 2012, from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of your spirituality and your human experience”. Your picture will help you to see and appreciate life’s continuous flow, the repeating cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. As you step into 2013, consider how this perspective can assist you in choosing what you birth, or rebirth, and how you flow, as you begin a new cycle of life.

(All images are stills from the movie.)
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Singing with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Have you ever met and deeply related with a celebrity or well-known public figure in a dream? How did you feel when you woke up and recalled the dream? Did you feel as if you really made contact, as if it were more than a dream? Did you feel inspired, or energised in some way?

Earlier this week, I was called onto Sydney’s Mix106.5 Rosso and Claire breakfast show to comment on Rosso’s dream.

Rosso dreamed Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant sang on stage with him then gave him his phone number.

“I used to play in a band, and in my dream I was back in the band when Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant jumped up on stage to sing with us,” Rosso began. “Then he gave me his phone number and suggested we meet up at the Byron Bay Bluesfest.”

Rosso described his dream as the best dream he’d ever had, and he was clearly excited about it. The sensuality of the dream – hearing, singing, and playing the music – combined with feeling the close connection with a legend, had left its mark. I guess in many ways Rosso felt touched by his dream, inspired and energised by his experience within the dream, but curious about why he should dream this now that his own band days are past.

What does it mean? We’ll come to that.

What’s the most memorable dream you’ve had? Was it a scary or dark dream, or was it positive and inspiring? How many of your senses were vividly engaged in the dream: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste? How deeply was your heart connected in your dream: emotions, feelings? How difficult did you find it to describe the magic and power of your dream to anyone the next day? There’s a numinous quality to these highly sensual, energising dreams that’s challenging to put into words. The most amazing dream you’ve ever had can sound straightforward to others. There’s an element that’s easily lost in translation but profoundly found within the self.

When you tell someone about a special dream, there’s an element that’s easily lost in translation but profoundly found within the self.

If you’ve experienced a soul mate dream, you’ll know this feeling well. In the classic soul mate dream, you meet a special charismatic someone, and experience a deep connection that touches your heart and soul and spills over into your waking life. That dream soul mate can be someone you’ve never met, and many a dreamer has fruitlessly searched for years for the person they met in their dream – with no success because the dream mate, no matter how convincing, is a marvellous creation of the dreamer’s mind.

That dream soul mate can also be someone you do know in waking life, someone in your circle, someone you’ve been in relationship with or hope to be in relationship with, or someone you barely know anything about. Again, the classic dream is compelling, the senses impassioned, the heart and soul energised, a feeling of deep connection, of finally finding something that has been missing in your life. If you have this dream, don’t think for a moment that the actions, emotions, and feelings the person demonstrated in your dream are intended by their waking life lookalike. Hard though it may be to believe, your dreaming mind chose that person as a perfect symbol of something you feel is missing, or something you’d like to connect with, in your life. Something, not someone. And that symbol is all in your mind too. You may see Joe as confident and supportive, while someone else might see Joe as confident and self-centred, and Joe might see himself as lacking in confidence and trying to make up for it with bravado. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So are all other qualities. The Joe in your dream is not the Joe you know or vaguely know in waking life, so don’t go looking for a deep relationship with Joe based on a fabulous dream, no matter how compelling. Instead, seek to connect with those soul mate qualities within your own heart and soul. In this example, reconnect with the confidence you had lost, and reconnect with a sense of support for your beautiful self, a support that has perhaps wavered in the face of negative self criticism.

So let’s return to Rosso’s dream about a new deep and heartfelt connection with Robert Plant.

Wish fulfilment is not the explanation for this dream.

Rosso knew, before his dream, that Robert Plant is headlining this year’s Byron Bay Bluesfest, but wish fulfilment is not the explanation for this dream (or a meaningfully rewarding avenue of exploration for any dream). I asked Rosso which three words he would choose to describe Robert Plant’s personality.

“Cool, outgoing, legend,” he replied.

When you’re asked to quickly describe someone’s personality in three words, it usually turns out that at least one of those words helps explain their character role in your dream. Rosso and I would need an hour to really flesh out the meaning of his dream – and without thousands of people listening in on the radio – but here’s the essence:

Like all dreams, Rosso’s dream reflects the last 24-48 hours. Our dreams are the result of our minds processing the last one to two days, trying to make sense of our world. In trying to make sense of our world, our dreaming minds compare our recent experiences with our past experiences, then, armed with this most recent update of our individual model of life as we know it, some dreams may project forward to preview the future according to that model. To test it out in our imagination. Rosso’s recent experiences resonated with his old band days, and, in his dream, he experienced a deep connection with “cool, outgoing, legend” that he then projected into the future as a new way of being.

In a sense, Rosso “got the number” of a Robert Plant energy within himself that he’s ready to reconnect with and energise.

In a sense, he “got the number” of a Robert Plant energy within himself that he’s ready to reconnect with and energise. What a wonderful dream!

Rosso may go to this year’s Bluesfest, and, if he does, he’ll attend Robert Plant’s concert. Who knows, as a media personality himself, Rosso may get to chat with Robert, may even get his phone number or socialise into the evening. Or maybe not. Either way, life’s deepest rewards are those that energise your own heart and soul, that inspire you to find what has been lost, to reconnect with a greater part of your being, to live life bigger and brighter, to walk up to the microphone and sing with all your heart – literally or metaphorically. To be fully alive to the moment. Understanding such dreams can take you there.

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Episode 132 The Dream Show: Open your eyes

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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Isn’t it interesting that when we see something new, we first try to fit it with what we already know? Our tendency is to categorise this with that, to file today’s experiences to fit in with yesterday’s, to make sense of our world by making it connect with the picture we have been building, day by day, since birth.

Then along come certain events or experiences that just don’t fit – or we can’t find ways to fit them into our commonsense picture of the world. What then?

This month’s episode of The Dream Show looks at our blind spots, gives examples of how to identify these in our dreams, and explores opening our eyes to new ways of seeing the world.

One of the main functions of our dreams is to process our experiences in ways that help us to make sense of our world. We each build our unique picture of the world, of what makes sense to us based on our unique life experiences. So many different world views, mostly overlapping to some degree, gift us so many opportunities to learn from other people’s perspectives – and sometimes our dreaming minds add new brushstrokes to our picture instead of editing to fit the same-old, same-old, same-old rut.

Enjoy this light-hearted but serious dip into the science and mystery of making sense of life.

Listen

(Our next show, episode 133, will be released in four weeks, on 14 December 2012.)

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Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nightmares: a cure?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 2 Comments

Are dreams always symbolic? What about recurring nightmares in which the dreamer relives an actual traumatic experience, over and over again, sometimes several times a week, often for decades? This can be the case for people with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder, a type of anxiety disorder following a traumatic experience). How can these replay nightmares be stopped? Can dream alchemy be applied to transform these kinds of nightmares and their underlying issues?

Nightmares following traumas are generally symbolic, seemingly unconnected to the actual event, but exact replays are more common for people with PTSD.

Nightmares disrupt sleep, leaving you tired the next day, as well as stressed about the scary nightmare and what it might mean about you and your life. Magnify that to exhaustion when you have the nightmares several times a week, compounded with daily anxiety about going to sleep and facing yet another replay of the long-ago trauma, and a sense of hopelessness about not being able to stop the nightmares: that’s what many people with PTSD suffer year after year.

On top of that, many suffering these types of nightmares can punch, kick, and hit their bed partners, adding to bedtime anxiety. When dreams occur in the REM stage of sleep, ‘sleep paralysis’ stops our muscles from acting out our dreams, but the kinds of nightmares associated with PTSD sometimes occur in other stages of the sleep cycle when legs and arms are free to move.

Nightmares following traumas are generally symbolic, seemingly unconnected to the actual event, but exact replays are more common for people with PTSD. So what is PTSD?

Diagnosis of PTSD references three main symptoms enduring more than 30 days after the event: reliving a traumatic event in a way that disturbs your daily life; feeling emotionally numb or detached from the trauma; and increased arousal in everyday situations.

Reliving may mean having flashbacks where the trauma seems to be happening again, recurring nightmares about the event, repeating memories, and strong reactions to things that remind you of the experience.

Feeling emotionally numb or detached from the trauma can manifest as not caring about anything, a lack of interest in everyday life, and avoiding anything connected with the event, as well as not being able to remember key details of the trauma.

Increased arousal due to PTSD can include being startled easily and having exaggerated responses, being hypervigilant, having difficulty concentrating, outbursts of anger or irritability, and difficulties sleeping.

Each sensory reliving embeds the trauma.

The danger of experiencing replays of the trauma, whether by nightmares, flashbacks, or repeating memories, is that these tend to be overwhelmingly sensory in nature, as if they are happening in the present tense. They are not so much thoughts about the event, or feelings that can be eased by considering context. Each sensory reliving embeds the trauma.

The standard treatment for PTSD usually involves cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which helps the sufferer to identify thoughts stemming from the trauma and replace them with less upsetting thoughts. CBT retrains the conscious brain to change perspective and response to situations that would otherwise trigger negative reactions. When CBT is effective with PTSD sufferers, nightmares featuring actual replay tend to stop, soften, or recur less often.

So CBT works with the conscious mind to reframe thoughts about the event.

The unconscious mind may persist with unconscious beliefs, feelings, and responses associated with the traumatic event.

The unconscious mind may persist with unconscious beliefs, feelings, and responses associated with the traumatic event. In this case, the nightmares – or other, more symbolic nightmares – will continue, and underlying issues stemming from the trauma may remain unresolved.

So can PTSD related nightmares be stopped when standard CBT fails to achieve this?

One treatment that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment is Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT). Now, if you’re acquainted with dream alchemy, IRT is going to look familiar to you.

IRT involves rewriting the trauma-replay dream to change the trauma story, and repeatedly visualising the new, positive version, while awake.

In IRT, the sufferer thinks up ways to change the storyline of their nightmare so it’s no longer scary. With help from the therapist, they decide on the best rewrite of the dream and then replay the new version of the dream as a visualisation – while awake – a set number of times. This therapy stops the nightmare in many cases, or reduces how often it occurs.

What’s the difference between dream alchemy and IRT?

IRT involves rewriting the trauma-replay dream to change the trauma story, and repeatedly visualising the new, positive version, while awake.

Dream alchemy involves understanding the dream (interpreting it when it is symbolic), identifying the unconscious beliefs (sometimes based on traumatic experiences) that underlie the key issue, and rewriting either the whole dream or an aspect of it in a way that reprograms those unconscious beliefs into positive beliefs that automatically drive positive responses. The new version is repeatedly visualised*, while awake.

IRT reprograms the conscious mind and the dream storyline. The dreamer either dreams the new storyline or the replay dream stops. Deeper unconscious issues related to the trauma may be reflected in more symbolic ongoing nightmares and dreams, and remain unaddressed.

Dream alchemy addresses and resolves issues by transforming the underlying unconscious beliefs.

Dream alchemy reprograms both the conscious and unconscious mind and these changes are reflected in new, positive dreams. Dream alchemy addresses and resolves issues by transforming the underlying unconscious beliefs.

When therapies such as CBT or IRT assist sufferers to overcome PTSD and stop the trauma-replay nightmares, grief associated with the trauma may naturally resolve. When grief remains, or when unconscious beliefs related to the grief have taken hold (beliefs around perceived guilt, for example), these will be reflected in subsequent symbolic dreams. For those who remember their dreams, dream alchemy is a route to resolution and healing.

* Dream alchemy may be prescribed as a visualisation, affirmation, artwork, writing, bodywork, or other modality, depending on the dream and the dreamer.

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Rainbow shades of grey

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

“Why do we dream in black and white?” It’s a question I’m often asked, and it always makes me smile. “We don’t,” I reply. “You don’t remember noticing colours in your dreams, so you assume you dream in black and white. And shades of grey. But now you know you can dream in colour, you will.”

Within days – or nights – such dreamers excitedly report colours. A flash of red, perhaps, or a golden sunset, then a sudden rush of colourful details until the dream is as colourful as waking life or perhaps even vibrantly supersaturated, super surreal.

Yet in another sense, we do tend to dream in black and white, the black and white of opposites. Risk and safety for example.

Yet in another sense, we do tend to dream in black and white, the black and white of opposites.

Look closely at most dreams and you will see at least one pair of opposites. A dream might feature good and evil, risk and safety, crowded and alone, deep and shallow, new and old, faith and doubt, the black and white – the either or – of issues that conflict us.

Are you a black and white thinker? Do you see the world in black and white, right and wrong, good and evil? Do I hear a resounding ‘no’? But look deeper, and especially look at those pairs of opposites offered on a platter in your dreams. A dream theme peppered with risk and safety suggests you may – at least unconsciously – look at risk and safety as mutually exclusive alternatives, black and white, no shades of grey. Perhaps you see life as frighteningly risky so you run for certain safety, or you see life as suffocatingly safe so you choose the high adventure of risk. No shades of grey.

When you find your black and white blind spot, ask yourself who, in your early life, influenced your perspective. Continuing the example, you’ll probably find at least one parent or guardian valued risk to the exclusion of safety, or safety to the exclusion of risk, and you either followed suit and took on the same values, or you retaliated in fear to occupy the opposite position. Your current values reflect your beliefs – about risk and safety in this example – and those beliefs are often based on your emotional experiences.

When you are awake to your dreams, you can choose to begin the healing work of finding a balance point between opposites – the Tao, the ‘middle path’.

This deep work involves recognising your shadow (what you see as bad, the black to your white).

This deep work begins not with a decision to simply walk the middle path between black and white, but to explore and heal the origin of your beliefs and the emotions that cemented them in black and white. It involves recognising your shadow (what you see as bad, the black to your white), the shadowy urge to take risks which must be repressed in the name of supreme safety, or the shadowy urge to stay safe which must be repressed in the name of adventurous risk. It involves understanding and embracing your shadow, loving that part of yourself, integrating it into your being instead of banishing it from your kingdom, and when you do this, the black and white of your staunchly upheld perspective gives way to an infinity of possibilities etched in far more than fifty shades of grey. Or colour. Why live in grey when you can live in colour?

When you know that you can dream in colour, you do. When you know that you can live in colour, you do.

I prefer to take poetic licence and see a rainbow spectrum of brilliant colours between black and white.

I’m not really one for shades of grey. I prefer to take poetic licence and see a rainbow spectrum of brilliant colours between black and white. It feels more intuitively correct.

Think of the font colour menu in Microsoft Word: black at the top left leading through a range of colours to white at the bottom right.

Scientifically speaking, white light contains all the rainbow colours mixed together (you only see the rainbow when you shine white light through a glass prism, or when sunlight gets refracted by raindrops), and black is the absence of all colour. But look again. Scientifically speaking, black pigment is made up from different coloured dyes, and white pigment is generally the absence of coloured pigment.

Step through and beyond the rainbow into a world rich in colour.

Let’s leave the physics and semantics of black and white, and, while we’re at it, the spelling of grey or gray, colour or color, licence or license, and delve into the poetic heart of the matter.

Let your dreams help you to drop your veils of black and white, and to step through and beyond the rainbow into a world rich in colour.

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