Dreamwork Trains Your Brain to Communicate in Image and Feeling
There are many benefits to working with dreams, and there isn’t just one method or one path.
Working with dreams can support healing, emotional well-being, creativity, and psychic development. As a result, I find that people who tend to be interested in dreams and dreamwork are often creatives, artists, healers, or simply sensitive individuals seeking to explore their own inner landscape or experiment with altered states of consciousness.
However, in these unsettling, strange, and destabilizing times, working with dreams can be transformative for all of us. If you are someone who remembers your dreams, I imagine you’ve realized that the content of your dreams is often unlike the content of your waking life. Time flows differently. You occupy space in dreams differently. Dream characters may not make sense. You, yourself, may not make sense. Not as compared to the You you know yourself to be in waking life.
Working with dreams requires you to change the way you engage with information and inputs. It requires you to shift the way you encounter others — and yourself. Dreamwork teaches you a different way of receiving information, whether that information is in images, language, or sensory input. This training — which in a way, is akin to learning how to communicate in a foreign land — becomes very valuable out in the world in waking life. Therefore, dreamwork can be useful for anyone to learn: not just artists, creatives, and healers.
No matter your belief system, your religion, your politics, your age, or your outlook, I think we can all agree that these past many years have brought about a shift in the way we communicate with each other.
On a communal or societal level, we have experienced that shift as a technological one. Depending on your age you may have moved through many phases of technological advances in the last 30 years: from email and the internet, to texting and social media to smartphones, to Instagram and TikTok, to VR and AI. How we get messages across to others and how others send messages out into the world has shifted dramatically. For the purposes of this article, I invite you to consider specifically the shift from language to image, from thinking to feeling.
But on a personal level, you may also have encountered a shift in the way you communicate with friends, family or loved ones. Perhaps relationships that used to be close or easy have grown difficult, or means of communication that worked for you in the past no longer seem to work. People don’t get you. You don’t get them. Connections have been broken. Miscommunications have led to conflict and ultimately to broken ties or broken hearts. There seems to be growing confusion around communications. In a way, waking reality is starting to make as little sense as our dreams.
In general, we are witnessing and experiencing a huge shift in how we communicate with each other. Whether this is intentional (like some conspiracy theorists posit) or simply evolutionary, it is happening.
I feel extremely grateful for my own personal dreamwork during this shift as it has offered me a course of study and a framework for growth that has proven useful in my everyday life as I navigate a world that no longer seems to make sense, if it ever truly did. I have noticed quite a shift in how I receive and perceive others (and the world around me). In part, this comes from getting to know myself better through my dreams. Working dreams with my Natural Dreamwork practitioner over the years, I’ve become more familiar with how “I roll” in situations that trigger me. And, it’s not always pretty. I have become more aware of my tendencies for reactivity; first seeing them more clearly in dreams and then learning to identify them more easily in waking life.
However, Natural Dreamwork also provides me with skills for meeting my own reactivity (in dreams and in waking life), like learning how to stop myself mid-reaction, pause, and choose instead to sense or feel more deeply into what is actually happening as opposed to what my conditioned mind wants me to believe is happening.
Most important, I have learned that taking more time to feel, to sense, and to process what is happening is okay.
Let me repeat that for those of you in the back (including parts of myself that still forget): Taking more time to sense or feel or tune into oneself is okay.
Doing so has created a sense of trust inside me I have not had in a long time, if I ever had it. It’s a special kind of trust. A trust of oneself. A trust that you know inside you what is right for you.
Building this trust with myself over time has led to me being more able to rely on my feelings and senses over my immediate interpretation or story about what is happening. Again, I practiced this first with dreams, but then it transferred over into waking life.
Now, I find myself taking more time before responding to information, especially when I feel triggered: whether that’s in a dream, via social media, in the news, or even as a story someone is passing along to me. I have begun to notice how my nervous system responds to information and sensory inputs. I have made more conscious lifestyle choices as a result of tuning more into my own nervous system responses.
I have noticed, too, how competencies I used to lean heavily on — for instance, my writing or my ability to speak with confidence in a debate — no longer seem to serve me in the way they used to. Instead, I find myself speaking and writing less, and listening more. I find that I require — and take — more time before speaking or writing to tune into how I feel, or to process what has just been said or done. I find that doing so has led to a development of and familiarity with my feeling center (“my heart”), which I now can use more in my communications — both receiving and sending. Meaning: I am acting more from what I truly want or who I truly am, as opposed to reacting in response to my interpretation of what others do or say.
My dreams have tracked this shift in me over the years. In particular, I have seen a change in me in “telephone dreams;” the ones in which I can’t seem to press the right buttons in order to make a call or I am somewhere the phone doesn’t get a signal. In the past, this type of dream would frustrate me greatly and I’d be quite reactive in the dream as a result — doing and saying all sorts of things I didn’t mean, out of frustration, anxiety, or a desire to please others.
Recently, however, I found myself in one such dream that took a different turn. The dream starts with me in a group of adults on a hiking path in a desert landscape. I am with a little girl, probably around 4 years old. I was concerned the girl — who I loved and wanted to protect — would not be able to keep up with the others as the path became more steep, narrow, and winding. The tour guide told us that this was the last “cut out,” which I took to mean a place where we could choose whether to keep going or not. I observed the girl and wondered if I could carry her on my back the rest of the way. I realized I couldn’t — she was too big to carry anymore. Arriving at a rest area, I thought to call my mother to come pick us up, but the phone call — on a flip phone — would not go through. When I realized we had no signal where we were, I also understood I didn’t even know where we were. I would not have been able to tell her how to find us. I didn’t know the name of this place and there weren’t any maps. I looked around then and saw families enjoying the shade of the trees and picnicking at tables. Children were running around and playing games. There was a water fountain flowing freely that I knew the girl would like to drink from. Instead of frustration, as I have felt so many times in telephone dreams in the past, I understood deeply how much we needed in the moment just to stop, rest, and possibly even play in the shade for a while. From that place of deep knowing — despite some lingering anxiety — I invited the girl to drink from the flowing water fountain — which she did. Watching her filled me with joy and love.
And then I woke up.
= = =
In these last many years, my mind has been stepping more out of the way to make room for my feelings. My feelings have been stepping in to support me when my mind is confused. Some might call what I am describing intuition, but it’s not intuition. It’s deeper than intuition. What we identify as intuition is often reactivity. It’s a response to wounding or conditioning. It’s a knowing that is not really a deep knowing.
The deeper feeling I am describing is one that is more essential to you. It’s what was there before all the wounds, all the stories, all the conditioning, all the hyper-vigilance. Dreamwork helps us access that essence in each of us. And this is why it’s useful for everyone right now, as the world becomes weirder, as reality makes less and less sense, as our means of “traditional” communicating break down.
There is a way to operate in reality that does not rely on “making sense,” (mind, logic, language) but rather on feeling (soul, sensing, image). Dreamwork can train you how to operate and communicate in this way. I believe that expanding our capacity for communicating in images and feeling will become more and more necessary. It will be a way of locating ourselves in an increasingly chaotic emotional landscape.
I also believe that our reliance on logic and language will start to become a detriment if it hasn’t already. Training ourselves to tune in to our own essential being will likely enable us to tune in better to others. And from this sturdier place of deep knowing, we can better evaluate what’s being concealed beneath another’s language or what’s being hidden from view by a mask or a many-layered garment.
This kind of intimate knowing of oneself, however, requires time, effort, and focus. Dreamwork is one method of training ourselves in this kind of knowing.
Originally published on Jen Sonstein Maidenberg
