Dispelling Dream Clouds

July 2018.

     Most of us, most of the time, are caught up in clouds of anxiety, thoughts, memories, feelings of shame… general inner noise. These clouds whirr around us in a vortex of “what ifs”, “should I”, “and then”… making us increasingly confused. A lot of my work is about sorting through these clouds and making real what needs to be real, and releasing what is inessential, and thus freeing my clients from much unnecessary anxiety.

     The making real is grounding the something into a tangible form; something that can be worked with, and something rich with actual possibilities.

     In my own life in recent times I spent months of wanting, of craving, to travel again to Europe, mulling, thinking, planning, changing those plans, mulling, dwelling on, dispelling: essentially caught up in swirling clouds of possibilities. And then, a mid-September conference in Heidelberg, Germany beckoned (a time of Autumnal cooling and dancing red-bronze leaves and ripened berries), and I thought maybe I will/maybe I wont go, and so the churning continued. Then in the middle of one night, clarity came: go to the conference, and then work the rest of the journey out from that point. I registered with the conference people and booked my accommodation, and then a few days later, booked my plane flights.

     In this time of observing my own inner processes and noticing with clearer insight the processes of my clients, I began again thinking of the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, or three planes of existence (trailokya): the desire realm (Kāmaloka), the form realm  (Rūpaloka), and the formless realm  (Arūpaloka). Of particular interest in so far as this article is concerned is the desire realm. Here, is populated with lurid hell beings, of demons, ravenously hungry ghosts who can never be satisfied, demi-gods, animals and humans, all in a state of suffering.

     I can see elements of Kāmaloka in the horribly confusing and tormenting psychological states some clients bring to our sessions together; states dominated by anxiety, fear, self doubt, shame, and longing.  I certainly can identify aspects of it in myself.  Until they are identified, spoken about, even written about, they just undermine our capacity to move on in our relationships, our jobs, our life.

     This work has parallels in the Buddhist practice of dream yoga, or Milam. Dream yoga  is, in essence, the art of bringing consciousness into the dream state and learning to observe and control the dream, and then be free of it. Working with the unconscious (from where dreams arise) is a fundamental tool of psychodynamic psychotherapy and that work is about bring consciousness to ordinary and unordinary life. I’ve certainly noticed this in my own personal work, begun decades ago. I used to write my dreams down in journals and over the years collected dozens of them (big handwriting). I notice the quality of my dreams changed as I brought the light of conscious awareness to them. I also noticed that I was becoming aware that I was dreaming while asleep, and that I could change the course of dreams.  And then came an awareness that I didn’t need to dream quite as much as previously and also that I understood the meaning of the dreams I had with greater clarity.

   What I’ve found is the bringing concrete reality, through clearer insight, and tangible actions like keeping notes, or requesting actual documents, or preparing an action, dispels the dream clouds.

   Developing consciousness in dreaming begins with the learning to know that we are dreaming, and then, gradually working towards shaping what we dream, and then the art of lucid dreaming and travelling via the dream horse to anywhere we wish, or nowhere at all.

     The dream state in Buddhism refers not only to rapid eye movement dreaming in sleep, but to the arising of phenomena itself in every day life. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the account of the stages we pass through from life to death, from this moment to that moment, is the exploration of the bardo state (the “in-between”). The bardo describes the transitional, liminal state. This is a rich place of engagement, whether conscious or not, not an empty space. It is in here, however, that the silence of awareness is possible.

     The progression of sleep and dream yoga is something like this: first you learn how to remember your dreams; then you learn how to wake up in them; then you train your mind in the dream; then you learn how to stay awake in dreamless sleep.  All the while you are taking the insights from the night and transposing them into the day.  Not only are you transforming the night into meditation, but you begin to transform your life.  You start to wake up, in the spiritual sense.

Exploring the unconscious for the richness it contains

August 2017

by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     While considering what to write on for this month’s article, I came across some notes I made on hypnosis and dream work in depth psychology some years ago and  thought this was the beginning of a worthy something or other. I remember having the beginnings of a thought then about how both hypnosis and dream work share a very rich interior landscape. Such musings led me then to adding qualifications in clinical hypnotherapy to my counselling and psychotherapeutic training and practice.

      I first came into contact with depth psychology when I was 19, and began a ten year study immersion in the field of Jungian Analytical Psychology in both Australia and Switzerland. Since then I’ve trained in several other modalities, but I continue to mull about the unconscious and wonder, as I work, on its flexibility and capacity for fundamentally changing ordinary lives when properly nurtured and tapped into.

     The unconscious mind is a strange place of figures, and feelings, and sliding doors of perceptions that throw up, in the cracks of our existence, meanings that eluded us previously. Here is a kind of trance-scape that is really interesting not only theoretically but also experientially. This I know from my own inner work, as well as academic study. Here is the space where a richness of half known things are found to be much greater than originally thought. It’s sort of like a Tardis, where the interior is vastly bigger that what appears on the outside.

     I remember when I was a child playing a game that involved only traversing the cracks in the pavement on the street where I lived. This often required leaping around gazelle-like to avoid the plain old pavement with no cracks. It required focus, agility, and – at the same time – something of a relaxed stance. This focused-relaxed attitude is likewise what is required to be engaged in by both therapist and client alike in dream work and hypnosis. In order to move beyond the obvious, we have to connect gently to the subtle in order to know better the landscape of our minds.  Hypnosis provides a useful training for that, as does the work done in a counselling psychotherapy. Both take the natural aptitude most of us have for entering this focused-relaxed state and enhances it so that fundamental change can take place.

     None of this magical nor out of the ordinary; indeed most, if not all, of us already know what it feels like. We watch movies, we read books, we write, we listen and play music, we paint or gaze at an art work, we run, cycle, swim, or just wander around gardens or streets and shops in a present, and yet drifting away type of state. We do not lose control, just we do not lose control with hypnosis nor exploring our inner life in therapy, and no one can do things to us that we do not want. We can move in and out of this state at will.

     In therapy and hypnosis there is safety in the  meeting of minds, a rapport, and it is this mutuality that builds not only trust but a deepening of shared therapeutic experience where change happens.

      I particularly like working with people who, till now, have felt stuck in repetitive habits, negative ways of thinking, and bogged down with worry, anxiety, and a sense of unfulfillment. The artist, the writer, the musician facing the perpetual  blank canvas, or page or unliberating musical silence are perfect candidates for hypnosis and/or the depth psychology of dream work. I know this not only from working with such people, but through my own experiences facing similar sorts of things. There is a great beauty in the release of such blockages and the making of art, the release of iterative habit, and repetitive thought processes. This, by way, is felt as much by me as my clients. I enjoy my work and I bow my head humbly to the courage of those who journey with me.