Image and feeling

The teaching

As the dreamer-centred way, from Calvin Hall to Ernest Hartmann teaches it.

The dreamer is the judge

This way of reading begins with a rule: the dream belongs to the dreamer, and so does its meaning. No book of symbols can say what a dream means for someone else, because the same image carries different weight in different lives. A reading is offered, tried against the dreamer's own sense of their days, and kept only if it fits. Calvin Hall taught that dreams picture how a person sees themselves, the people around them and their own troubles, so that each dreamer's dreams are read as that dreamer's own.

The central image

A long dream can be tangled, so the reading starts with what stands out. Ernest Hartmann taught that most vivid dreams have a central image, one that stands out by being especially powerful, vivid, strange or detailed, and that this image pictures the dreamer's strongest feeling at the time. His clearest example comes after a frightening event: the survivor of a fire or an attack dreams not of the event but of being swept away by a tidal wave. The wave is not the event. It is the feeling, terror and helplessness, given a shape.

So the first question is simply: which image will not leave? Underline it. It is often not the climax of the story but a single picture, a locked door, a flooded street, a child on a high wall, that the mind returns to on waking.

The feeling, named

Then name the strongest feeling of the dream in one word: dread, longing, shame, relief, rage, tenderness. The events of a dream are often strange, but its feelings are seldom disguised; they are the part most like waking life. A dream in which nothing makes sense can still be plainly a dream of dread, and that is where the reading takes hold.

Where the feeling lives

With the image and the feeling in hand, ask where that feeling lives in waking life now. Where, awake, have I met this very feeling, and how lately? A dream of missing a train, in dread, asks where one fears being too late; a dream of a house with a crumbling wall, in sadness, asks what in one's life feels less sound than it should. The answer is often close and ordinary, which is why it is easy to miss.

The day before

Dreams borrow freely from recent days. Freud called the borrowed pieces the day's residues: a face glimpsed on a bus, a word in a letter, a worry pushed aside at bedtime. Look first at yesterday, and then a little further back, since a waking event often returns in a dream not only the next night but again some days later. The borrowed piece is seldom the meaning; it is the thread by which the dream ties itself to life.

Two ways of associating

To go further, take each part of the dream and ask what it brings to mind. Here the teachers part. Freud asked the dreamer to let associations run freely, one leading to the next wherever they went, trusting the chain to lead to what the dream concerned. Jung warned that free association can wander far from the dream, and taught instead to circle the image and keep returning to it: what is this, for me, exactly as it appears? Both begin with the dreamer's own associations, never a dictionary's.

The image as a figure of speech

Dreams often think in pictures the way language thinks in figures of speech. A person out of their depth dreams of deep water; someone who has lost their footing in life dreams of slipping on stairs; someone who feels exposed dreams of being naked in public. Try saying the image as a phrase: what is it like to be, as in the dream, unable to find the room, carrying a heavy case, late again? If the phrase fits your life, the dream may have said it first.

If it were my dream

Montague Ullman built a way for small groups to work on a dream that keeps the dreamer in charge throughout. The dreamer tells the dream and answers questions about its details. The others then take it up as if it were their own, saying first what feelings it would stir in them and then what its images might mean, always beginning, if it were my dream. The dreamer listens without having to agree. Then the dreamer responds, and the group helps them search the recent context of their life, reads the dream back to them aloud, and offers, gently, ways the whole of it might link to their days.

The method's virtue is its respect. What others say are their own projections, offered as gifts, and only the dreamer can say which fit. The same respect is worth keeping when reading alone: a reading that does not land is set down, however clever it is.

Knowing when it fits

How does the dreamer know a reading fits? Eugene Gendlin taught that the body knows first: when the right meaning is touched there is a felt release, a small shift or easing, sometimes a laugh or tears, before the mind can say why. Without that shift a reading is only an idea. End with a single sentence linking the dream to waking life, and let later dreams confirm or correct it.