Recurring dreams

The teaching

As the dream workers' way, from Jung to Gestalt dreamwork teaches it.

A dream that comes back

A recurring dream returns in the same form or on the same theme, sometimes for months, sometimes for a lifetime. In Jung's teaching a dream that returns carries a message not yet received, and it keeps returning until the message is heard. The dream workers who followed him add a practical point: watch not only what returns but how it changes, because a recurring dream often shifts as the dreamer's life shifts, and the changes are part of what it says.

The common themes

Some recurring dreams are shared by very many people. The dream workers read them not as fixed symbols but as questions, each pointing at a kind of waking concern. Being chased asks what one is running from or avoiding. Sitting an examination unprepared, often long after one's last real examination, asks where one feels tested, judged or found wanting. Falling asks where support or control has given way. Missing a train, a plane or an appointment asks where one fears being too late or left behind.

Losing one's teeth is read by different workers as a worry about appearance, about ageing, about losing power, or about something said that should not have been; the dreamer chooses. Being naked or wrongly dressed in public asks where one feels exposed. Finding rooms one never knew one's house had is often a hopeful dream: Jung read the house as the dreamer's own psyche, and its new rooms as parts of oneself not yet lived in.

Keeping the record of returns

The record of a recurring dream is worth more than any single reading of it. Beside each return, note two things above all: what changed in the dream, however small, a different house, a slower pursuer, a door once locked that now stands open; and what the dream-self did. Over several returns the changes often trace the dreamer's own movement, and the common thread is usually found in the waking weeks rather than in the images. The question the dream keeps asking is visible there.

What the dream-self never does

Most recurring dreams have a fixed response at their heart: the dreamer always runs and never turns, always searches and never finds, always freezes at the door. The dream workers treat that habit as the knot. The work is not to interpret it away but to imagine, awake and calm, what would happen if the dream-self did the one thing it never does: faced the pursuer, called out, stepped through. The new possibility, once imagined, can change the next return.

Becoming each part

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, taught that every part of a dream is a part of the dreamer. His method is to tell the dream again in the present tense, as if it were happening now, and then to become each element in turn and speak as it, in the first person: I am the pursuer, I am the locked door, I am the empty house. What does it want? What does it say to the dreamer? The parts can then be set talking to each other, often with two chairs, the dreamer moving from one to the other as each answers.

In a recurring dream of being chased, speaking as the pursuer is often the turning point. Given a voice, the pursuer may turn out to want something quite unlike what the dreamer feared, and a dream that has run for years may change or end.

Active imagination

Jung's own method for meeting a dream image awake is active imagination, and Marie-Louise von Franz, who worked beside him, described it in four stages. First, quiet the mind's ordinary chatter. Second, let the image, the house or the pursuer, rise of its own accord and move without being directed. Third, give it some form: write the exchange, paint it, shape it. Fourth, and most important, meet what comes ethically, as one would meet a real person, asking what it requires of one's waking life.

Jung treated active imagination as powerful, not as a game. It is done in a calm hour, stopped at once if it frightens, and best done with an experienced guide if it stirs much.

When it stops

The day a recurring dream stops coming deserves an entry of its own. In Jung's reading its stopping marks the matter taken in; in plainer terms it often follows a strain eased, a decision made, or a grief allowed. Either way, the record of the dream's beginning, its changes and its end is a small history of one's own growth, and it is worth reading back.

A dream that replays a real event

One kind of recurring dream is different and should not be taken on single-handed: the dream that repeats an event from life, an accident, an attack, a war, a loss, close to the way it happened. Such dreams belong with a doctor or a therapist, who has methods made for them. The ways described above are for dreams that speak in images; a dream that repeats a wound needs care, not interpretation.