Telling and Re-telling The Dream

Here is a technique for working with your dreams that is so simple and obvious that it hardly counts as a technique and is so powerful that you’ll always want to use it.

- Before you interpret your dream…

There is a first step to working with a dream. Before you even begin to analyze or interpret a dream you must tell it or write it down. The written dream and the spoken dream are quite different. This article is about the power of telling -- and then re-telling --the dream.

Telling a dream is not a passive process of going back to your memory banks and fishing the stuff out. When you tell a dream, your brain is actively seeing, listening and deciding what to tell and how to tell it. When you re-tell a dream, these activities are accentuated.

- Tell me the dream again

The ancient greek philosopher Heraclitus said “You can’t jump into the same river twice”. This applies especially to dream telling; it is near impossible to tell the same dream twice.

Whenever someone tells me a dream, I stay with the dreamer’s telling of the dream as long as possible.First of all, if the person reads the dream, I then ask them to tell me (i.e. speak) the dream.

Then, when they have told the dream once, I ask them to tell the dream again. I will continue to ask them to tell the dream again until either i. The story stabilizes and no new material comes out or ii. The dreamer has had enough.

In a group, I might ask the dreamer to turn to each person in the group and re-tell the dream. The effect of telling 5 or 6 other people the dream can be quite dramatic: The dreamer "gets" the dream without any external prompting or interpretation.

- You can’t tell the same dream twice

It is not uncommon that the second telling of a dream produces entirely new segments. You will often hear "Oh yes, now I remember..." The dreamer will produce spontaneous memories e.g. "It was a gray shirt – like the one my father used to wear", “He reminds me of someone I used to go to school with…”.

- A spoken dream is not the same as a written dream

These differences are hard to notice if you are writing down your own dreams. You tend to write down what you need and you "know" whether or not there are other details without being aware of the consequences. But if you think about it, many dreams have a short version and a longer version. In addition, telling a dream is a performance in a way that writing down a dream is not.

- Putting it into practice

First of all, you need a partner. You want to become aware of the way in which you tell a dream. The task of the listener is to say nothing. This is not a trivial task since by the third or fourth time, the listener’s mind is probably over flowing with questions and ideas. All the listener should say is “Would you like to tell me the dream again?” until eventually the dreamer decides to stop. If you can tape yourself doing this, you’ll get a remarkable payoff from listening to yourself as you tell the dream.

Copyright David Jenkins 2003