Diana Compton goes first.
My grandma has just died, she says, reading from a notebook. She's lying on a bed we need, so we pick her up to put her on the floor, face down. She starts to move, but we tell her, No, Grandma, you don't have to do anything, you're dead. She's wearing a wedding dress with a long train and a bustle.Then we're waiting for someone to come perform surgery on someone. It's supposed to be done by midnight. A man comes to the door and says he needs a book so he can do the surgery. I remember that the book is at a neighbor's so I go to her house. She comes to the door wearing a bathrobe. She's busy setting the dining room table for a party tomorrow. She tells me to go look for the book.
At first I can't find it and I panic, because the surgery has to be done by midnight. Finally I find the book in the back of the bookshelf. It's either "Moby Dick" or "Huckleberry Finn."
Compton stops and looks at the women who have gathered in Faith Hansen's living room on this March morning. "I don't know what to do with this dream," she says.
Most people are couch potato dreamers. They let their dreams flit by like insignificant sitcoms. They sort through the images, if they sort them at all, like a person looking through junk mail.
Some people, on the other hand, are serious dreamers. They see their dreams not as random and meaningless and occasionally amusing, but as specific and significant. Less like sitcoms and more like PBS. Less like junk mail and more like a special delivery letter. A letter from the unconscious, urgent and important. And also, of course, bizarre.
So once a week, on Friday mornings, Compton and Hansen and their friends get together to read the most urgent of their dream mail and help each other figure it out. They call it dreamwork.
It's a gentle analysis that begins with the non-threatening phrase "If it were my dream. . . ." The women then try to explore, for example, why Diana Compton's grandmother was wearing a wedding dress, and why Compton was searching for a book, and what the surgery might mean - hoping, finally, to hit upon something that gives the dreamer an "Aha!" feeling of understanding.
After about 30 minutes of questions and "If it were my dream" projections, Compton begins to have some new insights. She has always been a list-maker, just like her grandma, who could not abide idle hands. She has always kept busy, doing things for other people mostly. Now she would like to find time to write, but other obligations keep getting in the way. Maybe it is time to put that grandma part of her to rest, to excise the guilt and to find the book inside her, before it's too late.
Each woman in the room this morning will have a chance to tell a dream and have it "worked." By noon we will have heard about a murder in a movie theater, a meeting with an old lover, a scenario featuring a warehouse and a green cathedral, and something about a tangle of electrical wires.
The women are among a growing number of dreamers in the Salt Lake Valley who have joined dream groups. Some groups are made up of friends. Other groups are made up virtual strangers, drawn together by a tantalizing prospect: that there are other people who will listen attentively, without yawning, to every detail of their dreams.
Penny Pilling's dream group meets two Sunday evenings a month. Like most other dream groups in Salt Lake, this one has no leader. Members take turns telling their most pressing dream, the one that has them stumped.
"My dream is called `Houseboat on the Loose,' " says Pilling, who then begins to read from her notebook. We hear about a life-size, plastic, inflatable fireman hanging over a houseboat on Lake Powell; then a real man who gets on the boat and turns into another man. Pilling describes how she tries to steer the boat through a canal; how she needs to make a phone call to a friend but can't reach him.
Plastic inflatable firemen, people who turn into other people, Lake Powell houseboats going down a canal: Substitute some other incongruity and uncertainty and discontinuity and it could be your dream, because these are the hallmarks of dreaming, the things that make them different from our waking world.
Ancient peoples thought dreams were messages from the gods. Sigmund Freud thought they were a disguised message from our unconscious, an unwelcome wish that our mind's "censor" doesn't really want us to face. The censor disguises the wish by making it obscure or unrecognizable, he said, and that is why dreams are so bizarre. And that is why it takes a psychoanalyst to decode them. In the past 10 years, scientists have been able to zero in on the physiology of dreaming. Harvard neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson (see accompanying article) has shown, for example, that dreams start in the brain stem and come riding in on a burst of acetylcholine. The cortex, he postulates, then tries valiantly to make sense of the images by creating a narrative.
The fact that dreams start as chemicals doesn't mean, Hobson says, that they are meaningless. They can tell us a lot about our waking lives, presenting themes we might not have noticed. But the mind doesn't create bizarre symbols on purpose, just because it is afraid we can't face up to the truth about ourselves, he says. The bizarreness is just an artifact of the physiology.
Most modern-day dream interpreters fall somewhere between Freud and Hobson. Dreams, they say, are not just about unwelcome wishes. They can't all be reduced to Oedipal fantasies. But they are controlled somewhat by our unconscious.
In Utah, most dream groups are disciples of a California dreamworker named Jeremy Taylor.
On a Saturday morning last January, Taylor sat in front of a roomful of Utah dreamers who had gathered for a workshop on dreaming. After 30 years of keeping a dream journal, after listening to hundreds of other people's dreams, after writing two books about dreams and being president of the Association for theStudy of Dreams, Taylor has the aura of someone who knows more than the rest of us.
This is the gospel according to Taylor:
No dream comes to tell the dreamer something he already knows.
All dreams have multiple meanings.
All dreams have profound meaning.
Dream symbols don't have one universal meaning. But even the most "aggressively silly" dictionary might help you have an "Aha!"
Nothing in a dream is there by accident.
All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.
No dream came to say "nnnh, nnnh, nnnh, you have these problems and there's nothing you can do about them."
In solitude, the dreamer is likely to miss the point of a dream.
Taylor always encourages his workshop attendees to start their own dream groups. Between five and 10 members is the optimal size, he says, although talking a dream over with even one other person is better than trying to decipher it alone.
Dream exploration in a group should be non-threatening, he says. "Few things are more pointless than arguing with someone about what their dream means." Instead of saying, "Here's what your dream means," say "If it were my dream," and project what the dream might mean to you.
In fact, says Taylor, you can learn as much about yourself as about the dreamer by exploring someone else's dream.
It helps, says Taylor, to give your dream a title. "Tell me the title of some of your dreams," he asks his audience.
"The Attack of the Angry Spiders," one woman yells out. "ATM Cards in Korea Time," says another. "My Boss Is Driving a Winnebago," "Fighting Wild Animals at the Ocean with a Whip," "My Sister in a Laura Ashley Dress."
Taylor tells this story about dream work: A woman in one of his groups had a dream that she and her youngest son were on a vacation and that the son was drowning in a hotel swimming pool filled with soup.
The woman was certain what the dream meant: Her son, who had graduated from college two years before, was still being supported by her. He was unable to get on with his life, and blamed this inability on the fact that his mother and father had recently divorced. He was drowning in his own self-pity.
"But I never met a dream that came to tell the dreamer what she already knew," says Taylor. So he asked the woman how she felt when she saw her son drowning. It doesn't bother me at all, the woman said.
As the group began to discuss the dream, offering "If it were my dream" projections, it emerged that when the son first graduated from college he came to his mother full of enthusiasm about some ideas about his future. His mother then proceeded to throw cold water on all of them.
With a sudden "Aha!," the woman realized that she had a vested interest in promoting her son's inability to get on with his life because she wanted her ex-husband, who had left her for a younger woman, to feel guilty.
With this realization, Taylor said, the woman "dissolved," blaming herself for unconsciously hurting her son.
"But no dream comes to trash the dreamer," Taylor told her. The group continued to work the dream, focusing this time on the image of her son drowning in his mother's largess. It was then that the woman realized that the son drowning in the pool was not his current age but was a sophomore in college - the same age she had been when she had first met her husband and had given up her career goals to marry him.
The drowning, it turned out, was a picture of what she had done to herself. With that realization, says Taylor, she began to think of all the things she wanted to do with her life.
"She would probably have come to these same realizations without the dreamwork," says Taylor, "but maybe at age 80 in a nursing home."
As you might imagine, there are more dream groups in places like California and New York than there are in Utah. But Utah is also, in some ways, the hub of the dream world, because it is the home of Dream Network, the nation's largest dream magazine.
Editor Roberta Ossana lives in Moab, where she has transformed the journal from a newsletter into a slick quarterly full of articles by psychologists, lay dream workers and ordinary dreamers.
To read Dream Network is to realize what most of us are missing out on. "Dream Sharing on Internet!" says one notice. "Unparalleled Adventure While You Sleep!" reads an ad for "The NovaDreamer for Lucid Dream induction."
In the back of the magazine, dream researchers ask for help with their projects. "Trish Feuerstein seeks dolphin/whale dreams for a book." "Janine Blaeloch is seeking dreams by women about bears."
There are articles on using dreams to overcome addictions, on the significance of insects in dreams, on how to learn to share the same dream with another person, on how to operate dream groups.
Indeed, it's hard to read Dream Network and not think wistfully of your own dreams, dreamed and then summarily forgotten. If you are 35 years old you have already had 25,000 hours of dreams - three full years of your life.
It's hard not to wish that you had begun to take your dreams more seriously, that you had written them down, that you had read them to a group of people sitting attentively in a circle, eager and helpful, never once stifling a yawn.