From
Alcoholic
to
Dreamer
A
Personal Story of Getting Help from Dreams*
Henry Reed, Ph.D.
*Originally
published in Voices, Spring, 1984, 20(1), pp. 62-29.
Can we get any help
from our dreams? Are dreams really anything more than a rehash of yesterday’s experiences? Could it actually
be true that dreams can inspire us, provide guidance, even healing? If
so, how can we ever know how to correctly interpret them? Science claims
that dreaming is somehow necessary to our biological survival. Yet if
remembering those dreams, not to mention correctly interpreting them,
were the critical component of dreaming’s survival value, then our
species would long ago be extinct. Few of our dreams are remembered, and
fewer still are understood. The critical value of dreams must lie
elsewhere.
I believe that the
essence of the dream is the story we experience during the
night—the experience of the dream changes us. The guidance
dreams provide, the help they give, is produced by the effect of the
dream experience, remembered or not, upon our being. That’s what
I’ve come to understand from my own experience. Here’s how I found
help from dreams.
It was a good friend,
an artist whom I held in special esteem, who first introduced me to the
value of dreams. He shared with me how his dreams were enriching his
life. He told me, for example, how he had first seen his inexpensive,
but beautiful, oceanside studio in a dream, and then actually located it
in town.
It was 1968 and I was
preparing for my PhD research examinations at U.C.L.A.. Reading about
dream psychology at that time I learned that our oft-forgotten dreams
were regarded as a natural, necessary and regular part of the sleep
cycle, but the specific value of dreams remained undetermined. A few
psychologists claimed they could deduce insights into a person’s deep
personality structure from dreams, as if dreams were meaningful
symptoms. Back then, having dreams interpreted was like a proctological
exam: only the doctor could read the signs, the patient wouldn’t
really want to look for oneself, and it was something done in private,
as it was somewhat embarrassing.
While I had been
studying dreams as a clinical phenomenon of ambiguous reputation, my
artist friend was actively engaging his dreams as an extension of his
creativity. He introduced me to the work of Edgar Cayce, who suggested
that if you or I were to make an active attempt to become involved with
our dreams, we would become the best interpreter of our own dreams and
would be led to know how to receive the dream’s help. What a different
perspective! My friend’s stories of his dreams were exciting and gave
me a sense of great new possibilities. Being able to use dreams as an
instrument of guidance, as if having an internal compass to point the
way, had an irresistible appeal for me. It was on such a note of
inspiration that I finally dedicated myself to seek my dreams. I wanted
to overcome my amnesia for them. As a New Year’s resolution I began: I
bound together a sheaf of papers into a hand-made journal and covered it
with some attractive material. I wrote a dedication prayer in the
journal, asking that through dreams I might be able to see through the
fog of my life. I wanted to connect with any meaningful life plan that
might be within me. New Year’s Day, 1969, was to be the first day of
my new life!
I awakened that next
morning without recalling any dreams. I tried the day after, but with no
luck. I kept my journal by my bedside every night, night after night,
but still with no success. It was disheartening but I persisted. Beyond
my abstract, intellectual curiosity about dreams, I had good reason to
persist. I had personal need. I was a troubled person, searching for
something that would allow me to feel good about myself, something to
give me a sense of direction and a new lease on life. I was 25 years old
at the time, in the seventh year of my career as an alcoholic. I
didn’t know it at the time, but the effects of the alcohol were making
it very difficult for me to remember my dreams.
It wasn’t until
sometime in March, over three months later, that I finally did remember
a dream. I almost didn’t remember it! I was already out of bed,
groping in my closet for a shirt, when I remembered something about a
flying goat. Aware that it wasn’t an ordinary memory, but perhaps
something of a dream, I sat back down on the bed and it gradually came
back to me. I wonder how different my life might be like today had I not
been given a second chance to remember that dream. Here it is:
I am camping in a tent
on the land of an Old
Wise Man. This land is his special sanctuary and I feel very grateful to
be here. I am standing in the barnyard face to face with the Old Man.
His deep eyes fix my gaze and I feel his presence quite strongly. I then
notice behind him a flying goat! Yes, indeed, this place is special, and
magical. The goat flies back and forth, a few feet off the ground,
around the barnyard, then flies off into the barn, not to be seen again.
Then to my left I see a haystack, and lying there an empty bottle of
wine. I realize that someone has been there sneaking a drink. I say to
the Old Man, "Hey, look at that!—there’s a drunk on this
property, sneaking around to drink. We’ve got to find him and get rid
of him, kick him out! He doesn’t belong in such a special place as
this." But the Old Man faces me patiently, his deep eyes
penetrating my innermost self, and replies, "Henry, that man is a
guest of mine, and was invited here long before you arrived. I put that
wine there myself, to lure him in so that I can feed him." I look
back at the haystack and see an empty jar of mayonnaise and an empty bag
of potato chips. Potato chips and mayonnaise, I wonder—what kind of
food is that? I guess my image of a wise man would have him serving
health food. But my presuppositions are brushed aside, for in the
presence of the Old Man’s generous acceptance of the drunkard, as
mysterious as it may seem to me, my own self-righteousness sticks out in
embarrassing and shameful contrast. I feel exposed and can’t look the
Old Man in the eye anymore. I wander off back into the forest to return
to my little round tent.
This first dream proved
very important and from the moment it was first recalled, it played upon
my waking mind. Was the goat a symbol of my astrological sign,
Capricorn? I wondered. There was a drunk in the dream—could that
relate to my own drinking? As I asked myself questions I couldn’t
answer, I was discovering just what it is like to puzzle over the
meaning of the images in a dream. I couldn’t make much sense of my
dream, but one thing stood out: the face of that Old Man and my feelings
while talking with him. His intentions for the drunkard seemed very
puzzling to me, but clearly my own attitude was inappropriate—my
feeling of shame over being so righteous and uppity was a vivid memory
from the dream. The idea that the Old Man purposefully left wine for the
drunkard as bait suggested to me that perhaps there was some purpose or
meaning to my problem drinking that I just couldn’t see. Yet the food
being left for the drunkard—potato chips and mayonnaise—seemed so
peculiar that I had a hard time accepting that it might make any sense.
The question of meaning was left unresolved. But I no longer felt quite
comfortable being so judgmental about my drinking.
This reaction was my
first clue about getting help from dreams. A meaningful interpretation
of the dream was not available. Instead, it was the natural, emotional
effect of the dream upon me that proved important.
The impact of the dream
upon me was that I tried to be acceptant of my drinking and continue my
quest for dreams. The former was much easier than the latter. I still
found dreams hard to recall. I wasn’t able to record another dream
until July, and after a whole year, I was only on page three of my dream
journal. I graduated from U.C.L.A., accepted a faculty position at
Princeton University, and continued to recall only an occasional dream.
That next summer I took a vacation and devoted myself exclusively to
remembering my dreams. I would sleep late and then spend at least an
hour when I awakened to recall as much of my dreams as possible. It took
me that much work to catch on to how to recall them.
I gradually improved my
dream recall to the point that it would take me several hours each day
to write out my dreams fully from my morning notes. From my work that
summer, I discovered some interesting subtleties about memory for dreams
and summarized them in an essay, "The Art of Remembering
Dreams," which you will find in my book,
Getting
Help From Your Dreams and as a separate booklet with exercises. In that essay I express my
idea that we can get some help from dreams simply by remembering them. I
reasoned that if the dream experience was meant to affect us, then by
remembering the dream experience over and over again during the day, the
impact of the dream would be strengthened.
That fall I decided to
do a more formal study. In an experimental course, students and I
developed a way to measure the results of our efforts trying to remember
our dreams. Using this measuring scale we were able to prove that
remembering dreams was a skill that could be learned. You can read later
about that project in the chapter, "Learning to Remember
Dreams." In that project we also discovered that after having
learned how to recall dreams, we don’t necessarily remember any unless
we make the effort to do so.
While I continued to
record my dreams, my drinking began to create problems for me I
couldn’t ignore. I suppose my story as an alcoholic is typical:
repeated confrontations with the problems brought on by my drinking were
met with repeated vows to quit drinking. These vows would then be
quickly forgotten as my compulsion got the better of me, until finally
that moment came of "bottoming out." I sunk into the despair
of the truth: I knew that I would never voluntarily quit drinking—I
loved it too much! I felt totally helpless and sullenly contemplated my
future as an unredeemable, drunken bum.
One night, feeling very
lonely and sorry for myself, I drank myself to sleep. A few hours later,
I awaken , lost in uncontrollable sobbing. My crying was the carryover
of this dream:
I am traveling
somewhere.
I am amidst a
crowd of people. We are looking up into the sky. It is night and yet
the sun is up and acting strangely. Rays of light shoot out in all
directions across the sky. An eerie tension unites the crowd and the
sky.
Out from the sun flies a glowing object. As it descends from the
sky it appears to be a dove. The dove flies overhead, then zooms right
down to me and nestles in my chest. I cry aloud, releasing tears of
joy and relief, "Somebody loves me!"
I felt calmer inside
after this dream. I felt as if there might still be hope. Once again it
was the emotional impact of the dream, not any interpretation, that
proved helpful.
Feeling I might be
worth saving, I decided to seek psychotherapy. I remembered a Jungian
therapist whom I had heard lecture once before. When I had questioned
her about my dream of potato chips and mayonnaise, her intriguing reply
was, "The wine is the spirit." When I called for an
appointment, I learned that her schedule was full, and it would be over
a month before we could meet. In the meantime, I began to attend some
meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I was in for a surprise
at these A.A. gatherings. While among my friends and peers, who were
confounded by my drinking, I felt the loneliness of a stranger in a
strange land, and I made no sense to myself. At the A.A. meetings,
however, people spoke a language that I immediately recognized and
understood, and I felt myself reflected in their stories. By my third
meeting, I accepted the fact that I was alcoholic. Even though I
didn’t know how I would ever stop drinking, I was nevertheless
strangely relieved. I realized that all the guilt trips and other
torments I had suffered were not an expression of my individual
personality, but instead were an expression of the personality of
alcoholism. I likened it to a person unknowingly caught in a
whirlpool, who feels scared and guilty for always spinning around in
circles. But when the source of the predicament is realized, the
feelings of foolishness and guilt are relieved, because when you’re
caught in a whirlpool, you’re going to spin around helplessly—it’s
not your fault!—until you are released.
One day soon
thereafter, on my way home, I stopped by the liquor store to pick up my
evening’s ration. But when I grabbed for a bottle, something inside me
hesitated. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand what was happening,
but finally I left the store emptyhanded, thinking I would return later.
But I didn’t return. That evening, a mood of sadness descended on me,
because I realized I couldn’t drink anymore. I was surprised and
somewhat put out. I hadn’t yet decided to quit drinking—what was
going on? I tried to make sense to myself about how I was feeling. I
remember explaining to someone that I felt as if I were standing on the
edge of a cliff, wanting very much to jump off, but realizing that there
were plants back home that needed watering—who would water them if I
jumped? Longing to jump into that bliss of release, but reluctantly
accepting the responsibility of being needed at home, I sadly returned.
My drinking career had ended.
But how? By whom? I
hadn’t decided to quit. I never would have done that! I didn’t want
to quit, ever. So what had happened? I didn’t know. All I knew was
that drinking was no longer an option for me and I felt sad about it. By
then I had begun psychotherapy, and when I told the therapist what had
happened, she did not seem at all surprised. She encouraged me to
continue going to A.A. meetings. She surmised that I had been able to
let go of drinking because I knew, at an unconscious level, that what I
was seeking in booze would be found through our work in psychoanalysis.
Maybe she was right. Only years later would I better understand what she
meant. But at the time, at the beginning of therapy, at the beginning of
my strange new career as a non-drinking alcoholic, I was a mystery to
myself.
Much later I was to
discover a garbled entry I had made in my dream journal just before my
drinking disappeared. In this dream, I am at my grandmother’s house,
and I find a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cupboard. I push it away,
saying to myself that such stuff shouldn’t be left in the reach of
little children. Perhaps this dream, which I only vaguely recalled,
represented an inner decision. In any event, it is the closest I have
ever come to finding any act of "will," anything resembling a
"decision" to quit drinking. Actually, I experienced my
quitting not as something I did myself and could be proud of, but as
something that happened to me, something I found out about after the
fact.
Meanwhile, my research
on dreams continued. I had learned from that first experimental class
that it was hard for the students to maintain their interest in dreams
without being able to interpret them or otherwise find some meaningful
way to interact with them.
Interpreting dreams was
still very difficult for me so I searched for some alternatives. I had
become more interested in Jungian theory, and came upon a book by a
Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern
Psychotherapy, about the cult surrounding the Greek god, Asklepios,
who performed healings during the dream state. Sleep sanctuaries were
created in his name, such as at Epidaurus. People with illnesses would
sleep in these temples and have dreams that healed their afflictions.
These dreams did not need interpretation, for the dream experience
itself was the curative factor. Dream incubation appealed to me as it
confirmed my own feeling that the dream must be sufficient itself to
accomplish its purpose. I made arrangements to spend my sabbatical leave
from Princeton at Dr. Meier’s laboratory, the C.G. Jung Sleep and
Dream Laboratory, in Zurich, Switzerland. There we explored many
different types of experimental designs for studying problem solving in
dreams. Returning to Princeton, I supervised student projects in my
laboratory trying to implement some of these ideas. Inwardly, however, I
felt dissatisfied with this research. Then I received an invitation to
conduct dream experiments at the youth camp run by the Association for
Research and Enlightenment, the non-profit organization developed around
the work of Edgar Cayce. Contemplating an outdoor setting for dream
research among people predisposed to value their dreams inspired me and
gave me the necessary impetus to design an experimental ritual of dream
incubation.
On my way to camp I
developed a plan to gather the campers together and tell them stories of
the wonders of Asklepios, and speculate about the possibility of dream
healing today. Since in the ancient days, a person could not sleep in
one of the sanctuaries without a prior dream of invitation from
Asklepios, I would tell the campers to watch their dreams for signs that
they were to undergo dream incubation. Only those who had such a dream
should consider going any farther. For a sanctuary I bought a tent, an
aesthetically pleasing, dome shaped tent that would become the
"dream tent."
I describe my work with
dream incubation and the dream tent more fully in my essay, "Dream
Incubation," which you can find in my book, Getting Help From
Your Dreams. Here let me say that the design for the incubation
procedure, briefly, was to engage the participant, the incubant, in a
series of activities that would place that person in roughly the same
frame of mind that must have existed in the ancient Greek pilgrim who
was seeking a healing in one of the sanctuaries of Asklepios. The
incubant was to imagine someone for whom they had tremendous respect as
a healer or wise person, and to imagine the tent as a sanctuary located
somewhere the person thought would be full of healing vibrations. I
would then engage the person in a day of role-playing activities, in
which the person would dialogue with their healing figure concerning the
problem for which they sought help. That night, the person would sleep
in the tent to have a helpful dream. That was the plan.
I arrived at camp,
erected the tent, but when the time came to approach the campers with my
plan, I got cold feet. I felt guilty and inadequate. Who was I to
propose such an experiment? Things such as incubations were essentially
initiation mysteries, processes that were handed down from master to
initiate. I had not been initiated by anyone. It felt like I had made
all this stuff up. I decided that the best thing to do was either to
take down the tent, or if I left it up, to indicate simply that it was a
fun place to sleep if you wanted to get away from the crowd and focus on
your dreams.
I felt disappointed and
depressed over my decision. But then, out of the blue, I remembered a
joke I used to tell when I was a kid. It went like this:
There was a man with
a terrible illness. He had scabs all over his body and these scabs
were filled with puss. Every few days the man would peel off his scabs
and put them into a bag. Then he would drain off the puss into a jar.
Then we would store both of these in his closet. One day, a friend
came to visit, wandered into that closet, and got himself locked in.
It was three days before the man happened to open up the closet door.
When he did so, his friend came stumbling out of the closet, crying,
"Thank God! I would have starved if not for those blessed potato
chips and mayonnaise!"
Yuk! Potato chips and
mayonnaise! So that was meaning of that perplexing image in my
first dream! I was dumbfounded to have this long-buried memory suddenly
pop into my mind at such a critical time. It had been over three years
since I had that dream, never understanding the reference to the strange
food the Old Man was providing the drunk. Now, for some strange reason,
I had recalled this childhood joke which obviously was the source of
that dream image. I could then recognize, from my studies of symbolism,
the significance of the image: it was a reference to the mystery of the
homeopathic principle as declared by the Oracle of Apollo, "the
wound heals." It is the notion that an illness itself brings its
own cure, that there is something in an illness that heals, if you will
but incorporate it into your life. In my dream, the Old Man used booze
as a lure to teach me the secret of the healing power of woundedness.
I could see, from what
booze had taught me, how his trick had worked. The spirits of alcohol
came to rescue me from a one-sided existence. I realized that my life
had been dominated by the intellectual pursuit of power as a means to
deny my basic dependency upon factors in life beyond my personal
control. When I reflected upon my "reasons" for drinking, I
recalled that I always felt that life was too "concrete," and
that I was always "scraping my knee" against its hard
realities. Just as I had rejected the necessity of suffering, and had
avoided it, so had I rejected the value of the Old Man’s
"food." I bit the bait on drinking, however, and found it, at
first, to be a protective lubricant. But in time, the drink brought me
face to face with my wounded knees, made me acknowledge the
inescapability of my dependency, and made me give proper recognition to
the importance of its spiritual basis. Finally, I had to accept the
food, too. Rather than continuing to attempt to conquer life through
power, like the willful captain of a motor boat, after quitting drinking
I had gradually come to feel more comfortable as a skipper of a sail
boat, utterly dependent upon the spirit of the winds and the moods of
mother nature. I had come to be grateful for my alcoholism as an
affliction of the "gods" that only they could relieve, and
thus for an initiation into the way of the spirit and the power of
surrender.
All these ruminations
brought me full circle back to my plans to pursue research on dream
incubation. I realized that the method for dream incubation that I had
so laboriously constructed was prefigured in my own first dream. The
sacred place of the sanctuary, the revered benefactor of the Old Man,
even the tent that I was now using—all these components had
appeared in my dream! I remembered too that the god of dream incubation,
Asklepios, was regarded as the archetypal "wounded healer,"
because his power of healing originated from a wound. I had been
profoundly mistaken to have assumed that it was my cleverness to have
designed this experimental ritual, for I saw that I was unwittingly acting
out a dream! What an irony, a humbling one at that, because while I
had been stumbling around trying to figure out how to use dreams for
creative problem solving, all along my dream had been solving my problem
without me knowing it! My dream provided me with a new life pattern
based on an ancient source of wisdom!
These surprising
discoveries cleared away my inhibitions, and I went ahead with my plan.
I announced the availability of the tent and began a program of research
that was quite successful in demonstrating the continued operation of
the miracle of dream incubation. In my report of that research,
published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology as
"Dream
Incubation: The Reconstruction of a Ritual in Contemporary Form,"
I suggested that symbolic ritual might be a helpful method for people to
assimilate the transformative power of their dreams.
Looking back, I see
that the synchronistic timing of my recall of the old childhood joke,
giving meaning to that critical image in the dream, coincided with the
moment that the dream, and my original petition that led to the dream,
were about to be fulfilled.
I will always remember
that critical moment in the dream tent. It’s an experience I now call
"Dream Realization." I believe that trying to interpret a
dream (that is, trying to abstract a message from it), although a
natural and useful exercise, is but an imperfect approximation to
recapturing the total understanding that must have accompanied the
original dream experience. For by simply allowing the healing influence
of the dream to have its effect, until that moment comes, when having
changed as a result of the dream, the meaning of the dream is realized
in life, and the dream no longer needs interpretation.
The dream story itself
can be experienced as the most perfect revelation of its truth. At its
best, then, dream interpretation becomes practice in fully remembering
the dream.
Getting help from
dreams can be as simple, and as profoundly mysterious, as falling asleep
to awaken a changed person. Even if we don’t realize it for some time,
it happens, naturally, every night. At least, that’s what alcoholism
taught this dreamer.
Note: Thirty years
after the dream of the Wise Old Man, Henry has a Dream Temple on the
banks of Fox Creek, at his
Flying
Goat Ranch.