Robin Robertson
"Remember Our Dreams"*
"To describe the remembering of dreams as an art is partially a confession of the mystery of the process. Yet, in many respects, learning to recall dreams is similar to learning any other skill: it requires motivation, an especially adapted vigilant strategy, an overcoming of possible resistance, and, above all, an attitude of confident patience."**
Let me tell you a story from the life of psychologist and dream pioneer Dr. Henry Reed where he made use of all the traits he mentions above'especially "confident patience." Thirty years ago, before he was Dr. Reed, while Henry was studying psychology in graduate school, he made a decision to try and remember his dreams. He had reached an impasse in his life and had become an alcoholic, though he couldn't yet admit is to himself. Somehow he knew that dreams could help him. Often, in times of crisis, we know from some deeper source within us that we need to do something. But far too often we don't heed the quiet inner voice. Henry did. He went to the trouble of constructing a handmade journal to hold his dreams. He wrote a prayer in the journal asking for a dream to help him in his time of need, then laid it beside his bed. Despite this conscious effort to produce dreams, they didn't come. Not that night, nor the next, nor the one after that. In fact it was over three months before a dream came to him, a dream that would change his life.
In a dream, Henry was camping in a tent in a sacred sanctuary belonging to a Wise Old Man. He looked around his beautiful rural surroundings and was disgusted to see an empty bottle of wine lying by a haystack. He indignantly told the Wise Old Man that there must be a drunk squatting on the land. He suggested strongly that they should kick him out immediately. The Wise Old Man looked kindly at Henry; but told him that he regarded the drunk as his friend, and that he had used the wine to tempt him to come there so that he could be fed.
When Henry looked around to see what kind of food the Wise Old Man had left for the drunk'health food, he wondered?'all he saw was an empty jar of mayonnaise and an empty bag of potato chips. Confused by this strange food and shamed by the contrast between his sanctimonious self-righteousness and the Wise Old Man's compassion, Henry left the Wise Old Man and went back to his own tent.
It was several years before Dr. Reed (as he was now known) was to finally understand that seminal dream. At the time of the dream, all he had understood about it was that he was probably the drunk and that perhaps he needed to be less harsh with him self in dealing with his drinking problem. That was quite a lot to learn; before the dream he hadn't been willing to admit that he was an alcoholic, and yet he despised himself for being one. We are often in such paradoxical situations in our lives.
He also knew that he needed to learn all that he could about dreams. So while he finished his doctorate and began teaching, he read all that he could about dreams arid kept his dream journal by his bed. Though at first progress continued to be slow, very gradually his ability to remember dreams improved. Unfortunately his drinking problem got worse. Another dream, which we won't discuss here, helped him decide to go into psychotherapy with a Jungian analyst. While he waited for a first session, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Then one night, when he stopped. at a liquor store for a bottle of liquor, he found that he just couldn't pick it up. Something deep inside wouldn't let him. He went home sad and empty of spirit, but sober.
His dream research continued. He was fascinated by the healing dreams incubated by the ancient Greeks at the temple of Asklepius, the legendary Greek physician and, later, god of healing. People would come to the temple, much as someone today would make a pilgrimage to Mecca or to Lourdes. There they would perform spiritual rituals to honor Asklepius, and sleep in the temple, hoping for a healing dream from the god. Not only did many receive dreams diagnosing their problems and suggesting cures, many were actually healed during the night, seemingly by the dreams. The first such temple originated in Epidaurus in about 380 B.C., and was so popular that similar temples appeared all over Greece,. reaching their peak in numbers at somewhere between 200 and 400 temples in the second century. So people came to the temples of Asklepius for five hundred years!
In modem times it is always fashionable to assume that our ancestors were simply credulous fools duped by the trickery of the temple priests. This is the view, for example, of Professor Charles Singer in his Short History of Medicine. In contrast, a mammoth scholarly study by Emma I. and Ludwig Edelstein concluded that "the ancients were hardly so easy to fool that a mummery performed daily in hundreds of places throughout the centuries would never have been detected or suspected or at Least hinted at."*** Perhaps we would be better to defer our judgment of ancient rituals until we have been more successful in constructing modem rituals of healing and spiritual transformation.****
Dr. Reed decided that he would attempt to recreate a similar situation, where people could come to a sacred site hoping to incubate healing dreams. We can see that in selecting such a project, he was taking the first steps toward himself becoming a Wise Old Man who could help heal others. He obtained funding, then located people interested in participating in this project. He selected an outdoor setting'like his dream, though that wasn't in his mind at the time. There would be a dome shamed "dream tent," which would serve as a sanctuary, where someone could seek a healing dream. Again, in selecting a tent, he was recreating part of his dream without realizing it.
After he arrived at the camp and set up the dream tent, however, he started to feel insecure, even ridiculous. What a stupid idea this was! How could he possibly ask people to go along with it? He decided not to say this was a sacred place to incubate healing dreams and instead to merely refer to the tent as "a fun place to sleep if you wanted to get away from the crowd and focus on your dreams." Just then, when he was ready to retreat from his vision, just as he had retreated in his dream years before, he remembered a joke from childhood. Maybe you heard it once yourself and went "yuck." Here's the way it goes:
There was a man with a loathsome skin disease. His body was covered with pus-filled scabs which he would pick off and put into a bag. The puss was drained and stored in a jar. Both bag and jar were stored in a closet in his house. One day, when he was away on vacation, a friend wandered into his house and somehow locked himself in the closet. When the man returned from vacation a week later, the man in side the closet heard him and began calling out for help. The man let his friend out of the closet and told him that he had been lucky to survive. His friend agreed, saying that, "I would have starved if it hadn't been for the potato chips and mayonnaise."
Now that's a pretty disgusting joke, but it opened Dr. Reed's eyes. Suddenly he knew the meaning of his dream. Beneath the disgusting image of the joke is a picture of a man feeding on the products of illness. In Dr. Reed's dream, the Wise Old Man had tempted the drunk with wine, then fed him "potato chips and mayonnaise," i.e., he had fed him his own illness as its own cure. In Henry's life, after he had the dream, he accepted his alcoholism and lived with it for several years. The Wise Old Man inside him had known that it was important for Henry to accept his alcoholism as part of who he was, to feed it to himself, so to speak. That was all that was necessary in order for him to survive. During the several years since he originally had the dream, in the dark of the closet, deep inside, a "friend" was feeding on his disease. Without Henry ever being aware of it, he was being healed from the inside out. Now that he vas healed, it was time for him to help heal others. But first he had to know that he was healed. He had to "come out of the closet," as the gay community has so vividly pictured their own admission of gay identity. So he unconsciously re-created the dream setting and allowed the dream's meaning to emerge into consciousness.
Oh yes, and Dr. Reed did go ahead with using the dream tent to incubate dreams'with great success! It led to a whole series of rich encounters with dreams that were recorded in Sundance: The Community Dream Journal. The dream incubation work was just the beginning of this process. This need to honor our illness, our wound, is one of the most important ways we can begin to heal ourselves. Those who are willing to go through this process often become healers themselves, they are known as "wounded healers," since it is by healing their own wound that they develop the ability to help others heal themselves.
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* Quoted passage from Robin Robertson, Mining the Soul. (published by Samuel Wiser, 2000)
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** Quoted from Henry Reed, "The Art of Remembering Dreams," Quadrant (Summer. 1996), p. 48.
*** See Edwin Diamond. The Science of Dreams (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962), pp. 211-213.
**** See Edwin Diamond. The Science of Dreams (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962), pp. 211-213
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