Part of the Casswiki article series Psychology
Dream work is an exercise where one works with dreams to solve problems or to gain an insight on a particular issue. It differs from dream interpretation, where one would be trying to figure out the issues or problems that a subconscious was trying to reveal to the dreamer. Dream work can be a part of doing the Work.
An excerpt from one of the Cassiopaean sessions, where Laura Knight-Jadczyk explains what is a dream work:[1]
(L) Dream work is when… and I guess you’ll have to read some of Ark’s journal entries. What you’ll need to do is read some of his journal entries and see how he approached a problem of the self. Then when you see how he wrote it down, how he looked at it, saw it, looked at it from different directions. Once you see how to identify the problems, how to think about them, then what you do is you do the meditation. Then when that’s over, or even while you’re doing it, you think about the problem. You come at it in the same way as if you were writing about it. Maybe even take memories and you examine them and you think about them. You think about everything you can remember. And then you have it in your mind as you go to sleep. Then, if you wake up during the night with a dream, or in the morning with some insight, you write it down. This is where stuff comes from really deep areas. It may be something that’s not so much current life dissociation as it is something even deeper. That might be a question you might want to ask.
The most common dream exercise that one would engage is writing down the dreams upon awakening, but when one is doing a dream work, Arkadiusz Jadczyk once wrote:[2]
It seems to me that even more important than writing in your journal after the dream is writing in your journal just before going to bed. That is how we can “engineer” our future.
An important aspect of doing the dream work is becoming involved with an intense mental work (journaling) on a problem/issue before sleep, which would “instruct” one’s subconscious mind of its importance and it will continue to work on the problem during the dream. After waking up during the night or the morning with a dream remembrance, one would write it down in a journal and determine what the dream reveals. It is best to keep in mind that many dream interpretation guides are not always useful since one’s higher self would speak in symbolic forms as specific to the dreamer.
Further readings
- Cassiopaea Forum: Dream Work
- Cassiopaea Session 25 April 2010
- Problem Solving While Dreaming
- Cassiopaea Forum: Important Info on Dreams