Pulling In the Net: Dream Sharing with Others to Catch Your Big Fish

Welcome dreamers,
Sleeping and dreaming are generally quite solitary acts. Even though we may share a bed or a room with others, when we dip below the horizon of wakefulness into our dreams, that journey is taken alone. We then have whatever adventures our dreamtime soliloquies take us on, often with others playing their roles as part of the dream journey. But when we waken it is our dream alone; just us, with the lingering fingers of memory tickling our senses as we desperately try to remember as much as we can in order to write it down or record it.

Then what? Even Jung himself is famous for saying that he could not squeeze all the information out of his dream by himself, as we all have those famous blind spots. As I’ve said before, we can’t see the back of our own heads without two mirrors. And not only that, we usually dream in symbols and metaphors to boot! So we ponder and analyze as far as we can under our own steam, and then if we want to really mine the treasures of our dreams, it is time to turn them over to be considered by others as well. Some one else, or several others, can be that mirror for us so that we can see beyond the limitations that our own psyche is constrained by.

Whether you are working with just one other or in a dream group, the consultants need to respect the “rules” of considering some one else’s dream. First off, the dreamer is the final expert in whether an analysis is correct or not: without that inner tingle or what Eugene Gendlin calls our “felt sense”, the insight may be true for the consultant, but not necessarily for the dreamer. So as a group we have learned to try to use the wording taught to us by dreamworker Jeremy Taylor “If this were my dream…” and respect that it may take several rounds of ideas before one of them is a hit for the dreamer. One client of mine always tears up when there is an on–target dream hit. I can relate – that is always a true barometer for me as well: if I get tears in my eyes, then we must be at pay dirt.

Sometimes the listeners may get so excited or energized by the dream content the dreamer is presenting that they rush to jump into the fray before knowing what the dreamer wants to focus on. This happens fairly regularly in dream groups, we all get so excited as we resonate with the material. Last week I invited the members to try to slow it down a bit. Before we listened to the dreamer share her dream, I suggested that we first cast a large energy net around the circle, and then gradually draw it in to find the fish that is the right catch for the dreamer. This image seemed to help us slowly focus and let the dreamer’s intention guide our work. As we slowly circled the dream, we could feel some of the suggestions slip through the net, while others stayed inside until the final “aha” for the dreamer – “That’s it! There my fish!”

I invite you to try it with you own dreaming friends.

Sweet dreams,
Linda Yael

Embodied Dream Work: Understanding Your Dreams Through Movement and Play


“Dreams are todays answers to tomorrows questions”Edgar Cayce

Welcome dreamers,

When we dream, we are in a place. We are in a world that is just as real to us while we dream it as the one we inhabit while we are awake. In this dreaming place we talk, walk, run, play, interact with others and have whole adventures without needing to adhere to many of the rules we are subject to in our waking lives: rules such as the earth’s gravity, or social proprieties, or linear time, or three-dimensional space. As such, we are fully embodied beings living inside the dream. The images that make up our dream are quite alive as we are experiencing them.

“I dream I am a circus performer, balancing on the back of a horse.”

However, when we come out of the dream to tell about it we often find that language is inadequate to the experience. We are translating a lived moving experience into the two dimensional limits of language, often losing some of the richness and texture of the images and the experience in the process. Like the old story of trying to describe an elephant to a blind man, we can only capture part of the experience with words alone: just the trunk, or just the legs, or just the hide.  The artwork brings it much more alive; now imagine yourself enacting that scene: You are kneeling on one knee on your white horse as it trots around the ring. What does that feel like in your body? What if you put your body into that position and tried it?

The work on “embodied imagination” by Robbie Bosnak, and Jung’s concept of “active imagination” carry the stance that the dreamed images belong to this real and embodied world; it is our job is to develop a relationship with them in order to understand why they have come to visit us and what they might want from us. Bosnak says, “Images belong to the involuntary imagination and embody their own intelligence”. Jean Houston talks about an intelligence beyond our own called the “Entelechy”, from the Greek, that contains wisdom from our highest selves in contact with the collective unconscious.  We can access this self while in altered states such as trance, meditation, dreams and the in-between edges of dreams and wakefulness. Flashback memories, déjà vu experiences, and being in the “zone” or “flow state” in art or athletics or any creative endeavor can also allow us to access this realm.

When we practice dreamwork with our bodies as well as with our words, we can get closer to the reality of the living images. By letting the images enliven our body and using our felt sense, we can create dream theater or dream movements or dream sculpture that allow our bodies and those of our dream circle to get into the act and re-create the aliveness that we felt in the dream itself.

“I dream of a field mouse being stalked by a panther. The grasses are high and the sun is beating down on the field. It feels so immediate in the dream.”

We collectively become the field mouse, the blade of grass, the stalking panther, the hot sun, and thus feel into the dream through the different characters and parts of the landscape a whole which is then greater than the sum of it’s parts. Now we can see where is it going. By enacting the dream-drama, we get a greater sense of how it has meaning for our lives, and perhaps the lives of others.

Join us on Friday 11/20/15, 9:00-4:00 in Newton, MA. for the “Dreams Alive” workshop to play with these ideas. No dream or dance experience necessary. Contact Linda Yael Schiller ([email protected]) or Julie Leavitt ([email protected]) for more information/registration.

Dream well,

Linda Yael