Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Dream Analysis

     The degree to which a dream captures our attention is proportional to the pressure it is attempting to apply on our workaday consciousness.  If you find yourself recalling a dream, however diaphanous, during the day, or off and on for days or weeks, you should consider its message to be of serious import, and you would be well advised to look for someone who can help you unravel it.  Many recorded last dreams before sudden death have transmitted their warnings to the dreamer, like blinking strobe lights of an aircraft about to land, warnings that might have downscaled a calamity to a mere sideswipe and saved a life.
     One of my preoccupations over the past ten years has been to procure formal training in Jungian psychoanalysis, including my own analysis with a series of certified Jungian analysts in New York and south Florida, lasting seven years.  It is unfortunate that in the Gainesville area, there are no professionally trained Jungian analysts, no individuals who have more than a layperson's understanding of dream symbolism, no one in this field who isn't, by virtue of having had to resort to self-training, associated in the public mind with occultism, and therefore cannot bring rational, respectable, even scientific sense to dreams.  This is not the case in large metropolitan areas where sizable numbers of educated people undergo this specialized form of psychological therapy, thereby acknowledging that the hundred-year-old study of the unconscious called psychoanalysis, having roots that go back to antiquity, has much to offer them personally, and can open up new, creative corridors of their minds.  Dreams reveal that we each have at our disposal a mansion with rooms that are furnished with mesmerizing artifacts and draperies, with dimensions we could only "dream of," but we have chosen, if we ignore the unconscious, to inhabit, only one or two rooms, while the others accumulate dust, harbor rodents, birds, even jungle beasts, and languish from inattention.  
     In my medical practice I asked patients for their dreams, because dreamwork is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, but most patients scoffed at the request, having been raised in a secular tradition that gives very little credence to information from the unconscious, information that can be vital for making diagnoses of a medical nature.  Although they laughed at the prospect of reporting dreams the way they would report chest pain, leg swelling or a rash, these patients suddenly started having dreams in the weeks following my suggestion, as though their unconscious selves had all along been hankering for an invitation to speak.  The patients returned to my clinic under the pretext of a physical complaint (generated also, I surmised, by their unconscious selves to force a return to the same nonjudgmental venue where their messages might be discerned), and bashfully reported their dreams.  Whether they put stock in the interpretations I proffered mattered less to me than that they dared to share their dreams at all, because physicians are often speaking directly to a patient's unconscious, whether acknowledged or not, thereby effecting change, even cures, in this mysterious way,  Sometimes this process is referred to disparagingly as "the placebo effect," an unfair epithet for a barely fathomable but very powerful process of healing, which requires a deep connection between two people.
     If you dream, write your dreams down.  Simply attending to them has a healing function, whether you "understand" them or not.  If you are lucky enough to find a practitioner who is well-versed in dream symbolism and is willing to spend time acquiring information about the circumstances of your life, you gain the possibility of unsealing a treasure-trove of information about your physical health, which in all cases has corollaries to the emotional and psychic patterns of your existence, and which is likely to enhance your life in ways you could only dream. 

3 comments:

  1. Interestingly, duh, no surprise as you, Ona, know, so called main stream medicine has no interest in Dreams whatever, which perhaps is another reason the gov. has the desire to destroy your medicinal income. Seems, very unfair, as sex, in the abnormal ways are seemingly OK'ed by the very same idiots. Surgically change a persons sex, or let same sex marry, though not allow such leniency on those who study dreams. Sad state of affairs in this time. It too shall pass.

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  2. Dream analysis is a mostly unrecognized source of valuable information about patients was well as guidance from the patient's unconscious, guidance that can reveal what is wrong. The reason dreams aren't valued is because very few people know how to interpret them, and learning takes a lot of time, just as learning any new language does. For doctors like me who want as much information as possible about patients in order to choose the right therapies and to counsel them appropriately, dream analysis is just one more tool in the toolbox, and is exceptionally helpful. Analyzing dreams, like doing ultrasounds, surgeries, and other procedures, makes a medical practice varied and enjoyable for doctors, and more valuable to patients, even if they don't quite know what we're doing. I didn't know what the electrician was doing either, when my outdoor lights needed to be rewired, and I didn't care. I just wanted them to work.

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  3. Entirely correct Ona, which of course you already knew. Too bad some people can not seem to do things right the first time, though which is why we have so much waste here in the US. It is also of course why some people who fix problems have jobs....or so says Tim, but what does he know?

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