This book describes how dreamwork can help alleviate depression, in both long-term and time-limited psychotherapy, and in self-treatment. The author shows how dreams shed light on issues contributing to depression-including drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, death and bereavement, conflicts about sex, health and body image, parenting, workplace stress and burnout, and ancestral, intergenerational trauma. Greg Bogart presents a synthesis of Jungian and existential psychotherapy, detailing how attention to archetypal symbolism brings into immediate focus new responses to pressing life challenges. He shows that allowing oneself to be affected by dream images and narratives promotes emotional, relational, and spiritual rejuvenation.
This groundbreaking book takes a simple, enlightened and multi-faceted approach to helping readers work with their own dreams in much the way that therapists do. Drawing on a variety of different dreamwork techniques, this practicing therapist uses her experience and training to teach us how to revisit and interact with our dreams and decode a dream's significance. Most importantly, this book shows how to go to the next step, and use the knowledge gained in dreamwork to make significant changes in our lives.A well-recognized way of dealing with a buildup of stress, depression or creative blocks, dreamwork is an integral tool to living a well life. This book shows how anyone can use that tool for a deeper understanding of the self.
For more than 20 years, Elizabeth Howard has worked with dreams and dreamers to enable each person to discover the secrets of their dreams. In The Dreamwork Papers, Howard introduces major theories and methods of dreamwork such as the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. She describes her own work and her studies of the work of Frederick and Laura Perls and their formulation of gestalt therapy. She tells how to create a helpful dream journal and how to use the "magic cookie" as an aid to remembering dreams. Elizabeth Howard lives in Gainesville, Florida. She studied psychology, dreams and the gestalt approach with Vincent F. O'Connell, Ph.D. She has taught classes in the psychology of dreams in community college, offers lectures about dreams in the community, and facilitates individuals and groups centered on self-discovery through dreams. "I've been fascinated by dreams for years," she says. "I don't know of anything else that reaches so deep into the soul of the individual. Dreams can bring laughter and tears, but to me, in the end there always seems to be growth and moving on."
There have been many previous books on the physiology of dreaming, the history of dream interpretation, and the meaning of specific dream symbols. But there have been relatively few books exploring the moment-by-moment process of interpreting dreams. This book guides you through this interpretive process, and illustrates how dreamwork promotes emotional, relational, and spiritual transformation. It explores how working with dreams enhances our emotional life, deepens our capacity for relationship, and helps us gracefully navigate change and transitions. The author shows that dreamwork is a natural antidepressant, is effective in transforming anger, bereavement, couples conflicts and impasses, and aids the process of individuation. The book explores archetypal themes and complexes, synchronistic experiences and spiritual awakening in dreams, and representations of the body in dreams. The final chapter, "Taming Wild Horses", explores animal dream symbolism and its importance for enhancing our human sexuality. The book also describes the Dream Mandala, a method of self-transformation through the union of opposites - the charged polarities of the personality.
In this DVD, Clara E. Hill demonstrates her three-stage model for working with dreams, where she works with the client to explore the dream in detail, find insights by expanding on initial interpretations of the dream, and consolidate those insights and take action to address issues in her waking life. The first stage, exploration, is informed by client-centered theory and involves enlarging key images of the dream to enhance their vividness and help the client experience them again with emotion and depth. In the second stage, insight, client and therapist take what they've learned from the exploration process and conceptualize what the dream means to the client's present life. The third stage of action allows the client to apply her understanding of the dream and determine what waking changes should be made based on newfound knowledge from the dream. In this session, Dr. Hill and the client discuss at length a dream that the client has had recurrently since she was 18 years old. Recurring dreams often represent recurring themes in people's lives, and the client considers the powerful notion that if she can gain insight into her dream, she could perhaps change her life.
A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy demystifies the process of working with dreams by providing both a grounding in the current science of dreaming as well as a simple, practical approach to clinical dream work. In addition to a survey of the current science and neuroscience of dreaming, this book includes clinical examples of specific techniques with detailed transcripts and follow-up commentary. Chapters cover how to work with PTSD nightmares and how to use experiential dreamwork techniques drawn from current neuroscience to engender lasting change. Readers will be able to discuss their clients’ dream material with confidence, armed with an approach that helps them collaboratively tap into the inherent power for change found in every dream. Backed by research, common factors analysis and neuroscience, the approaches described in this book provide a clear map for clinicians and others interested in unlocking the healing power inherent in dreams.
In A Guide to the World of Dreams, Ole Vedfelt presents an in-depth look at dreams in psychotherapy, counselling and self-help, and offers an overview of current clinical knowledge and scientific research, including contemporary neuroscience. This book describes essential aspects of Jungian, psychoanalytic, existential, experiential and cognitive approaches to dreams and dreaming, and explores dreams in sleep laboratories, neuroscience and contemporary theories of dream cognition. Vedfelt clearly and effectively describes ten core qualities of dreams, and delineates a resource-oriented step-by-step manual for dreamwork at varying levels of expertise. For each core quality, key learning outcomes are clarified and resource-oriented, creative and motivating exercises for practical dreamwork are spelled out, providing clear and manageable methods. A Guide to the World of Dreams also introduces a new cybernetic theory of dreams as intelligent, unconscious information processing, and integrates contemporary clinical research into this theory. The book even includes a wealth of engaging examples from the author’s lifelong practical experience with all levels and facets of dreamwork. Vedfelt’s seminal work is essential reading for psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, and even psychiatrists, and could well be a fundamental textbook for courses at high schools, colleges, universities and even in adult-education classes. The book’s transparent method and real-life examples will inspire individuals all over the world who seek self-help or self-development – any reader will be captivated to discover how knowledge of dreams stimulates creativity in everyday life and even in professional life.
Written both for people who want to work on their own dreams and for psychotherapists, this book shows how one can draw on dreams to bring about self-change.
Dreams are often laden with emotion. Not only do the dreams themselves contain emotional triggers, but a frightening dream can leave us stressed and shaken in waking life. We might also be anxious about the possible recurrence of a bad dream. The Dream to Freedom technique is an effective way to address both the fear-producing aspects of dreams, and the waking anxiety associated with the possible recurrence of the dream. Using a structured approach drawn from traditional Gestalt therapy, it identifies emotionally triggering elements of a dream, and then applies EFT (also known as "tapping") to each one in turn. Robert and Lynne Hoss are pioneers of the Dream to Freedom technique, which shows you the hidden meaning of each dream element. This practice, when combined with EFT, often provides surprising insights about the link between the dream and your waking life problems. Dream to Freedom guides you on an imaginal journey to creating positive outcomes in your dreams. It's also been used to: Evoke lucid dreams; Eliminate recurring nightmares; Remember forgotten dreams; Access subconscious creativity; Heal old childhood traumas; Reduce emotional triggering when you can't recall a specific event; Heal anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and other psychological problems; Tap within dreams. Dream to Freedom represents one of the most fascinating frontiers in which EFT can be applied, and is recommended for longtime dreamwork students as well as those with a more casual interest in the intersection between dreamwork, personal growth, and EFT.
With the morning light, tens of thousands of people awaken andrecord their deams in a special journal. Many others meet in grassrootsdreamgroups to discuss their nighttime adventures. Still others inpsychotheraphy work with dreams to understand their deeper feelings andmotives. Never before has there been a time when the value of our dream lifehas been so widely recognized. In this rich collection of thirty original essays by the leading authoritieson dreams, readers will find many clues to decoding the language of thenight. Contributors offer insights into dreams as a universal and specialsource of knowledge whose messages can bring growth, healing, and wisdom.They also tell us how we can interpret our dreams accourding to severaldifferent traditions. Many other topics on the fronteirs of dreamwork areexplored as well, such as shared dreaming, lucid dreaming, psychicdreaming, brain research, dreams and creativity, dreams and healthproblems, and gender differences in dreams. Contributors include: Gayle Delaney on personal and professional problem solving indreams June Singer on the Jungian approach to dreamwork Montague Ulman on doing dreamwork without professionalhelp Patrcia Garfield on women's body images revealed in dreams Stanley Krippner on tribal shamans and their travels intodreamtime Earnest Hartmann on nightmares Jayne I. Gackenbach on lucid dreams Kenneth Atchity on dreams, literature, and the arts For anyone interested in this subject, Dreamtime andDreamwork is a fascinating, state-of-the-art collection.
