When the Dream Does What Waking Life Can Not

What if a dream sometimes gives us room to stop rehearsing the role we play in waking life?

What if it might be possible to work out incoherence within our dreams?

A recent dream has led me to consider whether dreams are participatory, in addition to being symbolic - that the dreamer may be simultaneously experiencing, observing, and contributing to a living psychological drama.

THE DREAM

A stage was the setting of the dream. Another woman and I stood center stage. Her two young children were present, positioned to the side, needing to be taken to school, and mostly left to themselves. A man she knew was in the wings.

She brought to mind a pattern I find disturbing: placing the pursuit and possession of a man above the wellbeing of her children.

I began to address her about the effects of her relationship priorities, but the more I tried to reason with her, the more she talked about her plans to secure the man waiting off stage. I was telling her, "The man will be who the man is."

I felt my anger, disappointment and frustration rise. I was then shouting at her all of the things that I had been repressing. She was still talking about her plans. As I continued, I experienced a sense of deep relief, even though I realized that my attempts to influence her would never be successful.

The man she was pursuing then came onto the stage. She began her planned campaign, but he walked by her without engaging. He was leaving. He engaged with the children, who excitedly came to him. He essentially said to them, "If you write, I will answer." He then offered to take them to school. To me, his response suggested a relationship grounded in what he could actually offer.

The man didn't argue with the woman; he didn't punish her; he didn't expose her; he didn't become fascinated by her; he didn't need to prove that she was wrong.

In dreamwork, it is helpful to notice possible themes, consider the setting of the dream, and identify the emotions and the symbolic associations to the characters and objects appearing in the dream. But we are not merely decoding an object placed before us. We are entering a psyche-generated environment in which perception, memory, emotion, relationship and meaning interact.

This dream offers an unusually vivid example.

The characters reflect those I encounter in my reality and work. My associations with certain people or situations sometimes carry a familiarity that feels older than the circumstances than I encounter them. These familiar reactions are difficult to trace and work through in waking life.

In this particular dream, it was possible to be aware of both its personal symbolic nature and to experience something that I can't imagine doing in physical reality: I encountered a figure who embodied something I find profoundly disturbing, expressed the anger I ordinarily regulate, and then watched the situation unfold without having to control the outcome.

This doesn't necessarily mean the dream establishes that my judgment of her was objectively correct. The dream character is, after all, a creation of my own dreaming psyche. But something in me needed to experience no longer having to protect this figure from my own discernment. I could express my anger, disappointment and frustration.

I could watch someone refuse to change.

I could watch someone else decline the manipulation.

I could see children moving toward a different relational possibility.

And then I woke up.

The emotional charge shifted.

What happens when we encounter a pattern we find profoundly harmful and discover that we cannot - and perhaps should not - make the person carrying it change? Reflecting on the dream, I consider it quite likely that psychological coherence can occur in the dream state that is not bound by the ordinary constraints of waking relationship. I was able to experience something profound, rather than having to recreate the same pattern in waking life. Could this lessen the need to repeatedly "bang our heads against a wall" in lived reality?

In addition to gaining glimpses in a dream state of the influential subconscious conditions prominent in the reality of lived life, could the relief I experienced be a movement toward coherence? Equally, can lasting coherence or relationship completion remain a possibility?

This is not necessarily resolution in the sense of "the problem", but offers some relief and release of the emotions we hold, those we consider judgmental or otherwise not in accordance with our adopted relationship principles. Because the dream is not bound by ordinary constraints of waking relationship - perhaps the dream state gives us a place in which recognition can become experience - and experience can become movement.

After waking, I felt I had more choices. I could now accept my thoughts, anger and frustration, and be at peace with a mindset that echoed a discordant relationship experience. I now accept my reactions as they are, willing to reach the knowledge that a present person's behavior and an older association may both contribute to my response. When such situations arise, I remember

"Sometimes, it just is what it is."