Counselor helps interpret meaning
– For most of the time we’re sleeping at night, we’re dreaming. Our dreams are chiefly about something with which we are preoccupied, perhaps unconsciously, expressions of our deeper selves.
– And the best way to understand dreams is to want to, says Montrealer Layne Dalfen, who helps people to find out more about their dreams.
Layne Dalfen, dream analyst and author of Dreams Do Come True: Decoding Your Dreams to Discover Your Full Potential, explains that dreams are connected to your life and can be a useful problem-solving tool. Dreams can highlight a problem, alert you to a desire, make you aware of a strength and urge you to face fears or conflicts. “This is especially useful in relationships, where there is so much fear and hope connected,” says California-based psychotherapist and dream interpreter Michael Lennox, M.A.
War has also crept into my patients’ dreams, and into their psychotherapy sessions, more than any other event since Sept. 11. I ask teens and adults what their dreams mean to them. We try to use that material in the context of what else they are going through. But my dream work with them is pretty basic.
A man walked up to me screaming in rage. I ran as fast as I could, but he chased me. I realized he had an axe and wanted to swing it at me. He was running faster than I was, and I knew he would catch me. The screaming wouldn’t stop. It happens to every one of us each time we sleep. We dream — hopefully not a nightmare. Some dreams are wonderful adventures; others are frightening. Some dreams reach our most primal emotions, while others are just plain weird. Many people believe our dreams have deeper meaning relating to our personal lives and the world around us.
Like many people, you may have dreamed about people you love who have died, or about dying yourself. While these dreams can be sad or frightening, they don’t have to be. Dreams of death and visits from deceased loved ones are not necessarily about death in the literal sense. To find out what these dreams mean, you need to investigate how you have used the imagery of death in order to say something to yourself.
For 22 years, while Norman Gulko slept, his dreaming brain went on dates with his late wife. Her name was Flo, and they had been married more than three decades when cancer claimed her life in the summer of 1980. Two weeks later, she showed up in his dreams. She was standing in profile, her brown eyes young again, urging him to be happy.
Alberta Jensen of Aniwa has nightmares about botching a job on the assembly line at Federal Mogul. Bao Yang of Wausau always is late for work in her dreams. And Jennifer Smith dreams about overcharging her customers at Gander Mountain.
Though these women have no idea why, they are not alone in having work-related dreams.
In 1993, Christy Ann Conlin quit her job as an Ottawa file clerk and headed to Germany with her boyfriend. “I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life,” she recalls.
Until one night, after she fell into a deep sleep.
“In my dream, I was Madonna’s file clerk,” she recalls. “As I worked in this dusty chamber, she told me tales of her own success, which she’d achieved by daring to aspire beyond the ordinary.”
If you’re one of those people who naively think others might be the least bit interested in hearing about your dreams yet keep finding yourself disappointed upon learning nobody does, take heart in the knowledge that an entire conference devoted to dreams and their interpretation will be taking place in Montreal from Tuesday, July 8 to Saturday, July 12 at Hôtel Auberge Universel (5000 Sherbrooke E.). Not only that, but in honour of the conference and a simultaneous dream-themed art exhibit that will be running at the Gallery Art Neuf (3819 Calixa-Lavallée) all summer long, the city of Montreal has officially declared the week in question to be “Dream Week.”
Had her own dreams analyzed: “I was 21 years old and unable to articulate my feelings,” Dalfen said. “So instead, I would talk to him about my dreams. It was the first time I learned that we could solve our problems through our dreams. Dream analysis is an investigation, like solving a puzzle. You attach the dream to the problem”