Page 18 - NAMAH-Oct-2024

Namah Vol. 32, Issue 3, 15th October 2024

angle yields a new meaning. You can work showed up in our dream. Why it did what
with a dream image that is alive for you years it did. What is it feeling, what does it need
after you have had it. And every time you from us? We speak as the dream object; then
work with the dream, you discover a new we return to our dream-ego, and speak as
meaning. Because dreams offer images and our self. We allow full freedom to the dream
not meanings to the images, one can look object. Kaplan-Williams shares the magic of
at the image from various angles, draw out dialogues in his chapter called, ‘Dialoguing
personal associations, cultural associations, with Dream Images’:
archetypal and mythological associations,
not just from one culture, but the world over. “What an exciting possibility it is not to have
to always try and be in control of everything,
Dialoguing with our dreams but to be able instead to follow, to work with,
to create together a life direction superior in
Not only is dreamwork an exercise of associ- meaning to anything the ego can consciously
ations, a dream can be passed through the manufacture itself (9)!”
prism of language and be processed as a
dialogue, for language too hides symbolic The power of dream dialogues was revealed
clues. Psychologist Erich Neumann states, to me when I did an exercise to dialogue
“And because the symbol-forming process of with one of my dream objects. My dream
the unconscious is the source of the human was about extracting expensive clothes
spirit, language, whose history is almost and perfumes from a suitcase. I seemed to
identical with the genesis and development recognise the clothes and the perfumes as
of human consciousness, always starts out as mine, although in waking life I would not
a symbolic language (8)”. This is why dream call them mine. I kept some clothes and
analysis asks us to pay attention to the words perfumes aside to carry them home, in
we use to describe dream objects. If we hear batches. I started the practice by centring
proper names of people and places, they are myself with a meditation. This allowed the
important clues; just as images and their size, active imagination to be triggered. I had a
colour, texture, and positions are. dialogue with the suitcase. I alternately wrote
We can ensoul a dream object or dream from my perspective and from that of the
personality by dialoguing with it, using suitcase. It is hard to believe that a person can
active imagination. We can ask it why it switch back and forth between personalities
and not force an answer from the ‘other’. Yet
it works, and with practice, one gets better at
bypassing the observer-commentator ego and
letting the active imagination unfold. There
is a psychospiritual reason for the success
in dialoguing, as Kaplan-Williams explains:

“From my own experience and as well as other’s
experiences, I can say that dreamwork is
soulwork. That somehow, somewhere there is a

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