In one dream-incubation session, a client dreamed of a stranger who terrified her.
He was tall, and followed her all the way to her front door, peering inside through the gap above it.
She and her friends pressed against the door with all their strength to keep him out.
In the dream, she was deeply afraid. She knew only one thing:
This man absolutely must not be allowed in.
But in the dreamwork that followed, we did not rush to ask, “What does this man symbolise?”
Nor did we try to decide whether he represented her aggression, trauma, shadow, or some form of masculine power.
We did something else. Slowly, we moved closer to his point of view and felt into his body.
We entered his stance, his breathing, his attention, and the way the room felt as he looked at it.
Then an entirely unexpected world appeared.
The man had no intention of hurting anyone. In fact, he was barely concerned with the people inside.
What he saw was this: why was the floor so dirty? Why had the branches in the back garden grown so wild? Why was the room piled with so many useless things?
These things should be cleared away. Those branches should be cut back. The floor should be cleaned.
Standing outside the door, he grew more and more irritated.
He simply wanted very badly to get inside and tidy the room.
So was he nothing more than a cleaning fanatic?
A horror film suddenly became a comedy.
Fear and the dream figure’s own experience
Moments like this are one of my favourite parts of dreamwork.
Because they reveal something fascinating:
Our fear within a dream and the subjective experience of the dream figure itself may be two entirely different things.
The ‘frightening presences’ in dreams are often not dangers in the ordinary sense. They may be energies furthest from the ego—parts of ourselves that have not yet been integrated.
Their profound unfamiliarity activates a primal fear.
Entering the body of the other
For me, this is an important part of embodied dreamwork.
A dream does not necessarily need to be translated immediately into the question, ‘What does this symbol mean?’ Instead, the client can enter each image in the dream and come to understand the ‘other’—including the presences they fear, dislike or avoid.
The stronger the fear, perhaps the greater the possibility for growth held within the thing that frightens us.
When we temporarily leave the position of the ego and enter the bodily experience of another presence in the dream, strange things often happen.
A story that seemed completely certain begins to loosen.
‘He wants to hurt me’ may become: ‘He is not even looking at me.’
‘It is chasing me’ may become: ‘It is simply moving towards somewhere.’
‘This thing is terrifying’ may become: ‘It possesses a strength that is entirely unfamiliar to me.’
Holding an unfamiliar way of being organised
Jung understood dreams as psychic activity that does not belong entirely to ego-consciousness.
In embodied dreamwork, this ‘otherness’ becomes very concrete.
You are not standing outside the dream trying to understand it. You need, for a time, to let your body hold an unfamiliar way of being organised.
Another breathing pattern, posture and desire. Another way of seeing the world.
Sometimes the figure we fear most carries a state of aliveness that we rarely allow ourselves to inhabit.
It may be aggression. Order, desire or coldness.
It may be the freedom not to consider other people’s feelings.
Or it may simply be someone who very much wants to clean the room.
The clearing that followed
After this dreamwork session, the client really did clean her home from top to bottom.
As the dream-incubation work drew to a close, she also left a job that had been draining her for a long time, found a new one, and began a new chapter in her life.
Of course, we cannot draw a simple causal line between one dream, one piece of dreamwork, and these changes in waking life.
But looking back at the ‘cleaning fanatic’ standing outside the door, determined to get in and tidy the room, it is difficult not to feel that—
He, too, brought a profound clearing to an inner space she had postponed attending to for a very long time.
