Dream Interpretation: Practical Methods for Pastoral Care and Counseling

This article outlines a simple, straightforward set of practical dream interpretation methods which pastoral caregivers can use any time a client's dream becomes relevant to the counseling situation. The article describes seven elements to the successful interpretation of a dream, offers a brief illustration of how dream interpretation works in practice, and explains how to test the validity of an interpretation.     

Dream Images

Contrasting dreams of the author, one of an old lady, another of a young girl, are brought together and explored. Swirls of feelings grow out of them, spanning many dimensions. The aliveness of dreams combines the down to earth, personal and social trauma, conflicts between survival and integrity, creativity, mystery, and a sense of the holy.     

Montague Ullman's Dream Appreciation

American psychiatrist Montague Ullman viewed dreams as spontaneous creative expressions of one's current life situation and developed a method of working with them the outcome of which he felt to be superior to interpretation. He called this outcome dream appreciation. It (a) was arrived at by the dreamer, not some professional; (b) didn't attempt to understand the dream in terms of any established body of theory, but tried to make sense of it in terms of the dreamer's life; and (c) reunited the dreamer with what was felt to be deepest and most true in herself and brought this out into her life. Examples exist in the literature of the first two aspects. Although the third aspect characterizes every well-run Ullman group, the literature contains not a single convincing example of it. This article provides one.     

Reality Transformed to Dream

This article is based on a lecture held during two public seminars in Stockholm (May 2005 and January 2006) arranged by the Swedish Psychoanalytic Association to commemorate Ludvig Igra and his achievements in the field of psychoanalysis. The author addresses the often painful phenomenon that the patient is not getting better but rather worse just when the analyst thinks he has understood and productively interpreted the unconscious dynamic behind the patient's symptoms. Through the use of a clinical example, the concept of negative therapeutic reaction is discussed with special reference to Abraham, Rosenfeld, Joseph and Igra.     

Creativity and Dream Recall

The literature on creativity and dream recall often found significant positive correlations between measures of creativity and dream recall frequency (DRF). The present study investigated the relation between creative interests and DRF in detail. The findings confirmed the results reported in the literature, according to which persons with visual and verbal creative skills recalled more dreams. It is suggested that the visual memory may serve as a mediator variable in the relation between creativity and DRF.