Creativity | Jenny Alexander's blog: Writing in the House of Dreams

Whenever I mention I’m writing a book on dreams, people always tell me about a dream they’ve had. Then they almost invariably add, ‘But I don’t know what it means.’

The only way we value dreams in mainstream Western culture is as a psychological resource – if we can’t analyse them, we don’t know what to do with them. But interpreting dreams in this psychological way is problematic.

I’m not saying we can’t interpret dreams at all. Sometimes we will wake up thinking, ‘I know what that dream was about,’ and when that happens, we will almost certainly be right. But if the meaning doesn’t jump out at you, any interpretation can be misguided.

The interpretative approach also inhibits us from talking about dreams. We worry our dream might be saying something about us we can’t see, but someone else will spot straight away.

But the biggest problem with the psychological approach is that it keeps us centred in the dayworld, rather than allowing us to fully enter the house of dreams.

Creative dreaming is about letting go of all links between dreaming and waking life, and treating them as different kinds of experience for the self. Tessa, in last week’s comments, told us she dreamt about nine black cats brooding huge beautiful black-cat eggs. What an amazing experience! We don’t have to ask what it means, any more than we would ask what it meant if she had told us she had pancakes for breakfast.

We can hear each other’s dream experiences exactly as we would hear the stories of waking life, and value them in the same way, for their interest and colour, their emotion and energy. For the imaginative experience they spark in us, vicariously.

If you want to remember more of your dreams, start talking about them. Make them part of your normal life, not in a piecemeal, conditional way, only keeping the ones you think you can understand and dismissing the rest as ‘meaningless.’

I’ve put some pointers about creative dream-sharing on the ‘Tips’ page today. You could start by sharing a dream with us here. Notice how different it feels to be telling and listening to dreams when no-one is trying to understand what they mean.

Next week, we’ll be on safari in your dreamworld, and guest blogger Scotti Cohn will be telling us about ‘the wolf dream.’

At the end of the first series of creative dreaming-and-writing workshops I did, my favourite feedback was from someone who said she felt as if she had been walking past the same opening in the hedge every day of her life, but never stopped to look over the gate. Now she had looked, she was astonished to find there was a whole new world on the other side to explore, which had been there all the time, unobserved.

The world of the unconscious mind on the other side of the gate is a treasure-trove for writers, and many do get ideas and inspiration from their dreams. (If you’re a writer with a dream story please get in touch – I’ll be inviting guest bloggers to share ‘The dream that sparked the book’)

But even people who value dreams and get inspiration from them usually do it in a fairly random way, rather than deliberately and consistently using their dream-life as part of their writing practice.

Creative dreaming and writing are both ways of opening to the hidden places of the psyche. You can use one to magnify the other. In my writing life, I use dreams for gathering material and for finding structures that work. I harness the currents of imagination and emotion at work in my unconscious mind in the moment to energise my writing.

In my dreamlife, I use creative writing to further explore and enhance my experience of dreaming.

This approach works brilliantly for me. I love sharing it in workshops and now I want to share it with readers too. I’m working on a book called, ‘Writing in the House of Dreams – creative dreaming for writers, creative writing for dreamers,’ which should be on publishers’ desks by the end of the year.

At parties or the pub, when I tell people I’m writing a book about dreams, they always say, ‘I had this amazing/weird/hilarious/alarming dream…’ And then they go on to recount it. I love that!

If you’ve had a memorable dream, please share!

Next week, I’ll be blogging about the thing people always say when they have finished telling their dream, ‘I don’t know what it means…’