“There is a loving in dream-work. We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us—and this feeling of being loved by the images permeates the analytical relationship. Let us call it imaginal love, a love based wholly on relationship with images and through images, a love showing in the imaginative response of the partners to the imagination in the dreams.”
–James Hillman
Of all the “re” words that we use in working with dreams, perhaps the most important is re-spect, which means to look again. Really, that’s the whole thing we’re trying to learn in a single word. That’s what our dreams are doing: bringing us to respect ourselves—not inspect with guilt—but to re-gard, to take another look at what happened yesterday or what happened in childhood, and re-spect it. Whatever we look at again we gain a new respect for—whether in ourselves or in the culture. But to do this, we have to let it be as it is and not try to update it, make it new. Just looking again, the respect, renews it.
Frequently, people approach their dreams like going to a fortune-teller, or a newspaper horoscope, looking for information about what to do in a given situation. But dreams don’t tell us what to do; they tell us where we are. Dreams place us. By putting a big “X” on the map of our psyche, dreams say, “You are here.”
As these images bring a sense of internal fate, they also bring an awareness of internal necessity and its limitation. A mutual caring envelopes the relationship and we start to feel responsible to the images and for them. Working with dreams this way teaches us how to companion ourselves in perhaps the deepest way possible, so that our images become our keepers, as we are theirs.
If we can accept psychic reality as really real—not just a bunch of complexes or the effect of society or the result of earlier development—but just as real as bricks and stones and trees, we can start to allow ourselves to be shaped by that reality. Thus, we learn to handle our dreams, tending them carefully and discreetly, stepping back so the images can come forward and reveal themselves, their purposefulness, their stories. And it soon becomes clear that these images have chosen us, our dreams, because they are trying to teach us the art of love.
For more information or to schedule your free introductory dream-tending session, call 661-288-1901 or email: dreamtending@gmail.com .