Group Interpretation

About a week and a half ago I was a part of a dream interpretation group.  I don’t often get the privilege to work with other interpreters, but when I do I have a great deal of fun and learn a lot from the experience.  I learned a long time ago that when I work with others to extract meaning from a dream, I gain a new perspective, which results in lots of new insight.

Other dream interpreters offer much more than just help on changing the dream’s perspective, if they’re good listeners, like all successful interpreters are, they can hear what others in the group have missed.

Here’s an example:

  The dream takes place in the nineteen fifties and I am six years old in the dream.  I am with four or five adult white men who have an encounter with an African-American man, who was very nicely dressed.  We were in a small town setting, where the white men took him behind a building. They beat the man, and as I watched, one of the men I was with put one of his fingers into the neck of the African-American man and blood pulsed out.  As I watched I knew the man was dying.

After the man rejoined the men I was with we all went into some kind of building.  I then walked out of the building by myself and looked at the man.  I could tell he was a good man, and was confused as to why one of the men I was with beat him and did that thing to his neck. In spite of all that was done to him, the African-American man still stood strong.

On the surface, this dream seems to be about racism; a white guy who beats an African-American man.  In that surface definition it made sense that the dreamer was either from the south or her parents were from the south.  When we asked the dreamer where she was from she said both her and her parents were born and raised in Ohio.  Not exactly a hotbed of racism.

After that, we tried to identify the focus of the dream.  In other words, we were looking for the thing in the dream that, if removed, from the dream, would cause the dream to fall in on itself.

In ninety percent of cases, the dreamer is the focus of the dream.  Really, the only time the dreamer is not the focus of their own dream is if they are observing something, or working with others to complete a task.

Interestingly enough, there were six interpreters in our group and three thought the dreamer was the focus and three thought the African-American man was the focus.  Both groups had very valid points for believing they were right.

If you take the dreamer out of the dream, the dream falls apart because there’s no one to witness what’s happening to the man and emotionally experience what’s happening in the dream.  If you take out the African-American man then there’s no one to receive the action of the dream.

Because each half of the group saw things the way they saw things, each half was absolutely convinced that they had the right focus.  Each side was so convinced they were right, in fact, that there was a bit of disunity.

We placed the African American man as the focus of the dream and moved on.

As we worked our way through the interpretation process something very interesting happened.  In asking the dreamer her feelings about what she witnessed, she reiterated that she was confused about why the men she was with were doing these awful things to the other man.  As a six  year old child in the dream, it didn’t make any sense to her why these men she was with had such hatred for the African-American man and why the one man, in particular, treated him so violently.

Then, someone in the group, I can’t remember who exactly, pointed out that the dreamer remembered seeing the African-American man stand tall as if he could not be broken by the hatred, even though he was near death. Then the person asked the dreamer if she thought the situation applied to her in any way. The dreamer responded by stating that she was verbally and physically abused when she was a young child.

All at once, everything made sense.

The dreamer was the focus because the dreamer was both the six year old and the African-American man. This dream had only one focus, but the dreamer was two different people in the dream.  I have to admit that this is something I’ve never seen before.  It made sense to the dreamer, she felt a sense of relief which is the number one indication that an interpreter has arrived at the right answer.  Also, from an interpretive perspective, it made total sense because its totally normal for the victims of early childhood trauma to be both hurt and confused.

This dream is a brilliantly delicate way of bringing up something that traumatized the dreamer and showing her that no matter what had been inflicted upon her she would be standing tall in her adult life.

Now, you may be asking yourself why nothing about racism was brought out in the interpretation.  The dreamer is caucasian, for one. she’s standing in the shoes of an African-American man because many times dreams have a way of imparting empathy.  One of the ways to do that is to allow the dreamer to stand in someone else’s point of view in order to get the point across without traumatizing the dreamer by bringing up aspects of her unpleasant childhood.

At the end, the group agreed that it took all of our differing perspectives in order to arrive at the correct interpretation.  Even if the divided perspectives seemed to cause a chasm between us that, for a few moments, couldn’t be crossed.

EB