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ABSTRACT Bringing Dreamwork Approaches to Waking Life Zoé Newman, MFT Email: znewman@juno.com Zoé Newman, M.A., is a psychotherapist and spiritual director in Berkeley, where she has been leading dream groups for the last sixteen years. She has presented at previous ASD conferences, published in Psychological Perspectives and other journals, and authored a book entitled Lucid Waking: Bringing Dreamwork Approaches to Waking Life. Summary of Presentation In many spiritual traditions, life is seen as like a dream. This workshop
will explore bringing dreamwork approaches to waking life to find new
perspective, insight and growth. We’ll also address how working with waking
experience and relationships "as if it were a dream" can be a
valuable resource in psychotherapy. 1) To learn how one can find insight, or facilitate another in doing so, through exploring an experience or situation "as if it were a dream." 2) To explore how bringing dreamwork approaches to relationship conflict can lead to insight and change. 3) To explore how one might apply dreamwork perspectives to everyday situations to change old patterns and respond in creative, new ways. Evaluation questions: 1) How might you facilitate insight, explore issues, and utilize the therapeutic language of metaphor with a client through bringing dreamwork approaches to waking experience? 2) How might you facilitate a shift and useful insight by working with a relationship conflict from a dreamwork perspective? 3) List one or more ways that bringing lucid and Senoi perspectives to waking life situations can be of therapeutic value.
Abstract "The nature of our entire experience is that of a dream." -- Tarthung Tulku Rinpoche
Bringing a dreamwork perspective to waking experience, whether for our own self or in our work with others, can transform everyday experience into opportunities for new perspective, insight and growth. Meeting our nightmares with interest and symbolic exploration, with the attitude that they are in service of our wholeness, can open us to the gift or message that they offer us. These same dreamwork principles can open up the "waking nightmares" of our life — such as relationship conflicts, repetitive patterns, frustrating mishaps, past regrets — and yield helpful insight. Likewise, moments noticed only in passing, framed as dream, can reveal depths of meaning and healing, and become rich resources for change, as we explore them with attentiveness and openness. In the workshop Bringing Dreamwork Approaches to Waking Life, we will look at how to bring the same approaches and tools that work in exploring our dreams to our everyday life -- both for ourselves, and for psychotherapists, in our work with others. Exploring the metaphor and symbolism of a synchronistic event as if it were a dream, for instance, can bring clarity and insight. Utilizing the dreamwork perspective that dream characters reflect our own psyche can help us become aware also of the gifts and challenges of our shadow side in waking life impasses. Recognizing relationships as reflections can lead to important shifts, new clarity, and growth. And the spirit of exploration and freeness that lucid and Senoi approaches bring to dreams can help us face our "waking monsters" with new creativity. It's sometimes hard to remember we have creative choice when we're caught up in the drama of the moment, just as when we’re caught up in a dream before realizing it's a dream. Applying lucid dreamwork perspectives to our everyday life, we can "wake up," and instead of repeating old familiar patterns, we can experiment with different, more useful responses. The workshop will include presentation, guided exercises, dyad work and sharing. We’ll explore how to draw on dreamwork approaches to find new perspective and insight in our own life, and also how bringing an "if this were a dream" perspective into our work with others can be a valuable resource and a skillful therapeutic and healing tool.
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