Dream Catcher

Introduction

Some psychological theorists would have us believe the therapeutic task is to find our true, coherent self. Robert Bosnak would rather we find the multitude of identities with which we can identify, to devolve to just this side of the chaos of incoherence. And where better to “be” these selves than in our bodies, the most obvious vehicles of our expression of self. And where else to find these multiple selves than in the most colourful and fantastical spaces that we all inhabit: Our dreams.

Graham Lindegger spoke to Bosnak about his approach to working with dreams, the body and the many selves we are invited to experience.

Graham Lindegger: Robert, I think the best starting point for the readers of New Therapist is for you to tell us a bit about yourself.

Robert Bosnak: I did my very first training as a lawyer specializing in criminology and after my studies in criminology I became very ill with a physical illness that was quite untraceable. I ended up in hospital for 10 months and they couldn’t find it and in the end I decided that something else must be going on, so I went to Switzerland to go into analysis.

That’s where I met Aniela Jaffe, an analyst who wrote Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections. She became my first analyst. This was in 1971. I needed a permit to stay in Switzerland because I’m Dutch, so I enrolled in the Jung Institute to get a permit. I started my training when I was 23 and graduated when I was 29.

I then went to the US with my wife and two children and ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the end of 1977 and had my practice there for about 25 years. During that time I had the opportunity to begin my own way of working.

In my own analysis, my physical illness began to subside and actually moved away and, touch wood, never came back. So I was very interested in the relationship between the physical body and imagery, also on account of my analysts, Aniela Jaffe and later James Hillman (the founder of archetectypal psychology). I was very much trained in archetypal psychology. So I started out in a very different place than where Jung had ended up.

What Hillman had been doing was to deconstruct Jung and move more toward the notion of multiplicity and away from Jung’s polarity, where he was seeing everything as the animus and the anima and the self, the ego and the shadow and the notion of the self as a central organizing principle—and we moved entirely away from that. I think that the notion of the central self is completely alien to my work. So I began to work more and more with the body and with the notion that when you work with images, your whole body is involved.

Then I started traveling and my main interests were how different people in the world dream. Dreaming has been my passion.

GL: Is it fair to say that you wouldn’t go along with the more traditional Jungian idea of integration towards some kind of unity in the self?

RB: Absolutely. I think that I go much more from the point of view of the complexity theory—the notion that we are living on the border of chaos and that the most adaptable people are those that can live as close to chaos as possible. And we are always out of control and we are constantly working on adapting to new situations. I agree with one of the old female alchemists, her name was Maria Prophetissa, who said that the best souls are made of rubber—I’m very much into rubber, maybe because I’m from the 60’s.

GL: You don’t fit the mould of the traditional Jungian analysts’ approach to dreams, I wonder if you could introduce us to your idea of the incubation and embodiment of dreams.

RB: What I find is that everybody, everywhere, when asked about their dreams, tells me: “I was somewhere and this and that happened.” So to me, a dream is a place—that’s the first rule that I start from. It’s an environment in which you find yourself, it’s an environment in which you present yourself as embodied, it’s not disembodied—it’s fully embodied. When you touch things you can feel them with your hand, you can feel textures and smell. All your senses are engaged. Everything that presents itself to you is embodied and you know that you are awake.

So one of the elements of dreaming is knowing that you’re awake. It’s a place where you find yourself where you know that you’re awake and the difference between a dream and physical reality is that you wake up from it. And I’m not going into the metaphysics of when you die. Maybe you wake up from this—that’s not my issue. So, as you wake up from dreaming, you realize that this dreaming reality evaporates. I call the reality of dreaming quasi-physical, because it presents itself as if physical.

So my whole work is trying to help people re-enter this quasi-physical realm where everything around them is imagination. I think that’s one of the greatest miracles of human consciousness—that there is this imagination that can create an entire world in a flash. To me, that’s why I say that every dream is an act of genius.

If you have a dream that you’re walking to the store to buy a quart of milk—that is a pure act of genius because there is a street being created, there is a counter being created, there is somebody being created that takes your money, there’s milk created. Everything in a dream is being created as it happens.

GL: And you are particularly interested in the bodily aspect of dreams, is that right?

RB: Yes, there are several reasons for that, the first being that I had my own physical illness, which got cured by working with dreams, but for which I spent a long time in Western medicine and in the hospital. The other thing is that I worked with people who suffered from serious illnesses. I have two main interests. One is working with people with severe physical illness. I worked a lot with the AIDS epidemic. I was working with it in Cambridge and so most of the AIDS sufferers who had any money came to Boston, because Boston and San Francisco was where the big research was being conducted and I had my office there. I found that the work that I did not only made them feel better psychologically, but I had a sense that—and this is completely anecdotal—they actually lived longer.

After that, I worked for a long time with people with heart transplants, and I also had the same feeling—it did have a physical effect. So I became really interested in the physical effect of, for instance, working with heart transplant patients on the images of the donor. If you create a relationship with the image of the donor, that image keeps coming to the person. The attitude of the doctors was: “Just get away from that, those are terrible hallucinations, don’t go there.” And I started to work with them and it created a relationship with the donor presence. I don’t care if that is actually the spirit of the physical person.

GL: That’s your phenomenological stance.

RB: Absolutely. The only thing that I am interested in is that this is a presence who announces himself as: “I am your heart, I am the person of your heart.” And that, to me, is the encounter. I work the encounter not only from the perspective of the recipient, but by helping the person transit into the perspective of the donor. So a relationship is established between the presence of the donor and the presence of the recipient and that relationship, I think, is beneficial in the prevention of some of the rejection problems associated with transplants.

Through images, you can get deeply into the autonomic nervous system. We know that, through embodied work with dreaming and other embodied work, you can get deeply into the autonomic nervous system, and I think that there you can affect the immune system. You can affect all kinds of ways of physical functioning that we are not using at the moment because we have this silly notion that you cannot get to the autonomic nervous system. That division is similar to the idea that was popular when I was training, that you can’t change the brain. Now we know that you can. So all these things that we were so convinced about are turning out to be false and, in my work, I do a lot of embodiment work with symptoms where I enter into systems.

GL: So when you talk of embodiment work, what does that mean?

RB: To me, the word embodiment is the interface between image and body. It is, for instance, saying, “This woman is the embodiment of beauty.” It is the moment where an image presents itself as body. My point of view is that we are being embodied by images.

So, this morning I was walking down the street and I saw a man all hunched over and he was being embodied by his depression, you could see that he was carrying his whole world around him and in his world it was dark and bleak. He was this bent person in the middle of sunshine in Sydney. But he was walking in the darkness—you could see the darkness around him. It was embodying him—he was being embodied by his environment and his environment is an image.

My definition of an image is “an environment in which you find yourself within a quasi-physical environment.” The physical environment was sunshine with people bouncing around in the street. But we are being embodied by images to some degree all the time. Usually the image that embodies us is what I call habitual consciousness—our habitual sense of self. We are usually embodied by our habitual sense of self, in which you know that you are a South African male, having grown up that way, you’re married—all those things are part of your habitual embodiment, but it’s an image— it’s an image with which you are identified.

Identification is something that you learn. Babies don’t start out being identified with anything, not even the body. A baby can look at their hand for hours, and not have any sense that it is part of their body. So identification is a slowly learned process—the images slowly begin to embody us, we slowly become identified with particular images, and we are disidentified from other images.

Part of what I am trying to do in my work is to move away from habitual consciousness, or habitual embodiment, because that creates a thick crust of routine and habit which, as a side-effect, speeds up time as we get older. The crust of our embodiment and habits get thicker and thicker and we don’t have any new experiences so life seems to move faster and faster. All the work that I do is to break down that crust, to melt that crust, which is now chemical motion. The alchemists say that the first thing that you have to do when you start working with material is to melt the crust.

We meet our patients in an encrusted state—that’s how they come—and their particular crust doesn’t work for them. Through working with images you can get different embodiments that can freshly begin to embody you. And so this process gets you out of your crusty state and makes you much more adaptable, because your crust was developed in a period that is no longer the present, so you’re actually responding to the present with habits from the past.

GL: Would you say that, in a sense, when you’re working with a person, you’re attempting to foster a mentality of curiosity to new ways of embodiment, new forms of consciousness?

RB: If that were enough that would be great, but curiosity doesn’t do much. People go there kicking and screaming. Habitual consciousness wants to persist. Everything wants to persist. To get out of that persistent habitual consciousness, curiosity is not enough.

In one dream that was told to me, there was an image of a woman standing on the land, not wanting to enter into the ocean. She was completely identified with the stance of being on safe ground. It was very difficult for her to feel the process of falling.

In the same dream, there was a man who was falling and this woman was disidentified from the process of falling. It was very difficult for her to notice what it was—that there was something falling from the medium (because the dream is the medium so there’s something falling through the medium) and to get that sense of what is falling through the medium. When asked about the falling man, she would insist that “that is not me.” That was her first response. But I begin from the point of view that this is a dream and therefore everything is being dreamed and the person who is standing on the shore is being dreamed just as much as the person falling from the aeroplane. The person standing on the shore is just the one with which the habitual conscious identifies because the habitual conscious wants to be on safe ground. So I have to work carefully, slowly, to help the person to sense that process of falling though the medium of the dream, and that takes a long time.

I do this though a process called mimesis—it’s a form of imitation. It’s based on acting techniques. I find that if we view all the beings in a dream as characters that can embody us, then it is possible to live a much greater part of our lives. You live your life on many different wavelengths than simply receiving life through your habitual consciousness, which is a very narrow band on just one of many bandwidths. There are many stations on all of these bandwidths—we’re just not listening to most of the stations that are transmitting information to us.

GL: In addition to embodiment, you also speak about incubation.

RB: Dream incubation is a very ancient process. Western medicine began with dream incubation. At the height of the Greek classical period, there were many forms of medicine going on and you can see that in the Hippocratic corpus. But the one element of medicine that persisted for a thousand years everywhere through the classical world was based on dream incubation.

Hippocrates himself considered himself a descendant of Asclepius, the God of healing. In his medical school, there would be an abotom, a place for the dreamers, and in that abotom the god would present himself to the dreamer. The encounter with the god was actually considered to be the healing element.

The way that we would describe it now is that there is some kind of self-healing tendency that is becoming more evident. And we have begun to research it indirectly in the placebo studies, which show that imagination has an enormous influence on the healing process. And rituals are a part of this. For instance, one of the most powerful rituals we have in medicine is surgery. There were heart surgeries performed in the 1950’s that we now know are biologically totally ineffective, yet they were effective, because people went through the ritual of surgery.

We know that ritual and imagination actually have a potentially healing effect and we can now show how it works in the brain through neuroscience. I’m very interested in placebo as one of the great miracles. Of course placebo has gotten a bad rap because it’s the adversary of the pharmaceutical companies who have to prove that they’re better than placebo.

So dream incubation is triggering the self-healing response by way of dreaming. The way that you do that is to help the person enter into their state of illness, create it as an environment/image, feel the experience of being surrounded by that illness and, as you become surrounded by that image, you can feel how the image works—how that environment of the illness works in the body.

The dreaming response begins to respond with states that are similar to what you put in. One of my trainees once said, “It’s like we are digging a watering hole somewhere in the jungle and waiting to see what kind of animals come to the watering hole.” I’m very interested in what kind of dreams are coming, not so much the reaction of the habitual consciousness to what is coming, but what beings are coming by themselves.

So if you have a dream of a serpent coming I’m much more interested in the movement of the serpent, the way that the serpent presents itself, the way that it enters into the space of the dreamer, than the reaction of the dreamer to the serpent.

GL: I notice when you work with dreams, you speak a lot about anchoring.

RB: Yes, my interest is in multiplicity. I want to help people to experience more than two states at the same time—usually three or four states. The way that I do that is through the use of Constantin Stanislavski’s Method of Sense Memory.

Stanislavski talked about what later became method acting—there are particular memories that are located in the body and if you concentrate on that place in your body, the whole memory starts appearing. I used that before I knew about Stanislavski—Stanislavski became the theory behind it.

Let’s take a dream of being chased by a dog, you can feel the state of running away from the dog, for instance, as the fear in your chest. Then we identify with the dog and we can feel the aggression of the dog in the jaws. If you then have anchored that carefully, by having the person feel the jaws and the chest at the same time these two states co-exist. It’s difficult to feel emotions at the same time, but you can feel locations in the body at the same time, so you can have three or four different locations in the body that you have psycho-activated which, through anchoring, stay there. And if you trigger them, then all these states come into being simultaneously and so you are in an environment of a multiplicity of states that begin to move through your body and create so much turmoil that the body needs to respond. That response, then, is what in complexity would be called a phase transition—a movement from one qualitative state into another.

GL: And that’s touching on the chaos that you spoke about earlier?

RB: Yes, so the risk of the work is that we are bringing in too many states. If we bring in too many states then it moves too far into chaos and the person can’t hold on to it. The worst risk about it is that nothing happens. It’s not dangerous,it doesn’t make the person psychotic or anything.

So, we have to find the optimal number of states that a person can contain, which frequently is three or four. The other problem is that if you have many states, then it erodes very fast. If you have six or seven states, a person can hold onto these for a brief period of time, but after a day it has eroded into two states. So what we want to do is, after the person has had the dream experience and worked with the dream and has all these different anchors in their body, to practice that.

Then we get the notion of neuroplasticity, in which you can practice a new state of being, because once all these states have been triggered at the same time the body must respond to it, because it cannot stay in that state of tension. A new state of being must come out of that.

GL: So is that a conscious, intentional practice?

RB: It’s an intentional practice, for about 5 minutes a day. The most motivated people are those with an illness, because illness makes you very motivated to do these kinds of things.

For example, suppose you have a person with multiple sclerosis (MS) and she presents a dream about a man sneaking through the backyard and breaking into the house, and she is very scared. First, we work with the house and how she feels in the house. So we anchor the safety in a particular place in the body. Then we begin to look at the way that this man moves—and through this process of mimesis we begin to sense what that movement is like. As she focuses on that, her body becomes more and more like the movement of the body of that person (this is not physical because this person cannot move, as she has MS), but this is all imagined movement and through this imagined movement, with very subtle movement of the body, she can sense the movement of this character. As she senses his movement, she begins to identify with him. Each image has its own gravity—it behaves like a heavenly body—but you have to come into its orbit, close enough for it to pull you into its gravity, and then suddenly you can experience its subjectivity.

Subjectivity is something that we have learned to identify with this particular body and therefore we call this our subjectivity. Once you identify with another body then you are practicing what I call paradoxical propriorception—you have the propriorception of the body of another.

So she begins to sense the body of the one who moves and the way that he breaks in. Then we work on the fear that she has and we work with that in a different place in the body. So now we have three body locations: the anchor of being in the safe house; the movement of the sneaky fellow in the back yard and the very subtle movement that he has; and the enormous fear when she sees him entering, so we have three states.

Now she begins to practice these three states by holding them simultaneously. What happens, after a week, is that she can move with greater ease; her body has some kind of suppleness that it didn’t have before; she is more aware of her fear of falling and by being more aware of it she doesn’t clench her walking stick as tightly. So she moves in a more supple way as I help her to practice it.

Usually these practices can last up to three weeks and then they run out of steam. But in the meantime other dreams would have intervened, so new practices can be devised. After a period of time, the person feels that there is a particular suppleness in her body, which also translates into a more subtle relationship that she is having with her children, and then it multiplies outwards from there.

GL: You also spoke about working with memories in a similar way to dreams.

RB: Yes, my notion of memory is that memory is a series of images that are frozen into a master narrative, that we always narrate our memories to ourselves, and that we believe the narrator.

If it is possible to move away from the narrator, then you can get a completely fresh experience of these events and you can be changed by them again. That way, you actually begin to change your past, because we don’t remember our past, we remember our last memory of our past.

So if you begin to shift the memory system without falsifying it— that’s the trick of course, since a falsified memory is useless—, then you can shift within the memory. If you take a memory as a place or a series of places in which you can position yourself differently, then the whole memory system changes. This means that the whole image in which you find yourself changes, which means that your embodiment changes, so everything begins to change and I’ve seen that work many times.

GL: So the way in which you would work with memories would be very similar to the way in which you would work with dreams?

RB: Very similar. The thing that I say to people is there are two ways of working with memories. First is working with memories from the point of view of the court system—trying to find out what really happened—and frequently people are very stuck there. The other is working with memory as it presents itself as phenomena, and that’s the kind of memory that I’m interested in.

I recently worked with a woman who had been raped. It had a terrible effect on her, of course. I help her to get back to the room, but not look at what is happening on the bed, but to look in another direction. She finds that there is a very sturdy closet that is over on the other side of the room. So what I help her to do is to sense the closet, to sense the sturdiness of the wood and to slowly allow herself to become embodied by the closet, and once she is embodied by the closet, for her to begin to sense, from the closet’s perspective, what is going on in the room through peripheral vision. In this way, she can let it come much closer. She doesn’t have to disassociate, but she also doesn’t have to look directly. I have found that this kind of working with trauma—by way of peripheral vision, by stripping off the master narrative (what’s happening on the bed) and looking at it from the point of view of this closet, you can actually allow things to move out of disassociation and begin to re-associate.

GL: Would you say that, in a way, when you’re working with memories, you’re working with multiplicity, you may have multiple images in a memory and you might have one that becomes the master memory and what you attempt to do is open up the multiplicity of the memory to the person?

RB: A memory is a form of imagination to which we assign history. Several studies tell us that after a few days the memory is transformed and it continually changes, so after a year it’s completely different to what it was originally. Imagination constantly works on recall. Memories are no longer just what happened in the past, but they have become image environments. This means that not only is the narrator a part of the imagination, but also, for instance, the dog that is walking around over there is being imagined right now, because when we go back into the memory, there is a dog there. So it is possible to actually then identify with the dog and work the whole memory from the point of view of the dog. Then you get a completely different state of memory and that begins to affect the way that a person experiences themselves. So I try to always move the person out of the story-teller role. Like with the dreamer, I try to move away from being the one who tells me the story. I am standing on the edge of the water and I am not the one who is in the water.

GL: Robert, finally can I ask you just to tell us a little about your healing sanctuary.

RB: When I was in Switzerland, there was this Jungian Training Hospital for Psychiatric Illnesses that was founded by C. A. Myer, who wrote a book called Ancient Incubation in Modern Psychotherapy. It was a mental hospital only.

From that time, which was in the early 1970’s, I became interested in what would happen if we used the same principles with physical illness. About 11 years ago, I got together with my friend Stephen Aizenstat, who is the founder and former president of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. We found that we were both interested in trying to recreate an Asclepian healing sanctuary, which hasn’t been done in 1,500 years, because the last sanctuary was closed in about 500AD.

We were very interested in dream incubation and in what would happen if, in tandem with conventional medicine, we could have a place of healing where dreaming was central and other forms of integrated medicine, like yoga, acupuncture, nutrition and massage could support us in focusing on dream incubation.

[Following this interview, Bosnak opened the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary. The center currently runs 7- and 10-day programmes that incorporate many of the principles outlined in this interview into the treatment of people with progressive and serious illnesses and with those who wish to use dream work in tackling other challenges in their lives. People go through ancient dream incubation and Bosnak and his team are exploring whether it is more effective to work with conventional medicine in tandem with these incubation practices and with these integrated medical practices than it is to work only with conventional medicine?]

About the interviewer

Graham Lindegger is a professor of psychology at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa and a contributing editor to New Therapist.