Inside Dreams

Yet my dreams had made me feel utterly out of my depth. They had almost mystically anticipated events. (Had it been pure coincidence I’d dreamed that a Chinese surgeon took a “bullet” from my neck, and months later, a real Chinese surgeon—a Dr. Wang, the country’s premier thyroid specialist and the spitting image of my dream doctor—had operated to remove my tumor?) They had galvanized me to act, almost against my will. How could dreams, evanescent wisps of the night, gather the force of a Kansas tornado barreling toward Oz? What kind of dreams were these?

Songbirds, for instance, were found to be improvising new songs in their sleep.⁠8 Octopi change their skin patterns during REM periods, suggesting they are dreaming of moving through environments and having encounters.

Whenever you have a hypothesis about a dream, it must be tested against the other metaphors in the dreamscape to see if they all fit, and if they form a larger overall pattern.

A metaphor in a dream is rarely a single image, but embedded in a whole world of interconnected metaphors that are collectively moving toward a goal. In dreamwork, we consider each image separately, but we must not remove it from its context. It must be contemplated in its larger context for cohesion to become possible.