An Interview With Jeremy Taylor
By Diane Stirling
In Touch (I.T.): Your advocacy of group dream work resonates with Centerpoint’s emphasis on coteries — small, self-directed, learning communities that rotate the leadership — as an ideal context for exploring the world of myth, symbol, dream and the unconscious.
Jeremy Taylor (J.T.): I’ve developed some “Basic Hints for Group Dream Work,” that are designed to help dream groups enter into the process of mutual, participatory exploration. Participants “unpack” each other’s dreams, without giving undue authority to any member(s), especially those with formal training, years of experience, or letters after their names. This approach encourages people to enter the process as emotional equals and contribute to the group’s shared knowledge.
I.T.: What happens when a dream is shared?
J.T.: Every time a person tells a dream, each one of us is exploring our own imagined version of the dream. In other words, ideas we have about the possible meaning(s) of another’s dream must be a projection, based on how we have imagined the dream for ourselves.
I.T.: How do members of the dream group recognize or reflect this state of projection?
J.T.: They consciously acknowledge and “own” that their ideas about the possible meanings and significance of other’s dreams, (and lives!) are projections. People need to be reminded to preface their thoughts with some version of “If this were my dream....” I usually call people back to this form of address when they slip back into their familiar speech habits, prompted most often by their increased excitement and involvement in the work. I have a signal: I gently pound my chest, simian fashion, meaning, “Please remember our agreements. The point you are making is much too important to be lost in the form of an accusation. Please re-frame what you are saying as an ‘I’ statement.”
Transforming habitual “you” language into “I” language with careful, conscious attention mirrors and promotes the parallel process of transforming other, unconscious, counter-productive “habits of a life-time.” Becoming more consciously responsible for the ways we speak to one another while we are exploring our dreams helps us become more consciously responsible for how we conduct ourselves in all other areas of life.
I.T.: How do dream groups start their sessions?
J.T.: Most of the groups I work with begin with a round of brief sharing of the emotional highlights of their lives since the last meeting, a “check-in,” or “touch-in.” Everyone speaks, usually including a brief, evocative title for one of their recent dreams. Then, determined by the laws of fairness, the person whose claim on the group’s attention is most compelling shares a dream.
Once a dream has been shared with the group, quite literally “anything goes.” The foundational principle that trumps all others is “The name of the game is Dreamer’s Choice.” The dreamer makes the call.
I.T.: What happens once a dream has been shared?
J.T.: Initially, the work usually takes the form of querying the dreamer about the details of the dream experience and often includes questions about the dreamer’s waking life. As ideas, feelings, and intuitions form about the possible deeper layers of meaning that lie beyond the surface of the dream’s appearance, members begin to make speculative suggestions about the multiple meanings of the dream. If and when these projections are on the mark, the moment becomes an occasion for an “aha!” The French call it a frisson, a moment of recognition, not only for the original dreamer, but also for all the people in the dream circle who have imagined their own version(s) of the dream. In this fashion, the benefit of the work with any given dream, or set of dreams, is never limited just to the original dreamer. We are all offered an incomparable opportunity to do our own work in projected form on the gift of the dream narrative. In fact, I regularly find that it is much easier to do my own leading-edge dream work in projected form while exploring other people’s dreams, because I, like every one else, am uniquely blind to the deeper meanings of my own dreams.
I.T.: Do you have a sense of a particular image or myth that is speaking to many people in our culture at this time?
J.T.: Interesting question! The one that pops to mind immediately is what I call “The Return of the Dark Goddess.” Many people are reporting dreams with powerful, numinous, dark female figures in them. At a collective/archetypal level, I believe that these figures all tend to be personalized “dream avatars” of the archetype Carl Jung called the Great Mother — the feminine aspect of the Divine. She is coming back into the collective field of consciousness in waking life and is manifesting in people’s dreams with increasing strength and regularity.
I have also noticed that people who are seriously engaged in trying to make committed relationships work, are tending more and more to report dreams in which their relationship struggles are depicted in HUGE, archetypal metaphors. It is as though the Great Mother and the All Father had a nasty falling out somewhere around 7,000 years ago, during which seemingly unforgivable things were said and done. Now they are both coming to realize (in parallel with our waking human realizations) that the planet’s ability to support conscious, complex life is being jeopardized by their continuing archetypal “lover’s quarrel.” Any sincere effort to deepen relational life, to make it more honest, creative, and satisfying, parallels an increasingly urgent collective archetypal drama. People who really “show up” for their increasingly intense and complicated personal relationship struggles are unconsciously volunteering to serve as “ambassadors” in the negotiations between the Great Mother and the All Father. Our successes and failures have collective consequences that ramify and echo far beyond our own individual lives, as revealed by the inescapably transpersonal/archetypal images and metaphors that show up in the dreams.
I.T.: Do you have some recent insights or “aha’s” that have surprised you?
J.T.: Yes. For me that happens fairly regularly. Most of these surprising, unexpected “aha’s” are more personal than I would care to go into here, but I will say they tend to constellate around deepening layers of conscious recognition and appreciation that the Shadow aspects of my personality—the things about myself that I am always trying to control, minimize, hide from view, and weed out of my life — invariably hold as a hostage the very things I most need in order to actually take the next step towards increasing health and wholeness. From a theoretical point of view, the “hidden gifts of the Shadow” are well known to be immensely important; it’s just that it’s always a shock when archetypal truths of that sort manifest in stunningly inescapable ways in the intimate details of my own life!
I.T.: What are some of the other pitfalls that challenge dream groups, and how do they retain or regain their balance?
J.T.: One problem that crops up with some regularity among group members is a subtle tendency to collude unconsciously in avoiding levels of dream content that might cause fear, pain, anxiety, or disruptions and disturbances in a dreamer’s waking life if they were pursued with vigor. One way to joggle groups out of that kind of stultifying “politeness” and “mutual concern and protection” is to hire a dream worker who brings another technique or theoretical perspective to the work. Often, working with a new facilitator will loosen the log jam and allow the group to return to the deepening edge of their work together.
I.T.: Dream groups, like many study groups, tend to rely on discussion.
J.T.: Yes, another problem is that we tend to ignore the physical body. We meet. We sit. We talk... and talk... and talk. One way to acknowledge the physical layers of dream experience and exploration is to add Dream Theater to the way the group “unpacks” the deeper implications of dreams. Another is to involve a yoga instructor who is also into dream work as a co-facilitator of the group work, who teaches an asana to the group, as part of the projective exploration of the dream.
I.T.: You recommend starting with a “Check in,” but I’ve been in groups where this can usurp most of our time.
J.T.: This is “Check-In inflation,” where the necessary initial story-telling about the members’ waking lives since the last time they were all together expands until there is barely enough time to share a dream, let alone work with it to any level of depth. This problem is a direct result of the way our technological society militates against self revelation and offers no real support to people who want to connect with one another on a regular basis at increasing levels of depth.
One thing that can be done is to begin with a feeling statement, rather than an explanatory comment about why “I” feel the way I do, even the most profound emotional states and situations can be shared in a relatively short space of time. Instead of beginning with, “Well, last week I mentioned to you...” I begin my check-in by saying, “I feel this way, now, in this moment....” For example: “Whenever I allow myself to be still, I am filled with fear and anxiety because my mother is going into the hospital for a biopsy.”
Another collective, recurrent, archetypal, drama that arises in ongoing dream groups is the sense of “getting stale.” It usually happens when people have already gotten all sorts of impressive, helpful insights from the group, but nothing much has come of it lately. No one wants to “rock the boat,” or “make trouble,” but the individual feelings of frustration and disappointment are growing.
In my experience, these symptoms are a reliable indication that people have become trapped in a metaphor of “politeness.” They fear stepping beyond the unspoken boundaries of group propriety. In situations like this, there is almost always something “I” want to say to one or more other group members, but “I” fear it will cause upset—so much that the others may reject “me.”
Most usually (and I am tempted to say always!), this sense of being “stuck” is a consequence of not really believing that the potential hurtful or disruptive thing “I” have hidden in my heart and mind to say is actually a projection. “I” secretly believe it isn’t a confession but an objective comment about a person’s life.
In fact, if my observation were not composed of things in myself that I didn’t want to own consciously, the sense of frustration and holding back would not take the form of feeling stuck. The profound benefits of recognizing that all the opinions we have are projections, that “just because it’s projection doesn’t mean it isn’t also true,” cannot be overstated. Resolving this pernicious feeling of frustrated stuckness by saying the things I have held back and acknowledging that, true or not, they are my own less-than-conscious projections, has transformed and deepened the process of many an ongoing dream group, allowing it to continue and go even further into the uncharted waters of the individual and collective creative unconscious.
I.T: Has a group member ever dreamed a dream that spoke to the groups’ needs or dilemmas?
J.T: People regularly have dreams for other people. The most important thing to remember about the “message dreams” that people have “for others” is that they are still the dreamer’s dreams and will have all sorts of levels of meaning for the dreamer, in addition to any of the meanings and messages they may carry for other individuals or for the group itself.
I.T: Like dream group discussion, this interview comes to a close at an arbitrary point, long before all the dimensions and insights of the dream world have been explored. In conclusion, we would like to thank you for bringing dreams to the doorstep of consciousness for thousands of people.
J.T: The benefits of sharing dreams with others, listening to their projections about the possible meanings my dreams may carry, and in return, listening to and imagining other people’s dreams for myself are immense and ongoing. The practice of sharing my thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and physical responses to others’ dreams works when I own them consciously as ideas engendered by my own imagined versions of their narratives. The more I do this playful, ultimately serious work with my own and other people’s dreams, the more I will come into conscious contact with my own creativity, courage, and spiritual possibilities.
I have been doing this work, bringing my best energies to inviting and teaching others to do this work with each other, for more then 40 years. I remain as excited about the possibilities we discover in ourselves and in each other as a result as I was when I first experimented with saying to someone else, “Well, if this were my dream...!”
Jeremy Taylor led a workshop on Dreaming at Rowe March 3-5. Click for more info.