|
 For individual,
confidential
dream
interpretation
with John Goldhammer:
Call
John at: (206) 306-0322 and choose your payment method
on the
phone when you set up the date and time for your consultation
—
Visa & MasterCard
Note: All
dream interpretations and consultations, including all
other personal information are strictly confidential.
"Thanks again so much, John,
for the amazing dreamwork! You helped tremendously
during the most difficult time I have ever
experienced." —
Michelle P.
John can help you to:
-
Use your dreams to help you
understand your life and your own creative potential. What do
you need to be doing with your life right now?
-
Use your dreams to guide you in
making decisions and choices.
-
Stop recurring nightmares and
understand their true purpose.
-
Understand the meaning of recurring
dreams and apply it in your life.
-
Work with your dreams to understand
the origin and cause of
anxiety
and depression.
-
Protect your health by learning how
to recognize early warning signs of illness and disease in
dreams.
-
Find / Create your true calling in
life.
-
Recognize and use your dream images of
your Authentic Self.
-
Interpret your unique dream images
and symbols.
-
Use your dreams to help make the
world a better place.
-
Use your dreams on a practical,
day-to-day basis for for working with and healing relationships.
-
Identify and eliminate self-defeating
outside influences that are preventing you from realizing your
true potential.
How to improve your
dream recall
Recording
and Remembering Your Dreams
Here are some practical techniques for
recording your dreams that will also help you improve your
dream recall:
·
Find a journal that you like-something special
just for your dreams. Keep it next to your bed and before
sleep, open it to a blank page and leave a pen on it for the
night's dreams. Think about getting a unique, unusual pen for
your journal-for your dream journeying. Your preparation shows
your psyche that you are serious and inevitably, you will
begin to recall your dreams more clearly. Some people prefer
to speak their dream into a tape recorder and then transcribe
it into their journal later. Find a system that works best for
you and then commit yourself to it. Don't give up!
·
Use the back of your journal for a symbol and
image glossary of your personal symbols, collective
images and recurring dream themes with dates that refer you
back to particular dreams. Also consider keeping a blank page
next to each page of dreams for future notes and
interpretations. Over time, unique patterns unfold that are
extremely helpful in understanding your own symbolic language
and particular collective images that are impacting your
individuation process.
·
Write down your dream immediately! Our
connections to the unconscious are often fleeting and we tend
to lose most dreams if not written down in the first few
minutes after awakening. If you are unable to record your
dreams right away, write down key words and images from the
dream. This will usually bring the entire dream back. If you
don't recall any dreams, use your journal to record how you
felt when you awakened: relaxed, anxious, panicked, sad,
depressed, etc. Your dreams play a major role in influencing
how you feel, particularly when you first wake up. Writing
about your feelings in your journal, even without remembering
a particular dream, will help improve your dream recall.
·
When you record your dreams or feelings from the
night's sleep, don't censor any dream content. Record
your experience no matter how strange or nonsensical it may
appear to be. Also record the feelings from the dream. Trying
to interpret your dreams when you first record them can be
frustrating. We all have a tendency to immediately judge a
dream through a left brain sort of logic-an intellectual
approach that at first prompts us to think a dream is
meaningless and not important. Rest assured that your psyche
does not waste any effort on meaningless dreams! You have to
consciously override these first-impression judgments when you
initially recall a dream.
·
Consider including pertinent direct observations
about dream figures and symbols in parentheses immediately
after the motif/symbol to clarify known and unknown dream
elements. For example, a dream might read: "I was in my
grandparents' house (their actual house in Maryland)." As an
alternative, connections to people and dream elements can be
listed at the end of the dream.
·
Keep your dream journal private! Outer world,
well-intended judgments from friends and relatives can
seriously hurt your dream work process. The only exceptions
would be for legitimate dream groups, individual psychotherapy
with someone experienced in dreamwork techniques, or a
carefully selected "dreamwork partner," a close friend,
partner, or spouse with whom you feel OK sharing and exploring
each other's dreams. Finding a good dreamwork partner combined
with ongoing practice in dream exploration and interpretive
techniques is a tremendous aid to understanding your dreams
and your life, especially if you prefer doing your own inner
work instead of working with a psychotherapist. We are so
close to our own dreams, it's often difficult to be objective
and hence working on our dreams alone is definitely more
difficult. However, do not tell your dreams to anyone who does
not respect dreams or consider them important.
·
Give yourself extra time to wake up gradually
without using an alarm if possible. If you need an alarm, use
one that buzzes instead of a clock radio. Music or other
programs tend to draw you into the waking world and make it
more difficult to recall your dreams.
·
Self-suggestion: As you go to sleep, speak to
your psyche, repeating a brief sentence that clearly states
your intent to remember your dreams such as, "I will remember
a dream when I awaken in the morning." Keep repeating your
statement until you fall asleep. If you have difficulty
focusing or find your mind wandering, number your statements
in sequence: "One-In the morning I will remember a dream from
this night. Two-In the morning I will remember a dream from
this night," etc. Be patient and persistent with this
process-no two people recall dreams alike. Don't feel anxious
or pressured, but trust your own psyche.
·
Avoid late meals, caffeine, alcohol, or other
stimulants/depressants before sleep.
·
"B" vitamins will often help dream recall,
particularly B-6.
·
Try to get enough sleep. Get enough rest to wake
up naturally without any alarm. Exhaustion and stress can
prevent or drastically reduce our dream recall.
·
Give yourself time to unwind before sleep.
·
If you notice that you are sleeping in a certain
position when you recall most of your dreams, try to sleep in
that position.
·
If you rarely remember your dreams, try
alternating your sleep patterns: vary the times you go to
sleep and the times you get up.
·
Experiment with setting your alarm for 90
minutes, or 2 hours, or 4 hours after you go to sleep in order
to wake yourself during REM sleep. Or have your partner wake
you when s/he detects your eyelids moving indicating your are
dreaming.
·
Try sleeping fully clothed on top of the bed
covers. This may help you stay in a lighter sleep, which can
help to improve your dream recall.
·
Read or talk about your dreams just before you
go to sleep.
·
As you go to sleep, suggest to yourself that you
will recall your dreams upon the occurrence of some regularly
occurring morning sound or event such as the alarm, birds, the
sunrise, the smell of your partner fixing coffee, etc.
·
Try wearing clothing that is a color or design
that reminds you of your dreams.
·
Some people have had success taping a paperclip
or similar object to their forehead to create a physical
trigger and to symbolize an antennae to receive and remember
dreams.
·
Joining a dream group can stimulate and aid
dream recall.
·
The experience of interpreting and understanding
your dreams aids recall, as does acting on your dreams'
insight and guidance.
·
Cultivate your imagination during your waking
life; create daydreams and fantasies, read poetry you find
inspiring.
·
Use a timer that turns on a bedside lamp as an
alternative to an alarm.
·
When you wake up, give yourself a few minutes to
lie very still and turn your attention inward. Sudden
activity, like jumping out of bed, inhibits dream recall.
·
Dream researcher and author, Jeremy Taylor, has
found that "thinking backward," starting with the last dream
image and using it to link your way back through the entire
dream, helps dream recall. The regular practice of reviewing
your entire day backwards at bedtime has been found to help
dream recall, and in many instances, an entire night's dreams.
·
Simply retelling your dream to your partner or
to someone during the day helps recall and can also bring out
more details about the dream.
It helps to organize your dream journal
with a dream index as well as a symbol and image glossary
(with dates that refer you back to a particular dream. Early
on, writing this book (Radical Dreaming) compelled me to go
back and compile a dream log for my own dreams. I found myself
recalling a particular dream and I had to look through five
thick journals spanning the last twenty-four years and
thousands of dreams to find it. Sometimes you will remember
just a dream image and you can quickly locate it using your
symbol glossary. Plus it's extremely informative to see what
type of symbols and images repeat themselves in your dreams.
Recurring themes in dreams, as well as recurring dreams, can
indicate that you still have something important to work on
that you have yet to understand.
Help with nightmares
Excerpted from
RADICAL DREAMING:
by John
Goldhammer, Ph.D.
Murder, monsters, beasts, rapists,
predators, clawing fear, mutilation, decapitation-nightmares
sink their teeth into our night world, plunging us into a
black sea of fear. What could be the purpose or intent of such
throbbing dream dramas?
In my experience, nightmares fall into
two major categories that I refer to as therapeutic (Type one) and
traumatic (Type two):
Type one nightmares include those
that intend to shock us in order to get our attention-shock
therapy from our psyche. For instance, I once had a dream
of a tiger stalking me, intent on killing and eating me; that
was a Type one nightmare. Such a dream alludes to a
wild cat, something instinctive, natural, powerful, and
completely authentic wants to get me—perhaps my dreaming ego?
A nightmare in this category intentionally drags us
into its dark den in order to wake us up and to get our
attention. The dream creates valuable terror, terror
the Authentic Self often uses as a last resort, trying to save
our genuine life. These dreams are usually telling us
that we are doing something to ourselves that is
self-defeating or negating. When understood, these nightmares
stop.
Type two: In contrast, these nightmares result from
serious trauma in our waking life. These dreams are usually
quite literal and detailed, replicating an actual event we
have experienced in our waking life. For example, I recently
met a young woman who was in an apartment building two blocks
away from the World Trade Center buildings when the September
11th terrorists attacked. She watched in horror
from her apartment window as the buildings collapsed. She saw
people jumping from windows, others hurled out from the
explosions and fire. She began having recurring nightmares of
being trapped in the wreckage of one of the planes that had
hit the towers.
Her dream was showing her that she was
caught in the "trauma," the psychological "wreckage" of the event. Her
"normal" life had crashed; the event had wrecked her
emotionally, and she was indeed an "emotional wreck." It is
therapeutic to interpret all nightmares regardless of their
origin. In many cases, just understanding the nightmare takes
the sting out of it; it loses some of its intensity.
In circumstances of severe trauma:
accidents, witnessing death, earthquakes, natural disasters,
It is still appropriate to interpret these dreams and, if
recurring, to intervene. One method that has proven to be
effective is what one researcher calls "Imagery Rehearsal
Therapy." Dr. Barry Krakow, medical director of the Sleep and
Human Health Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has
developed a technique to change the images in nightmares. "Our
dreams," he explains, "start out as replays of traumas after a
traumatic event." But, according to Krakow, when nightmares
continue over a long period of time, they become destructive.
"The nightmares somehow take on a life of their own. They
become a broken record, a habit, a learned behavior," says
Krakow. Over time the nightmares actually re-traumatize
individuals.
Krakow's method involves rewriting the
nightmare, replacing disturbing images with comforting images.
The re-scripted dream is then rehearsed over and over
throughout the day and before sleep. Research indicates that
about 90 percent of the time Imagery Rehearsal will
either end the nightmare or modify it dramatically.
Burr Eichelman has developed a similar method of treating
trauma-induced nightmares that he calls "dream substitution."
He gives this example:
Mr. B dreamt of being shot by a
Viet Cong sniper. He would hear the shot and see the bullet
coming to kill him, awakening just before the bullet
was going to strike his head. He had dreamt this nearly
nightly for 12 years. In the alteration of the dream, it was
allowed to proceed in hypnotic trance until the bullet
became visible about 50 yards away. At this point the bullet
was transformed into a whipped cream pie, much in the manner
of the old-time silent movies. The pie was then slowed and
returned to the Viet Cong sniper. It struck the sniper in the
face, so startling him that he fell from the tree. The event
was so improbable that the Viet Cong and Mr. B broke into
outrageous laughter and walked off together in disbelief. . .
. Mr. B rehearsed the substituted dream at home with
self-hypnosis. The revised dream was dreamt at night several
times, replacing the traumatic dream. After this replacement,
the traumatic dream disappeared.*
*(f.n.: Burr Eichelman, "Hypnotic Change in Combat
Dreams of Two Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder."
American Journal of Psychiatry 142:113.)
Dreamwork over many years has convinced
me of the validity of one of Gestalt's underlying assumptions:
"You never overcome anything by resisting it. You only
can overcome anything by going deeper into it. If you are
pursued by an ogre in a dream, and you become the ogre
[when you work with the dream], the nightmare disappears. You
re-own the energy that is invested in the demon." You also go
"into it" by exploring the dream and trying to understand its
meaning. A correct interpretation will often stop or mitigate
a recurring nightmare.
|
