The nature of dreams is as mysterious and unpredictable as life itself. Throughout history, man has tried to interpret dreams, putting into their meaning a variety of magical interpretations and desires to foresee the future, as uncertainty for us has always been and will be a difficult challenge to go through, and the need for security and the desire to confirm the “correctness” of the chosen path always creates a temptation to transfer responsibility to higher powers. What are dreams really? This question interested me almost all the time. I remember about twenty years ago I got my hands on the book “The interpretation of dreams” by Sigmund Freud, which helped me make a lot of discoveries for myself, but I got the real answers years later thanks to Gestalt therapy, some of them I want to share with you. In this article I decided to describe the understanding of the nature of dreams in terms of their functions: aesthetic and integrative, also slightly touching upon the function of relationships.

So, dreams are a mechanism of self-regulation of consciousness, when movement occurs in a paradoxical way, while we are not moving. Aristotle characterized dreams as “the mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep”. But since this activity is carried out without our will, dreams are phenomenological. In German there are two designations of the body: körper and lieb – a physical body and a lived body. It is lieb that has the property of perceiving phenomena, therefore dreams are a product of the work of a lived body.

Have you ever wondered how it is that we do not suffocate with our nose in the pillow, or never fall off the bed, being on the edge while sleeping?

The thing is that this kind of safety is in fact created by our lived body (lieb). It is anchored in the space of the world, in an environment that in such way supports us, not letting us suffocate or fall in sleep. This is a property of the intentionality of the lived body (lieb). Living dream events therefore speaks of the aesthetic function as the work of perception at the level of sensations and turns us to the function of ID due to the connection with the environment that supports us. A dream, in this sense, is like a work of art. When we stand in front of a painting or read, or watch a film and identify with what we see in such a way that we succumb to perception without will, while going through the feelings and sensations that arise. Just like as works of art, dreams are a kind of sublimation, therefore F. Perls considered them as a projection:

“I especially love working with dreams. I believe that in a dream, we have a clear existential message of what’s missing in our lives, what we avoid doing and living.”
In Gestalt therapy we don’t interpret dreams. We do something much more interesting with them. Instead of analyzing and further cutting up the dream, we want to bring it back to life. And the way to bring it back to life is to re-live the dream as if it were happening now. Instead of telling the dream as if it were a story in the past, act it out in the present, so that it becomes a part of yourself, so that you are really involved.”
“If you understand what you can do with dreams, you can do tremendous lot for yourself. Just take any old dream or dream fragment, it doesn’t matter. As long as a dream is remembered, it is still alive and available, and it still contains an unfinished, unassimilated situation. […] And if you understand the significance of every moment when you identify with a certain fragment of dream, of every moment when you translate “it” into “I”, then you increase your life force and your potential. (F. Perls, 1969).

This provides basis to talk about the integrative function of the dream. A dream is a play, and by acting it together with the therapist, the client gains the opportunity to live through repressed feelings and assimilate them into his experience, to gain certain qualities and abilities. This is a kind of synchronization functions ID (our sensations) and personality (our qualities and senses). Such work helps to make the transition from the preverbal level of existence to the verbal, conscious one, thereby strengthening and assimilating intentionality as the ability to establish contacts and better relationships with others, and since neuroscience has shown that the same areas correspond to the physiological structure of the brain as for linguistic understanding of speech, and for motor function, it becomes obvious that working with dreams in the Gestalt approach reveals the potential for movement (active motor function implies the presence of strength and energy in the body). We get strength and energy in is case we know, where we want to come, i.e. we are aware of our need, and since the need manifests itself in the process of contact with the environment and people around us, we are talking about the function of relationships inherent in dreams.

Regarding the function of relationships in working with dreams, it can also manifest itself in a message to the therapist through the client’s account of his dream, and in an invitation to a joint consideration of the resulting projection in the space of the relationship between the client and the therapist. Such work is important from the point of view of legalizing the figure and recognizing the need through relationships by connecting the contexts of “there and then” (in a dream) and “here and now” (next to the therapist), as the client in a relationship with the therapist can act out his usual way of building relationships in life, but which causes suffering or is the cause of difficulties in relationships with loved ones.

Things are less complicated with physiological needs, and dreams in which we eat or drink water when we are actually hungry or thirsty can serve as an example. In this sense, dream is a mirage, the illusion of closing the Gestalt. But since there are other levels of needs (social and spiritual), their detection in dreams will not always be easy for self-awareness, but always very effective in working with the therapist due to identification with the images from the dream and acting them out.

All that we dream about is our parts projected outwards and embodied in symbols and metaphors, even if they are objects, even if they are our relatives and acquaintances, they are still our parts that are shown through other people as the embodiment of our states and sensations. Acting them out and unfolding them helps to gain strength and energy to live by living though the dreams, establishing connections and reviving contacts.

Working with dreams creates a game space, as it is carried out by means of the experiment of incarnating a person in certain images from dreams, playing roles and developing dialogues. This allows you to recreate the scenes and discover relationships that connect contexts and to expand consciousness.

The repression on which projective dreams are based is closely related to introjects – beliefs we have learned that have become obsolete and have become obstacles and barriers in relations with people around us. For example, if the person is not in contact with his aggression, tries to score and destroy it with introjects, such as “you can’t be angry,” “you need to love people,” “you need to forgive,” etc., then this aggression will be acted from the field, in the environment in which he exists, manifest itself with attacks from people around him, and also project into nightmares. Avoiding contact with one’s own aggressive energy makes it impossible to recognize the contact boundary and produces problems with the boundaries, preventing from feeling and protecting them. Aggressive energy is especially important in working with introjects to review, digest, and assimilate experience. I will give an example from practice.

Olga was often subjected to accusations and discontent from certain people associated with her activities, but could not stop the frequent aggressive attacks. The next time she was telling me about such cases, my anger began to rise, and I wanted to defend her. Realizing that I was angry instead of her, I told her about my feelings and desires, followed by recognition of the beliefs instilled in her in the environment in which she was raised, such as “all people should be loved and forgiven”, “you can not be angry at anyone”, etc. After our joint work with these beliefs, she was able to separate and differentiate the concept of evil and harm as such from the valid emerging sense of anger as aggressive energy to protect her own boundaries, she began to actively defend her interests, learned to interact differently with people who attacked her, and to “fight back”. At the next meeting, Olga was telling how it was all happenning and how her work process and relationships improved, as well as about her dream. She dreamed that she rode a very beautiful big wolf, which she did not fear, but admired. When I offered her to be this wolf from the dream and talk about herself, she was able to attribute to herself confidence and security, and also physically felt a lot of inner strength and joy. Olga also recollected, that previously she often had nightmares, where she struggled with a wolf, trying to tear its jaws and destroy it. This testified to the struggle she had with her own aggressive energy for years, and with which she had finally managed to “make friends”.

As I already wrote, Perls considered dreams as a projection, Fromm – as a retroflexion, I can characterize them as projections of a retroflex nature due to the presence of introjects with the prospect of the development of life.

The dream is the form in which our shadow side manifests itself, a chaotic form that creates a productive space of expansion of co-knowledge – the common knowledge of a person and the supporting external world, in which we all, like artists, create pictures of possible movement towards life.

Salvador Dali “Dream”, 1937