The Healing Power of Dreams - Carla Blowey

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
The Healing Power of Dreams
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Carla Blowey
January 5, 2006

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m glad you came to join the show today. Keep those emails coming in. I’m really enjoying hearing from you. In fact, I’ve started a new online advice column for those who have problems that they’d like me to comment on. I also have a tip of the week for you. In order to reach that information, go to my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org. Today, our topic is The Healing Power of Dreams. We all dream every night. For those of us who have suffered profound losses, dreams can be friends or foe. In our dreams, our imagination runs free. How many of us have awakened from our dream state early on in our grieving process thinking, “It can’t be true? Our loved one did not die. It was a bad dream,” only to find that we are living our greatest nightmare. To dream is natural. It’s a universal experience. All people of all cultures enter into this dream state when they sleep. How we regard the dream, however, varies from culture to culture and from person to person. In ancient Egypt and Greece societies, there exists temples where one would go to dream and receive healing or instruction from the gods. In Christian tradition, the dream was thought of as the word of God or the work of the devil. Mohammed, the founding prophet of Islamic culture, is said to have received what is written in the Koran through his dream. As time goes on, finding meaning in dreams has largely fallen into disfavor; however, in the early part of this century, dreams were championed by two great thinkers, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious and he felt that dreams revealed that which the dreamer would rather keep hidden. But Carl Jung had another theory. In his work with clients, Jung witnessed the natural healing mechanism of dream work. He worked with patient’s dreams and Jung rediscovered the age-old wisdom of the dream and its capacity to heal and make whole. Today our topic is The Healing Power of Dreams and my guest is Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight and guidance and wisdom from her dreams for almost twenty years. At age thirty-three, she entered the most challenging and painful time of her life with the accidental death of her five-year-old son Kevin. Carla chronicles her journey in her book Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing. On this show, Carla Blowey, author, speaker, and presenter, will discuss the use of dreams for spiritual growth and healing. She will introduce us to basic dream work including the techniques and resources. Carla has an on-line chat room as well as a quarterly newsletter. Carla, welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart.
C: Hi, Gloria, thank you. I’m delighted to be here with you.
G: It’s wonderful to have you on. Could you tell us about Kevin and how you got into dream work and writing your book and what year he died for our listeners?
C: Okay. Well, first of all, I got into dream work at age three. I can go back as far as age three remembering my dreams and always having been afraid of them as a child. And then, as I became an adult and in my young adulthood began to study more about them and became less afraid of the things that were being presented to me although I didn’t have a full mature understanding at that time. So when I had the nightmare about Kevin dying and being taken from me
G: So you had a nightmare about him dying early on.
C: Yes, the night before he died. And so that kind of shifted everything that I had learned and everything that I thought to be true because I’d never had anything that was that prophetic. So it certainly changed my outlook and began to pursue dream work rather deeply after that. Kevin died January 7, 1991, and it will be about fifteen years this coming January. So he was five-and-a-half years old and died in a bike truck accident. And that was about twelve hours after I’d awakened from the nightmare.
G: My goodness. I know a lot of our listeners do talk about some prophetic things that have happened before. In fact, my son had talked to my daughter about the fact that if anything happened to him it was fine and he would be well. So it’s interesting and I think that there are many other people who have had these kinds of things appear to them before. So in your dream work, what kind of theories to do you use?
C: Well, I don’t really subscribe to any theory although my foundation is Jungian. I’m not a therapist or counselor or even a dream interpreter, but what I am about is helping the bereaved, especially bereaved parents, see their dreams differently because I believe that everything we need to know to survive this journey is within us. It’s not out there, and dream work is an alternative tool for understanding your grief process and reconciling the death of a child or a loved one. It can bring healing to the wounded places in our body and our heart and our mind and in our soul if we learn to trust our intuition. By that, we can become more conscious of the inner guidance in our dreams and act on that guidance.
G: What kind of techniques do you use to access those dreams?
C: Well, with techniques in the sense of the first thing I always ask people to do is examine their sleep environment. Examine their sleep cycles because the first thing people say to me is, “I don’t dream” or “I don’t remember my dreams.” So we sort of have to de-clutter our environment as well as our mind about that kind of perception and so looking at your sleep cycles and making sure that you’re getting adequate sleep at night so that you go through REM, rapid eye movement is where we remember our dreams most. Drugs, alcohol, medication, prescription drugs, all of that can affect our sleep cycle and so some of those just might be blocks that once they’re removed or worked with a little bit
G: Yes, especially when somebody’s just recently had a loss. Oftentimes, we’re given maybe anti-depressants or valium or we’re using alcohol or whatever and all those things, I hadn’t thought about it before, certainly stop our natural processing, our natural dream processing that we do. We know that everyone dreams because there have been a lot of sleep studies done so we know it’s all happening for you all so trying to access them if you’re interested in doing that is interesting.
C: Right, so de-cluttering that part of it is the first step. And then the second step is to affirm that you want to remember them and you can do that every night by either writing an affirmation, praying an affirmation, meditating something that puts yourself in a receptive state and then with that, the next step then is to honor whatever it is that you get and to bring it into the outer world by journaling it, drawing it, singing it, dancing it, somehow bringing it to the outer world, and then being willing to see it differently and to process it by using your intuition and discernment and to recognize the synchronicities in your waking life seeing with symbolic sight and suspending that judgment.
G: Could you talk about how you would affirm that? What if you’re afraid? You know you were talking about as children, sometimes we are afraid of our dreams. How would somebody calm themselves?
C: For me, it was about taking it from the inside. The fearfulness is trapped in your mind and we spin and we spin and we spin. Okay. And so if we can take it, and not intellectualize it, if we can take it out of the mind and speak it and bring it from the inner world to the outer world where we can look at and become less afraid of it, so my suggestion then is in journaling, if you’re able to write and see the written word, I want to say that it de-sensitizes you, but the images are not as frightening. And I had to do that repeatedly over an eighteen-month period with the nightmare that I had about Kevin and certainly because it was so traumatic because of the end result was that he did die that with a grief counselor and being able to trust someone that I could speak that with.
G: That’s a good point. I was going to say a dream work group, where if you can there are those around, or get a couple of friends together to talk about dreams can maybe help.
C: A partner is important. Someone that you can trust who is not going to judge your inner world because you’re already doing that.
G: I just wanted to put an email in here because you were talking about the nightmare you had about Kevin. I received an email from a woman named Heather from Gloucester, Mass., and she says: My college roommate’s brother was killed in a train accident three months ago and she keeps waking up about three times a week. She will wake up screaming and I wondered do you have any suggestions? She listens to your show.
C: Well, certainly that’s not enough information for me to suggest anything concrete, okay? Because the thing to remember about dreams is that they are a reflection of what’s going on in our life on that very first level of dreaming and so I would ask Heather to look at what’s going on in her life that would be represented as a metaphor in that dream.
G: Now, Heather is the roommate and she was asking for her friend. One of the things I would say to Heather is it’s only been three months so she may be processing this. That it really happens.
C: And that’s the point. The dream is a reflection of what’s happening in her life and she is processing that grief or not.
G: And I would say to Heather, the roommate, that she may want to listen to her talk about the dream and just not say anything and let her keep processing it. It’s not an abnormal thing to have nightmares, especially when there’s been a violent accident.
C: Not at all. Yes. And I read somewhere many years ago that it takes thirty times of telling your story before you believe it, before it becomes real to you and the same thing with dreaming.
G: Well, we’re coming up on break now and when we get back, we’re going to talk some more about some steps that you can take if you’re interested in the healing power of dreams, and that is our topic today, The Healing Power of Dreams, and my guest today is Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight, guidance, and wisdom from her dreams for almost twenty years following the accidental death of her five-year-old son Kevin and Carla chronicles her journey in Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing, and she’s introducing us to basic dream work today, and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and you can email me at www.healingthegrievingheart.org. I’m also doing an advice column, so you can ask some questions of me from the column and also you get a tip of the week by going to my website. Please stay tuned to hear more about The Healing Power of Dreams. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today is The Healing Power of Dreams. My guest today is Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight, guidance, and wisdom from her dreams for almost twenty years following the accidental death of her five-year-old son Kevin. Carla chronicles her journey in her book, Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing. Carla is introducing us to basic dream work, including techniques and resources. Carla has an on-line chat room as well as a quarterly newspaper. Welcome back, Carla, and when we went to break, we were talking about steps that you can go through to work with your dreams. I think one was look at your sleep environment. The second was affirmation that you let yourself know that you want to remember your dreams, and then honoring the dream, and then processing it. Are there more steps or are those basically the four steps?
C: Well, you know, I’d like to kind of back up again, and talk about healing first because I think that to do any kind of processing, we have to look at what our motivation is in that. Like I said before, I think everything that we need to know to understand this grief journey is within us. It’s not out there and dreaming can be one of those tools, and I think our survival is dependent on learning to trust ourselves again, so the first step in doing any kind of grief work or dream work is to honestly ask ourselves two questions and the first one is, do I want healing to occur? And the second one is, am I ready to receive that healing? If the answer is yes, then I’d invite you to begin dream work because by setting an intention that you want healing to occur, you become open to it, and by being ready and willing to change your perception of how that healing is going to occur, then you become more receptive to it. So a note about the words “perception” and “healing.” Perception is learned. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learn to perceive it. So if you change your perception, you change the experience of your body in that world. And then healing, Webster’s dictionary defines healing as to cause an undesirable condition to be overcome, and I don’t know about you, but this whole loss and grief thing that we’re doing is about the most undesirable condition I can imagine.
G: And any loss that our listeners might have.
C: Any loss. And there’s no pain like the broken heart of a bereaved parent or for anyone that has a loss.
G: And letting yourself be open to healing is quite a thought, isn’t it?
C: It’s huge because if you’re not open to it, nothing is going to happen for you so when we can acknowledge our woundedness with love and acceptance for ourselves, there’s a transformation that occurs at the full level and that fear begins to dissipate and it makes space for love and healing to occur so every time we make a choice to see our fears or our dreams differently, we’re in a state of healing. In a state of healing, healing you.
G: Now do you think that there are some dreams that are a little different? I remember when my son died, I don’t think I would have had the energy at that time. It was probably a couple of months later. I don’t think I would have had the energy to really write down my dreams or I just wouldn’t have had it, but I had a dream where he was a catcher on a baseball team and I had a dream that he was learning how to throw the ball to himself standing there and making the ball come towards him and I looked at him and I said, “Are you all right?” and then I realized I didn’t really say it. It’s kind of a mind transfer thing, and then he looked at me very strangely and I realized it was a really odd question to ask him and he basically said, “I am,” and that was the end of the dream, but it was very healing for me because I realized that asking people if they were all right wasn’t even relevant. But that dream stuck with me for twenty-two years, but I didn’t really have to do anything with it.
C: And the difference with that dream and a grief dream to me is there’s a certain quality to a dream where you know at the core level that that’s a visit. You know that you are really making a connection with him. The quality of that dream is different. It’s intense. The imagery is there. It feels real. You can touch them. You know that the communication is direct and specific and there is no need for lots of words. It’s intensely emotional and you’re lucid.
G: Exactly, and I have another email from somebody who I think has the same kind of dream. And I think it is important for our listeners to realize they don’t have to do a lot with these dreams.
C: No, no. It is what it is. There really is nothing left that needs to be done with that because it’s just that simple and basic. The grief dream, however, is going to create more questions and it’s going to challenge you and it’s going to make you uncomfortable.
G: I want to do just one more, what did you call them, the visit dream? I think that is interesting because I received an email from Jane from Des Moines, Iowa, and she says this: “My sister drowned when I was fourteen and she was eighteen. I am now twenty-three and a school teacher. I teach first grade. I often have a dream that my sister is behind the bookshelf in my classroom and she is a first grader and I tell her she must leave before the class comes in.” And she says, “every time I have this dream I wake up feeling very happy.”
C: Oh, oh, I think that is a wonderful dream. I wouldn’t even question that either. There’s a playfulness there that I think her sister is trying to remind her of, and that’s what struck me.
G: Yes, absolutely, and all of you out there who have these special dreams, these are visit dreams. We really don’t need to do more with them.
C: Yeah, I think that’s just wonderful.
G: So let’s talk about the quality of the other dreams that we wanted to work on.
C: The other dreams, those grief dreams, well, first of all, let’s back up a bit and talk about what a dream is because with that Jungian foundation that I have, Carl Jung said that a dream is a spontaneous self portrayal in a symbolic form of the actual situation of the unconscious. Now that’s a mouthful, you know, that is a mouthful. So I like to borrow another quote from Abbott David, who is a dream mentor of mine, who simply says that dreams are a snapshot of the soul, and I like the imagery of that definition. So our nightly dreams reflect those changes in our life especially during times of loss and transition and we’re trying to bring ourselves back into balance so if we can think of our dreams as a movie. We’re the writer, the director, the producer, the set designer, the lead actor. We play all the supporting parts. All those aspects of ourselves are represented in symbols and archetypes and metaphors.
G: That’s a nice way to put it. Now for our audience who are really not sure about what the archetypes are, could you just say a little bit about those because Jung was very big on those.
C: Yes. An archetype is a pattern of human behavior going back to the beginning of time.
G: Right it would be like if I said mother, we would all know what mother was. That’s an archetype.
C: Right. We can all relate to it.
G: If we said dog, we would know what dog was. So those are universal symbols.
C: And there are universal themes that run through our lives as well and especially for dreams of the bereaved. There are these universal themes and symbols of being lost and found or going on the journey or animals that appear that represent our loved ones or ourselves. Colors, temperature, even mysterious encounters and barriers that are listed between the dreamer and the deceased and experiencing a light of paradise or running from something or to someone, being attacked or attacking someone. All of those are universal themes that we can relate to and they show up all the time. But the way I like to explain it to bereaved parents in my workshop is that – and this certainly is my perception based on my experience of what I’ve been doing over the past twenty years – in this first world, the physical world that we see outside of ourselves is where we experience and we judge everything that’s known for us. It’s really common for us to dream that our children are still alive or that we’re trying to find them. And I think of these as housekeeping dreams sort of de-cluttering our lives and wishful thinking or fantasy dreams occur there. It’s like I can still recall that in-between state of waking and dreaming in the early morning after Kevin died and thinking that he was safely asleep in his bed only to be disappointed when I woke up to that reality of living without him. So in that first world or the first level, these are the kinds of dreams we have. In the second world, that in-between world that you see inside of yourself where you’ve stored all these experiences from your physical world, we have dreams that can reproduce feelings and thoughts and memories about our children. We dream about re-living the illness, the accident, the funeral, or the last conversation. We dream about giving birth to them and burying them. We dream about arguments and disagreements and celebrations and birthdays and the if onlys and should I and why didn’t I? And these are common.
G: When you’re talking about all that, I’m thinking oh, my goodness, some people are going to be out there saying, wow, do I really want to open the door to remembering all this?
C: Right. But what’s good about this, what’s healthy about it is that it’s a gift. It’s our mind’s way of processing and accepting the reality of the trauma that our bodies experience because every cell in our body has recorded these experiences and that’s what triggers us. So they’re a normal response to trauma but continued nightmares years and years and years after the loss is not productive. And I don’t want that to be misinterpreted as a judgment on our unique time frame for grieving but what I mean in that is that in our vulnerability, we’ve allowed the fear to control and drive our life and that’s a choice that we make that’s made out of fear.
G: I think we call that in the therapy world unresolved grief. And as it keeps coming up, I think this unresolve of grief is a great thing to talk about when we come back from break because I have an email here actually from someone who asked the question about that. So we’re coming up on break now and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and our topic today is The Healing Power of Dreams, and please stay tuned to hear more from my guest, Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight, guidance, and wisdom for her dreams for almost twenty years following the accidental death of her five-year-old son, Kevin. Carla chronicles her journey ib her book, Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing. Carla is introducing us to basic dream work, including techniques and resources. Carla has an on-line chat room as well as a quarterly newsletter. You can reach me through my web page at www.healingthegrievingheart.org and you can also get a tip of the week and you can ask a question from my on-line advice column. This show is archived on the www.thecompassionatefriends.org as well as www.VoiceAmerica.com. Please stay tuned to hear more about The Healing Power of Dreams from my guest, Carla Blowey.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today is The Healing Power of Dreams. My guest is Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight, guidance, and wisdom for her dreams for almost twenty years. When we went to break, we were talking about unresolved grief with Carla and we were also talking about how you might want to go about studying your dreams and understanding them to help in the healing power that dreams bring us. So, Carla, we were talking about unresolved grief and I said that I’d read you an email from someone who sort of addresses that topic. This is an email from Mary from Chicago. She says: My seventeen-year-old brother was killed in a car crash three years ago. I keep having the same dream over and over. I see him and I say are you okay and he says no. I’m not okay. I have cancer and I’m going to die. But it’s okay. I am sad that I am glad I get a chance to say goodbye; however, I am tired of having this dream. It’s been three years. Can you help me resolve it?
C: Well, again, the first thing that given my approach in first recognizing those personal associations to things, I would ask Mary to play with some of those significant words that struck me as well and build on that like cancer. I don’t know if her brother had cancer, if Mary has had an experience of cancer.
G: But what does cancer mean? It’s kind of interesting. He was killed in a car crash but she’s dreaming he had cancer.
C: But cancer comes up, and so for me, if that was my dream, my personal association to cancer would be terminal, an end to something, and definitely we had this perception that our relationship has ended with our loved one. But it’s also ended with ourself as we knew ourself because when our loved one dies, who we knew, the person that we recognized as ourself also died as well. So those were the kind of connections or play on words that I heard. So what does cancer mean to her? And play with that. Secondly, there is a real clear message that says here, I say you’re okay, but he says no, I’m not okay. I’m not okay. I’m going to die. Well, if we look at this being a metaphor for the dream self speaking to the self, she’s telling herself, you really are okay. You really are okay and you will survive this, and her wounded self is saying but I’m not, I’m not. I’m sad. But then again I want to say good-bye to this. I don’t want to live this way. And I’m tired of it. I’m weary of living this way.
G: I think this is a wonderful email.
C: It is. It’s powerful. It’s a wonderful example.
G: She’s tired of having it and let’s move on. Well, it’s great. And another thing that I would suggest to Mary is she might want to get involved with, tell us about your chat room and how she would access that.
C: Oh, right, our chat is on www.after-death.com. It’s the ADC project with Bill and Judy Guggenheim and you can access the chat there. You go to my website of www.dreamingkevin.com and get into the link from there. We meet monthly and it’s an open forum just like we’re doing right now sharing dreams, insights, ideas, thoughts, ADCs (after-death communications), visits, and it’s become a really warm and safe place, I believe. We offer that opportunity for anyone who is interested in dreams or grieving the loss of a loved one to come in and share with us.
G: Great, so Mary, good luck, and I hope you’ve gotten some insight from this. It’s great. Thanks for sending us off that email here. So now we’ve talked about — for people who have just joined us — that you need to look at your sleep environment, affirm that you want to remember, honor your dream, process it, what else would you suggest? How about dream journals?
C: Dream journals. Yes. Absolutely. Dream journals. When we begin to write down the daily or monthly or even if you only dream two times a year, when you start to write those things down, you’ll be able to see a pattern and for the people who say, well, I don’t dream, even creating a journal and every morning writing how you felt when you woke up may trigger some of those images to come back during the day. Because how we feel is directly connected to what we’re seeing behind our closed eyes and so tracking that might help those images to surface again because you’ve become safe. You’re dealing with one aspect of that that you’re unaware of.
G: Well, I’ve got another email here which I think fits into this, it’s Bruce from Lake Placid, New York. I hear about people having wonderful healing dreams but I have never had such a dream. My son was killed in Iraq last year and I long to see him in a dream. Do you have any suggestions? Can you will a dream, do you think?
C: Oh, gosh, you know I hear this question repeatedly from so many bereaved parents and because I’ve had the experience of being able to, I truly want everyone else to have that as well, but I know that I cannot control it and neither can they. It’s a question I continue to ask myself because it would seem like such a given that the depth of our love for our children should guarantee a dream visit from them and yet, it doesn’t. And so the truth is, I don’t know. I truly believe that no one else knows that answer either and I disagree with anyone who foolishly suggests that parents who are not dreaming their child are not reconciled enough, or they’re not patient enough, or they’re not connected enough, or they’re not praying hard enough, or they’re not working hard enough, or any other rash of ridiculous reasons. Dreaming is just one of the ways that we can connect with our children so the key is to become aware of how they are trying to connect with us and not set limits on how that will happen so if dreaming is the tool that you want to use, then what is more helpful is to focus on the techniques we talked about to enhance dreaming and dream recall.
G: And maybe play with it a little bit and not be so serious about it.
C: Right because the sole intention really is to understand the inner self and in doing so, then we recognize the obstacles that are there and the hidden agendas and then we can be more receptive to the guidance that’s offered for that healing and brokenness, and we can shine light in the darkest corners of our grief and expose our fear of never being with them again because we can begin to see our beloved children indifferently. We will see them everywhere and in everything and touching every one because their light will illuminate that path to healing.
G: Yes, I would say to Bruce, it’s interesting. I do a lot of yoga and meditation and one of the things they always say during meditation is one of the worst things that you can do is have a fabulous experience because people are going for that constantly rather than just having the stillness or maybe Bruce is waiting for the dream, the expectation that it will happen. And as I say for some people who have had fabulous dreams, it can be a negative because they can keep looking for the same thing.
C: Oh, and I definitely have done that. With as many wonderful experiences as I have had, I’m never satisfied. Who would be? Which one of us would be? We want to see our children in any way we can.
G: But in just stillness, they are there.
C: But in just stillness, exactly. So it’s learning to recognize that presence.
G: Absolutely, and when you have closure within yourself, that pleasure is life and part of life. As one of my very good friend and a colleague says, remember life and grief go together.
C: Yeah, you can’t have one without the other.
G: Well, Bruce, thank you for your email and I would suggest that you might want to also look on Carla’s website and if you’re interested in dreams, start just playing with them.
C: You know what, we can talk about some resources, too, Gloria. I think the best resource is your personal dream dictionary and again that goes back to journaling and tracking and looking for those patterns. Think of it as a reference book that you create from recognizing your associations. But I also recommend reading The Dream Messenger by Patricia Garfield and anything that she’s written. She’s been studying dreams for over forty years. In fact, she claims to have the longest running dream journal. She started when she was fifteen or sixteen years old and she’s into her seventies now, I believe. So great work by her. And then, there’s also a book called The Dictionary of Symbols and what I like about this book is it gives you definitions from all cultures about many of the universal symbols that we’re well acquainted with that we really don’t know about. And anything by Carl Jung. Even though it’s a bit heady, Carl Jung still has some good stuff.
G: Well, when we come back from break, let’s talk more about dream journals and keeping a dream journal. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and our topic today is The Healing Power of Dreams. Please stay tuned to hear more from my guest, Carla Blowey. Carla has gained insight and guidance and wisdom from her dreams for almost twenty years following the accidental death of her five-year-old son Kevin. Carla chronicles her journey in her book Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing. Carla is introducing us to some wonderful basic dream work and techniques. You can email me through my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org. It’s wonderful to get your emails. They really enrich our show. And you can also get online advice from me through my website and also I’ll give you a tip of the week. This show is archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org and www.VoiceAmerica.com websites. Please stay tuned for more from Carla Blowey.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today has been The Healing Power of Dreams. My guest is Carla Blowey and Carla has given us insights about dreams and she chronicles her journey about dreams in her book Dreaming Kevin, the Path to Healing. Carla has been introducing us to basic dream work. And, Carla, this is our final break and I wanted to ask you, are there some things that you want to talk to our audience about before we end the show?
C: Well, I’d like to just recap about the journaling. I know that we kind of get stuck on, oh, I don’t like to write, or I can’t possibly imagine putting my words to paper and seeing them. So, there are alternatives to that. There are certainly things like drawing and painting, music, poetry, creating a mandala or a collage of images.
G: How would you do that? Just get a magazine and go through it and cut things out? That would be a great thing for young people, too.
C: There is a wonderful art therapist named Sharon Straus who lives in Baltimore and Sharon has done the most beautiful collages of her grief journey. And they’re on, I mean, giant, giant boards where she’s pulled images from magazines and paintings and such and put them together. It’s an absolutely powerful tool to pull those images and put them in front of you. And in journaling, bookwise, put it right next to your bed. Put a pen there. Don’t worry about turning on the light. Grab the pen. When you wake up in the middle of the night, write whatever comes to mind. Little chicken-scratch words. Wake up in the morning, you look back on it, it’s going to trigger something. And if nothing more, it’s going to make you laugh when you see the chicken scratch.
G: Before we end the show, too, I would just like to, for those people who have tuned in late, to just mention about the different kinds of dreams. The visit dream because there are so many people I know who have had those dreams and I want them to know they really don’t have to analyze them.
C: Yes, they really don’t have to analyze them.
G: That first year or two, even the bad dreams can be processing, or six months or three months, you know, when you’re not ready to do the dream journal yet. Just hang in with some of those dreams.
C: Right. Just hang in with it and recognize that they’re like little telegrams from your soul, you know, about something that’s very important that needs to be tended to.
G: Right and some of it may be you’re just processing that it really happened which aren’t always the happiest dreams.
C: Right. Those happy ones, we want to hold onto those, and we won’t have any trouble holding onto them. They are the ones we can recall immediately. They stay with us.
G: Absolutely, for years. And the other thing is the dreams that are scary or whatever, hang in and tell other people about them. Talk about it.
C: As a metaphor for what’s going on in your life and being represented by those particular symbols that you learn about yourself, it’s a gift. It truly is a gift because it will lead you to a greater understanding of yourself and the relationship that you had with your loved one, with your child, and it’s not limiting. All it does is de-clutter. I’m really big on that word. De-clutter our life, de-cluttering our mind, de-cluttering so that we can make space for this love to continue to grow so that we can continue this relationship that we have with our children, with our loved ones and continue to grow spiritually.
G: Absolutely. We’re talking about now rather than acceptance of loss the continuing bonds and dream work is a wonderful way to continue those bonds in a positive way.
C: And I’d also like to say that when we honor our own journey, when we honor our own pain and woundedness, I think we’ll receive greater support from the non-bereaved because we respect and honor our needs and we model that without apology. There’s a wonderful quote I love that goes something like this: The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.
G: That is lovely.
C: I wish I could remember where I found it and give credit to whoever had that profound thought.
G: It is a very profound thought. So let’s again give our audience a tip on when you do you think they can start with the dream work and do you have any thoughts about it and how can they take care of themselves?
C: How to take care of themselves? I would say number one.
G: Don’t drink alcohol which would disturb the dreams. Watch out for the drugs you’re taking.
C: Yeah. You definitely have to clean up. Self-medicating isn’t going to help us. It really isn’t. All it does is dull the senses and it screws up our sleep patterns. So clean up your sleep environment and also create a pleasant environment to go to sleep by as well. Affirm that you want to remember your dream. Something as simple as saying, tonight I want to remember what it is that’s being given to me and affirm it and not judge it, and that I will use it to the best of my ability, and then next process that dream by journaling it and taking it from the inner world to the outer world and begin to recognize the synchronicities that occur in the dream that you see in your waking life.
G: And I think it’s good to get together if you can if you’re interested with a dream group because not everyone wants to hear all your dreams especially when they go on and on.
C: Yes. And that is a problem, too, with any kind of support group. When to stop the person who’s going on and on or who takes too long. But there’s a certain sensitivity that you have to bring to this kind of work and I’ve learned you can’t rush anyone to tell their story. You have to help them get to the point with direct questions in a caring and affirming way but it’s important in dream work to speak the dream and all the details and the images and the feelings so if you’re going to get with the dream group, make sure that it’s more than an hour.
G: Right. Now tell me, do people ever tape record themselves and then listen?
C: Oh, that’s a great idea. Yes. Put the tape recorder next to your bed and talk right into it or when you wake up in the morning. Hearing it. That’s the point. You’re speaking the dream. You’re hearing it. You’re reading it. It’s coming from the inner world to the outer world and it becomes more concrete and less fearful. And having a dream partner give it back to you. That’s a technique, a little exercise we do in my dream workshop where we partner up and the partner is in the position of listening and then they have to give back to the dreamer what they heard. Wow. A whole different perspective because they’re speaking it from their experience.
G: Well, it’s time to close our show today. I hate to close because it’s been wonderful talking about dream work with Carla Blowey.
C: Thank you, Gloria.
G: Thank you so much for being on. I think dreams are so wonderful and I hope that people will look into it and think about it and please be playful with it when you’re ready to move into this area because it is fun and interesting and our grief has a lot to teach us. Thank you so much for being on the show, Carla.
C: You’re welcome, Gloria. Thank you.
G: So next week we’re going to have Iris and Joe Lawley on and they’re going to join us from Coventry, England. The Lawleys will discuss the death of their son, Kenneth, and their meeting with Simon Stephens and with Simon they started the Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. It’s a wonderful show and you shouldn’t miss the Lawleys. This is archived on my website www.healingthegrievingheart.org as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley and please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support. Remember others have been there before you and made it, and you can too. You need not walk alone. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.