Dream to Freedom: A Handbook for Integrating Dreamwork and Energy Psychology

By Robert Hoss and Lynne Hoss

Dreams are often laden with emotion. Not only do the dreams themselves contain emotional triggers, but a frightening dream can leave us stressed and shaken in waking life. We might also be anxious about the possible recurrence of a bad dream. The Dream to Freedom technique is an effective way to address both the fear-producing aspects of dreams and the waking anxiety associated with the possible recurrence of the dream. Using a structured approach drawn from traditional Gestalt therapy, it identifies emotionally triggering elements of a dream, and then applies EFT (also known as "tapping") to each one in turn. Robert and Lynne Hoss are pioneers of the Dream to Freedom technique, which shows you the hidden meaning of each dream element. This practice, when combined with EFT, often provides surprising insights about the link between the dream and your waking life problems. Dream to Freedom guides you on an imaginal journey to creating positive outcomes in your dreams. It's also been used to: evoke lucid dreams; eliminate recurring nightmares; remember forgotten dreams; access subconscious creativity; heal old childhood traumas; reduce emotional triggering when you can't recall a specific event; heal anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and other psychological problems; and tap within dreams. Dream to Freedom represents one of the most fascinating frontiers in which EFT can be applied, and is recommended for longtime dreamwork students as well as those with a more casual interest in the intersection between dreamwork, personal growth, and EFT.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energy Psychology Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781604152012

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

WHY DREAMS AND ENERGY

PSYCHOLOGY

The Synergy of Dreams and Energy Work

The psychological healing process often starts with surface-level problems, and then proceeds to peeling away emotional layers until the core issue surfaces. When integrating energy psychology with dreamwork, however, it is possible to begin at a deeper level. Sigmund Freud stated that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. Carl Jung agreed, adding that dreams reveal the unconscious aspect of a conscious event. Dreams are also found to focus on the more salient unprocessed emotional issues of the day. Dreamwork can therefore quickly bring to consciousness an issue with which a person is unconsciously dealing. On the other hand, dreamwork alone—in the absence of other therapies—is not necessarily designed to reduce the emotional stress that may surface, nor help the individual move through the emotional barriers it reveals. Energy psychology (EP), in turn, complements dreamwork by providing a method for reducing the stress and emotional barriers to healing, once an issue is identified. Combining the two disciplines integrates the primary benefits of each into one technique, which is useful for self-help or in a therapeutic setting. The Dream to Freedom technique combines the two disciplines in a three-part protocol. We begin (part 1) by exploring the dream using a Gestalt-based approach for discovering the unconscious emotional issues with which the dreamer is dealing. Once we understand the issue, we apply energy work (part 2), specifically tapping to reduce the anxiety surrounding the issue that stands in the way of progress. Finally (part 3), once the emotional barriers are reduced, the dream is once again used as an aid in defining what action the person can now take to progress beyond the situation.

A person, whom we will call Karen, experienced this beneficial combination of dream and energy work when she attended one of our first Dream to Freedom workshops. She was in a loving and happy relationship, living with her friend Jim. They had been together for well over a year, but the relationship began to unravel when Jim had to undergo a substantial medical procedure. Karen felt a sincere desire to be there for Jim, to nurture and support him through the ordeal. At the same time, however, she found herself consumed with unbearable emotional anxiety to the point that she decided she must end the relationship. It was at that point that Karen attended the workshop and volunteered as a demonstration subject (details of the session can be found in chapter 5, case 2).

Karen was a good example of a person struggling with a debilitating anxiety, the cause of which she could not define or identify, yet it was about to alter her life in very detrimental ways. Such deeply contained conflicts often require a lot of exploration to reveal the underlying decisions and emotions from which they originate. With a subject such as Karen, who had strong ego boundaries, exploration through dialog might have been a particularly lengthy process. Tapping on the symptom might have been helpful, but without identifying and treating the underlying issues, the problem would likely have persisted for many sessions until its origins were revealed. Fortunately, Karen had a dream to share: I am in the home I shared with my ex-husband, looking out over trees that contained black things. My mother is there and we are trying to decide whether they are birds or bats. Although at first glance, this dream seemed in no way related to Karen’s situation, it contained the very origin of her anxiety in explicit emotional detail.

As you will soon learn, the things that populate our dreams are picture representations of our feelings, memories, and concepts. In order to understand what they are picturing, we use a technique derived from Gestalt therapy (Perls, 1976) to let those dream things speak and identify themselves. It is a powerful tool that permits the dreamer to reveal the fear and conflict at the core of her dysfunctional anxious response, within about five minutes. We asked her to reenter the dream at an emotionally important moment, and then look around for something in the dream scene that attracted her attention, drawing her curiously to it. She was drawn to a lone bird’s nest, something that wasn’t even in her first dream description. We took her into the bird’s nest and, once there, asked the nest to speak. She identified herself as a lone bird’s nest, whose purpose and desire was to be warm, enveloping, to provide a safe landing spot and be there and strong when needed—an apt description of how Karen saw her role in waking life in relationship to helping her boyfriend through the procedure. We then explored the opposite side of the conflict, asking the bird’s nest what it disliked and feared. Karen, as the bird’s nest, stated, I dislike getting crapped on, and fear getting blown out of the tree!

There was the conflict—and the fear that created it—within the image of a lone bird’s nest. But where did this conflict come from? We could see that this was not just a bird’s nest speaking, but the dreamer’s own unconscious expression of that emotional memory. So we asked Karen, Can you recall a specific incident when you felt you were ‘getting crapped on and blown out of the tree’? She thought for a moment, then her facial expression changed. She stated, The moment I decided to divorce my ex. I had gone all out to help him and he showed up two hours late and began yelling at me for not having done enough. This was the moment when the stress reaction was encoded along with a protective decision about avoiding this vulnerability in future relationships. It was perhaps appropriate to the moment but dysfunctional when generalized to future relationships.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the greatest distress, she stated that her stress was a 12 when picturing the scene! It was time to apply EFT. EFT works by the person holding the emotional scene in mind while tapping on acupressure points so as to produce a calming condition in the areas of the brain that encoded the reaction, thus re-encoding the associations from fear to safety. We held the memory of this scene in mind while asserting a positive intention using the phrase: Even though I feel taken for granted, I choose to be there and be strong. After four rounds of tapping, her stress level reduced to 0.

Although she could now recall the traumatic moment without the emotional reaction, the work was not done. The decision she made at that moment about herself and her relationships required some adjustment so that she would not fall into the same pattern again. We returned to the dream for clues as to how it was attempting to resolve the situation. The dream had brought Karen to an important decision point related to identity: deciding whether the black things were birds or bats. This metaphor appeared to reflect her own conflicted identity regarding her role in relationships. To sort out the metaphor, we engaged her in a spontaneous visioning exercise to complete the dream. Her response was I fly away with the bats! I asked how this might be analogous to a solution in her waking life situation. She said, Bats, like birds, are free but, unlike birds, are helpful and come home to the cave at night. I can be like the bat, be there, be helpful, and still be me (free)! Reflecting on her next steps, she stated, I will tell my boyfriend today that I have decided to stay in the relationship. As it turned out, her boyfriend happened to walk into the room just at this moment, when the session ended. She went up to him and embraced and kissed him. There was hardly a dry eye in the room!

When the Dream to Freedom Protocol Applies

DTF works well with situations like Karen’s, in which unresolved emotional conflicts are created by fear and stress reactions that get programmed into the brain, resulting in dysfunctional behavior. The core issues that underlie these conflicts are often not consciously accessible, thus leaving the person stuck in a cycle of inappropriate symptomatic reaction in an attempt to avoid the pain. Understanding the dream cannot by itself relieve the stressful reactions or misconceived beliefs. Even though the dream can provide valuable insight as to the unconscious barriers that leave the individual stuck, if the stress reaction remains each time the person recalls the memory or is in a similar situation, it is very difficult to apply that insight. The tools of energy psychology are designed to help overcome these stressful reactions and barriers that stand in the way of mental and emotional progress. As you will learn in chapter 7, many of these tools work directly with the centers of the brain involved in creating the stress reactions, fears, and beliefs—to calm and extinguish the inappropriate stress or fear response. These are largely the same brain centers that are actively dealing with the problem in dreams. Since the dream is also trying to find a resolution, it contains clues that can be used to define ways to move forward, once the barriers that hold the individual back have been removed.

The DTF protocol begins by using a dream to help identify the deeper underlying issues with which the dreamer is struggling, so it is best applied when the individual has a recent dream to work with. It is good to begin the session by asking if the person recalls a recent dream, although the dream can be introduced later in a traditional therapeutic session, whenever it feels appropriate or perhaps when the underlying problem has failed to surface using other means. It is not always important that the dream be recent. Sometimes a spontaneously recalled earlier dream can contain important information about the present situation. Shelly (whose session you will read about as case 3 in chapter 5) was a self-made successful career woman at the peak of success when she began to get migraine headaches to the degree that they were destroying both her career and her relationships. She began her session with a recent upsetting dream in which someone else was inappropriately teaching one of her training seminars. In the process of working with that dream, however, she suddenly recalled a recurring childhood dream that, as it turned out, contained critical information about the origins of her present-day problem. I am in a house where I grew up. I am young, about seven years old. I am alone. It is at night and there are bad guys outside trying to get me. I am locking the door to the outside. I am seeing the door. I am terrified and I can feel my panic. As the session unfolded, we discovered that this door pictured an emotional barrier, a stress reaction, created by her parents overprotective messages, which shuts her down to keep her safe when she ventures too far into matters that trigger those early memories. The symbolic door in her unconscious had physically manifested as the migraines in her waking life.

Although nightmares such as this can be trauma related, it is important to note that the DTF dreamwork protocol may not apply to the most severe nightmares related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which appear as lifelike replays of the scene of the originating trauma. These replay nightmares are not characterized by metaphor and are therefore not treated by interpretation of the narrative or imagery, so Gestalt role-play does not apply to the replay elements of such a dream. As PTSD sufferers begin to gain mastery over their traumas, symbolic elements will gradually appear in their nightmares. But even then, it is best not to apply the DTF protocol in cases of severe PTSD without professional training or experience with such cases.

If the person does not have a dream to work with but simply a general anxiety or symptom that is not well enough defined to begin tapping on, there is a waking dream approach to applying the Gestalt tools in part 1 of the DTF protocol (the role-play) in order to better identify the underlying emotional conflicts the person might be dealing with. This is a common approach used in the practice of Gestalt therapy. Have the person bring to mind the general problem or feelings that are bothersome. Then instruct the person to look around the room or immediate environment at all the surrounding objects and pick out one that seems to attract or draw his or her attention more than the other objects. Use this object in place of the dream image in the role-play sequence. This works because the unconscious makes similar associations between images and emotions in waking life as it does during