Natural Dreamwork and the Poetic Imagination

Images heal the imagination. This discovery distinguishes the poetry of William Wordsworth. I’ve witnessed this same healing potency in dream images. In what follows I’m going to give readings of poems and of dreams to show how this healing works.

Since the publication of The History of Last Night’s Dream, I’ve spent the past ten years engaged with clients and their dreams in a process of spiritual direction. Some of my students have now become practitioners. We call what we do “natural dreamwork” because our work is grounded in the phenomenology of the dream, especially how images in dreams evoke strong feeling.

My clients provide me dream reports that are usually narratives mixed with interpretation. But in the session I gently try to bring focus back to the images. I don’t think the stories we wrap around dreams fit very well. Nor is it all that helpful to interpret dreams. I view a purely intellectual understanding of a given dream as a missed opportunity for a more powerful experience. My first goal in natural dreamwork is to return the dreamer to the feelings images bring. That is where the healing lies. I don’t interpret dreams so much as I bring them to life.

I find confirmation for this image-centered approach in Wordsworth’s poetry. In the last stanza of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” he describes concisely how the contemplation of images — in this case daffodils — can lead to psychological relief:

For oft when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive moodThey flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude:And then my heart with pleasure fillsAnd dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth expands on this basic idea in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, which he worked and reworked for forty years. He describes how, after suffering from paralyzing despair, he found healing by returning in memory to “spectacles and sounds to which / I often would repair, and thence would drink / As at a fountain” (Two-Book Prelude, 1799).

In The Prelude Wordsworth proposes a psychology of the imagination relevant to dreamwork. We could condense it, using one of his book headings: Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.¹

When we are in despair, he is suggesting, we are suffering from impaired imagination. We can no longer imagine alternatives to our current situation; we cannot envision anything new happening for us or within us. But Wordsworth found a cure: he restored his impaired imagination by dwelling on images.

Wordsworth relied primarily on memories, especially memories from childhood. But the same healing comes in contemplating prominent images from our dreams.

In what follows I’ll be moving between images from poems and from dreams. I believe poetry and dream are sisters, but I recognize they are not twins. Both are born of an experience of primary imagination (in Coleridge’s terms). But most poems undergo a conscious process of revision.

A dream as reported has also been revised, but unconsciously. And we don’t have first drafts of dreams to work with, only dream reports that are themselves somewhat garbled accounts. Working from the report, we can only surmise the dream experience in itself, the raw dream — because the phenomenology of dreaming is subtle and difficult to grasp. Time, space, and feeling there do not obey familiar laws. The Spanish phenomenologist Maria Zambrano even suggests that dreams are entirely privado del tiempo — lacking in any sense of consecutive time.

Yet most people tell their dreams as stories with incidents that follow on one another as cause and effect. This doesn’t really work very well, which is why most dream narratives are seen as weird or bizarre. As we are dreaming, the dream-ego is often busy avoiding images, reinterpreting them, or telling stories about them. Certainly in dreams space-time is distorted and flexible, and feelings and reactions become much more amplified.

The healing potency of images may not survive the unconscious revisions. So in the dream sessions we seek to reimagine the dream with a more conscious focus on felt images. Let me...