NASW Social Work Talks - EP46: What Can We Learn from Dreams?

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

NASW member Arthur Strock, Ph.D., is a founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and author of "Live By Your Dreams: Heartwarming Stories About Dreams and What They Tell Us." Dr. Strock holds advanced degrees in psychology and clinical social work. He talks with us about dreams and how they can be used to improve our lives.

Welcome to NASW Social Work Talks. I'm your host, Greg Wright. You might not know it, but you spend a lot of time dreaming. According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average person has 46 dreams a night. What do dreams mean? And can they be a part of social work practice? Today we are talking with NASW member, Dr. Arthur Strzok. Dr. Strzok is the author of the book, Live By Your Dreams. Welcome to Social Work Talks, Dr. Strzok. Well, thank you for inviting me. Believe me, it's an honor, and especially because there's nothing I'd rather talk about than dreams, and especially with social workers, because dreams, you know, they represent the entire person, and our field is known especially for taking care of our clients in a way that deals with the entire person. First off the bat, what exactly is a dream? the first thing that pops into my mind, it's a mental movie. My goodness, we can go to sleep and we have these mental movies. And a lot of people go to sleep and they dream because they just want entertainment. Well, the dream is so much more than entertainment. A dream is really a production that comes from most of the time from our inner self that carries a message and you know it's not just a message it's a message with guidance and i can say even more

than simply guidance it is good guidance we might even say it's guidance from the heart So, in effect, a dream is your subconscious mind trying to, like, tell you something, or is it a premonition? Ah, well, now, when we get into talking about the unconscious, then we get into theory. I would say offhand, yes, most dreams come from the unconscious. while at the same time knowing that there are different levels of the unconscious, you see. Let me put it this way. Some dreams, they seem to come right from what we've been dealing with in the course of the day consciously. If we've been thinking about a person, we may see that person in the dream. We may get information about the person. We may get information about our

relationship with the person. It comes from what's preoccupying our mind. If we're emotionally upset about something, the emotions will be reflected in the dream. Certainly anxiety is a most frequent emotion we get in dreams. But more than that, dreams, I think, in some way come often from the physical body. And that's something most of us in the mental health field don't think about so much, but we're holistic as individuals. We're whole people. And so when we talk about our mind, when we talk about the emotions, our physical being affects our emotions, our emotions affect our physical beings. And sometimes we'll get information that's directly applicable to what we need to be considering regarding our health. Most people, though, wake up and you don't

actually remember what you dreamt. So is there a way to kind of make yourself remember what you had dreamt the night before? I believe the key word here is intention. It's wonderful how our inner being responds to an honest intention. So in order to get a dream and recall a dream, we can start a dream journal and put a comment to our unconscious, if you will. Okay, self. Okay, dreams. Okay, unconscious. Okay, God. Whatever works for you. My intention is to remember the dream, wake up in the morning, and write it down. We write it down because the dreams disappear so quickly. If, in addition, we write to ourselves, I'm going to do something about the dream, that will improve the chances of recall. What do dreams have to do with social work

practice? In other words, how can a social worker use this to help a client? They can just be number one, open to dreams. And you know, my first recommendation for social workers would be just get comfortable talking about dreams. Because in our society, we don't generally talk about dreams. Get comfortable with it. Now, I want to put in a plug for my barbershop, this family-owned barbershop run by a brother and sister team. The other day, I said, Jerry, I'm going to have a podcast on dreams. And they immediately told about how a friend of the family told him about a dream where his mother was relaying the information that her husband had a health problem. Well, Jerry said to me, my dad has a minor health problem, but it didn't mean anything.

But this friend of the family said it was important. He talked to his dad. He got him to the doctor. And wouldn't you know, in a couple of days, he was having almost immediate surgery. The results of the surgery cleared up the problem. And that would not have happened without a dream. Yes. So when you are like talking to a client or a person about a dream, does it make it easier for them to like open up about other issues going on in their lives? I believe it does. If we take an interest in a person's dreams, it shows a very important interest, a deep interest.

That can set the stage because in my experience, they can hardly wait to share dreams. In fact, I was collecting dreams from my book and there was a woman and I said, I'm writing a book on dreams. Do you have a dream that you could share with me? Well, she looked at me and she said, thank you so much. I was hoping somebody would ask me today. I was wondering how you first got interested in the field of dreams. For years as an adult and as a child, I could only remember two of my dreams my entire life. So I had occasion to go to a weekend workshop.

Multidisciplinary, I was paired up with a person who, as it turned out, was an avid dreamer. and she was very outspoken and she believed in dreams to the point where before the first day this weekend she would say Arthur you have to follow your dreams you have to well I told her my story and she says no don't worry about it all you've got to do is put a pencil and paper next to your bed and tell yourself you're going to dream and write them down in the morning well I did it and the next morning I did get a dream and the dream was symbolic for my practice my my social work career if you will symbolically well there were two men in the dream and each represented something an approach to in

In this case, social work. One was a traditional type of person. The other was what we used to call new age. The question for me was, OK, Arthur, are you going to kind of go traditional routes, or are you going to go the route less traveled by and work with your dreams? Well, I picked dreams because I was fascinated that I could recall after a lifetime of not recalling.

Not only that, that there was information in the dream that was very valuable and that I could take action on. That was the beginning, but it was so fascinating to me that I just got a hold of every source I could to learn about dreams. I learned how to program my dreams along the way. It's not complicated. There is a procedure that we don't have time to go into in detail here. But basically, it's asking your dreams to give you answers to problems. And so I got into that. And when I found that out, then I was well on the road to moving from just a personal

interest in dreams to the professional interest in dreams. How do you determine the meaning of dreams? Is it by intuition or some other way? First of all, I've got to say that the dreamer is the best person to determine the meaning. Oftentimes when people say, and it's usually the first question that comes to me, what's this dream mean? The implication is that you've got to go to an expert. Well, the role of the expert, the role of the clinical social worker, the role of any social workers working with people who share dreams is to have a fund of information, a foundation of knowledge about dreams so that they can ask pertinent questions and not leading questions real questions about the dreams that allow the person

to get that intuitive or emotional aha I've got it kind of response now if they say something like oh yeah I think it means such-and-such well you know they don't quite have the meaning the true test of whether or not the interpretation was correct was if the person applies some of this wonderful dream guidance and it turns out to work in their favor then they know that they got the meaning correctly and in doing so they've added information about their own dream style to their personal repertoire, which is going to make successive dreams easier to find the meaning for. When we get asked, what does this dream mean as a first question, that really isn't the first question. The first question is,

What have you been preoccupied with? What has been upsetting? What have you been thinking about? What event has occurred recently that you're concerned about? What is the problem right now that you're working on? all of those contribute to dream material and getting the answers to that as people work with their dreams. And this is so important. It's self-empowering. And isn't that what we want to do for our family members, our children, ourselves, and of course, our clients? um i was wondering if you have a response at all to folks who like think this is all like magical um and a mumbo jumbo thing i mean is there is there like research at all out there backing this up thank you for asking because for years i have asked my colleagues hey how come you don't do more with dreams and they gave me all sorts of reasons but one of my colleagues i

respected the most for speaking clearly and concisely. She said, Arthur, I don't have at my fingertips enough research on dreams to be able to trust it. So research, well, that's simple. The International Association for Study Dreams, professional journal, dreaming. In every issue, There are marvelous research articles about dreams, theory, application, you name it. There's another publication of great interest. It includes articles by researchers, the Dream Network Journal. Great. If I could mention my own book, Live By Your Dreams.

because we learn by stories sometimes the research we can get bogged down in and my book live by your dreams includes stories along with my commentaries of dreams that I've gathered from people in my daily life it's an easy comfortable way to use a social work approach so and you can get to that very easily. Just go to arthurstrock.com and the link will take them right to Amazon where they could buy the book. All of that information will be in our resources under our podcast episode. So that will all be there. I don't really remember my dreams a lot, but now I plan to keep a notepad by the bed. So thank you so much, Dr. Strock. Believe me, Greg, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye now.

Bye-bye now. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.