The Taproot Podcast - Exploring the Dreamworld: This Jungian Life Hosts Dive Into Dream Analysis

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Join us for an insightful conversation with the brilliant minds behind the popular "This Jungian Life" podcast - Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano, and Joseph Lee - as they discuss their new book "Dreamwise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams." In this episode, our guests share powerful insights about: The concept of the "dream maker" as an intentional guide within your unconscious Why your dreams are personalized messages crafted specifically for your growth Practical approaches to dream journaling and interpretation How our dreams connect to our subcortical brain and deeper emotional life The 69 "keys" that can unlock hidden meaning in your dreams The hosts explain why dreams aren't random brain activity but rather communications designed to help you integrate unconscious material. As Lisa Marchiano puts it, dreams are "the attempt of something in you to communicate with you" and "always come in the interest of healing and wholeness." Whether you're new to dream work or a seasoned practitioner, this episode offers fresh perspectives on how dreams can help navigate uncertain times and connect with the transcendent aspects of existence. #DreamAnalysis #JungianPsychology #DreamInterpretation #ThisJungianLife #PodcastInterview #DreamSymbols #DepthPsychology #Dreamwise #MentalHealthPodcast #SoundsTrueBooks #DreamJournal #InnerWork #JungianDreams #PsychologicalGrowth #ShadowWork #DreamTherapy #PodcastRecommendation #NewBookRelease #SelfDiscovery #ConsciousnessExpansion

So I'm here with Eber Stuart, Lisa Marciano and Joseph Lee, the host of the This You and Me and Life podcast, and they have their new book, Dreamwise, unlocking the meaning of your dreams. So I really appreciate you guys being here with us. And if you're tuning in from the audio, you may want to check out the video because in the spirit of openness and vulnerability, we're all appearing naked today. Let's really open ourselves to the Dream Maker. And you probably don't want to miss that.

I don't know. I think in my case, I definitely want to pass. It's really a horror show. Yeah, it's a great opportunity to engage with some of the, you know, beyond the beautiful and the terrible, you know, especially for myself. Now, we have a reoccurring bit on here where we lie on the audio about what's going on in the video to try and boost that video engagement. So thank you guys so much.

I really enjoyed the book. I think I've listened to it four times now. The last one was definitely just because it sounds true. It wouldn't save my place, but it definitely continues to unfold. I mean, there are things that it's like I remember hearing them, but I heard them a different way. And it changed the way that I would work with a client semantically,

or it changed the way that I would work with, metaphor that came up in dreams. But a lot of those metaphors, what's interesting to me about a book like this is, it's about dream, but a lot of those dreams are just the operation of the subcortical brain. And that's very relevant in the way we react to things and the way their body holds you know energy and so it isn't just kind of like oh I

need a dream dictionary you know I don't really believe and sometimes I'll wondering if you're operationalizing some of it in a dream journal and doing associations and looking at symbols and so on Looking at symbols and so on In and like in my own dreams since reading the book, yeah, yeah It's I you know, so one of the things that you need to have dreams is sleep and the past two months Has not been great. I got six hours last night, but before that this is this is TMI But it was like one or two hours There's been a ton of things going on and I've been really wanting to connect but just in the midst of a lot of personal

and professional crises So I look forward to it, but I still we you know, I see clients which is always the top priority above anything You know else and a lot of that stuff was relevant and kind of how I engaged with that. I I don't know and I'd be interested to get y'all's take on this But I feel like I have like a really profound dream like every couple months. But there's kind of even with a me your perspective on the kind of like central thing that I think makes this book so unique is the character of the dream maker.

You're asking people to see a sort of intention, like a dream is being created by an artist or a psychopomp or a guide, you know, kind of all three. And that changes the way you engage with it as something that was made with intention for you to receive. And I was just wondering if you all could tell me a little bit about that framing and how you use it.

Well, Young at one point said something. I'm going to kind of paraphrase. He said, I have no theory of dreams other than that I believe that they have meaning. And I really love that. And in some sense, maybe that's the spirit in this book as well, although we might extend it and say that our theory of dreams is that they are the attempt of something in you to communicate with you. So, you know, the dream worker Jeremy Taylor says that dreams always come in the interest of healing and wholeness.

And I think that's true. So whatever your dream is, if it's upsetting or bizarre or seemingly forgettable, it was crafted for you to teach you something that some part of you thinks that you need to know. that some part of you thinks that you need to know. Yeah. I also, I like what you just said, Joel, about the character of the dream maker. And in the book, one of the ways that we sort of represent that is that he's like a backseat driver.

And he's back there. You know, he's not tapping you on the shoulder all the time, reminding you to stay in your lane. But he's observing all the kinds of things that the driver can't observe. And in particular, he's observing the driver. You know, what kind of music do you play on the radio? Or do you listen to a podcast? Are you honking your horn at other drivers that are maybe cutting you off or something? What are you doing?

But this also goes to a bigger Jungian principle about personalizing contents of the unconscious. So you have a feeling that there's this vague thing, I don't know, it's like this or that, and what we wanna do is personalize it, get it into a shape, a color, a character, something that we can really imagine. And so the character of the dream maker is that for us, that there

is a personality, there is a connection that's more than just a vague psychological theory or some kind of energy. No, there's somebody in the back seat. Maybe we could have a conversation. And what does he look like? Or is it a he or is it a she? I'm thinking of the way that my daughter will watch me while I'm driving and pick up all of the meta communication.

She's seven, that I may not be trying to consciously give off, but she's like, oh, dad, you're angry because you did this or, you know, do you not like the radio or, you know, do you not, you know, there, there's like a somebody kind of watching you who knows you better than, you know, yourself, cause our kids, a lot of times know us better than we know ourselves, you know, survival for them. Yeah. It's kind of a luxury for us. And the dream maker as an image brings that close, you know,

just like your daughter was his dad, but dad. And the dream maker is in service to the great enterprise of analytical psychology, which is to fully incarnate all of our potential. That the dream maker represents the intelligence of all that we could be and each night is examining the distance between who you were today and Who you could be in all your fullness and is

commenting on that distance in such a way that we are nudged if the dream is subtle or shoved, if the dream is particularly dynamic, in that direction where we can bloom. And you know, you also talk about setting the intention relating to the journal, not as a journal, but maybe as a piece of art or a ritual piece that's reflective of some part of yourself. There's a lot that is almost like a religious ritual or Western esoteric magic in the way that you talk about setting an intention, engaging with the process. I'm thinking of the part where you were talking about picking

out the journal and making sure that it's not just, you know, a book. Could you say anything about the non-dream elements of dream work and the non-therapy elements of dream work, maybe? Well, I think that the way I think about it is that it's a relationship and it's about cultivating a relationship. Yes. So, and that there's an intention with that, like I'm, whatever that is, I'm going to listen for it, I'm going to try to connect with it.

And it can be a little bit like the Western mystery tradition, you know, in that you're trying to kind of cultivate, you know, a dialogue with this other part of yourself. And there are all kinds of different creative techniques for doing that. But ultimately, it's to take your dreams seriously, it's really to take your inner life seriously. And you can do that with ritual, you can certainly do that just with dream work, you can do it in the therapy room, you can do it just between you and you in a journal of some kind. But the basic idea is to cultivate that relationship. Yeah. And, uh, there's a Jungian sort of trope about, uh, the face that you turn to the unconscious is the face the unconscious turns to you. So we, we turn a friendly face and it can start with, you know, I'm going to go to

And it can start with, you know, I'm going to go to XYZ store on Saturday afternoon, because I know they have a great selection of paper goods, of the reaching out and turning a friendly face, of pick out just the right dream journal, it has to have the right color and be the right size and that is what we can do that's our egos reaching out and saying hey I'm turning a friendly face to you and I'm buying you know something special and it's a spiral bound notebook but the I like this cover and I and then bringing it home and putting it on the bedside table. So we do from an ego waking point of view what we can do and we can do that. And then what happens happens.

You know you can't create the dream, you can't demand it, but you can set the stage and turn the friendly face to what Lisa just said of I'd like to have a relationship with you. Or as Joan Rivers used to say on all of her TV shows, she'd lean forward and she'd say, can we talk? And that's the invitation. Can we talk? I'm here. I'm listening. When I think of your comment about the relationship between Jungian Dream work and the Western mystery tradition, a couple of ideas come to mind. Diane Fortune, who's kind of the darling of the Western mystery tradition, said something which I think was in her book on the mystical Kabbalah, that the modern Magus needs to treat

the magical images as if they are real and independent beings and on the other side understand that those are simply representative images of something that is more mysterious. So we have to have our feet in those two places. For instance, when you were earlier referencing the part of the brain, that's kind of neurobiology of this inner work, that's that scientific foot we have in one place. And then the other, we have to re-enchant the world and also activate that playful side of our imagination by thinking of the dream maker as an actual person that's hovering near us and observing. And we need both of those attitudes in order to hold the work in the right way. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm thinking about the way that a lot of the prehistoric rituals we have to guess at,

when we look at things like Ella de Mercia, there's that step of the ritual of taking this thing that is part of me, but then representing it externally as this thing. And then once I mistake this for myself I make the change that I want to make you know whatever that ritual is doing and I reclaim it and pull it back but I have to mistake this thing for the self externally for the ritual to work I mean you have to kind of have absolute projection in order for the symbol to be reclaimed and and and alchemized in an effective way. Beaut said, yeah.

Wow. Um, yeah. And you know, I'm, I'm thinking like, as y'all are talking, you guys have all done an enormous amount of creative work. I mean, you have a podcast, you have therapy profession. The podcast is very successful and influential. Um, it kind of re-enchanted Jungian stuff in a way that I mean, it isn't, I don't know that it was trying to do the postmodern thing that Hillman was, but I'm kind of I kind of see it as James Hellman, where the Jungian stuff is very analytical, it's very dry. You know, there's like, people that are like memorizing Latin words and talking about alchemy. And then all of a sudden, somebody comes back and they're kind of like, No, it's alive, like, look, and then you know, people under you know, 70 start to like, talk about it on Reddit and things again. And you guys' show kind of did that,

or at least I saw that. Because I liked you before anybody did. And I think that a lot of the reclamation, or just the surge in popularity recently, it's not just because it's relevant and timeless, but because you guys kind of put it in a way where people could understand it and it wasn't putting anybody off. But you have a ton of stuff that you do. You know, why do dreams now, personally, but also, you know, culturally, what feels important? I'm thinking about Campbell's quote about, you know, dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams. Was there anything about the state of the world? Was there anything about the arc of your career or life that's overlapped? All three people decided that this was the time for a book on dreams. Was there anything about the state of the world? Was there anything about the arc of your career or life that's

overlapped? All three people decided that this was the time for a book on dreams to kind of go revisit that tradition. Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I mean, obviously dreams are such a central part of Jung and Jungian psychology. And also, uh, you know for us, I think the book really arose out of our dream school, which is an online program that we have that teaches people how to work with their dreams. And there's lectures and live events and that sort of thing. And we had done the work to craft that. And we're finding that it was really rewarding. And people were reporting that it was valuable.

And we said, well, we have all this material, we can sort of put it into a book and make good use out of it. But to the spirit of your question, too, I want to say that, you know, I think dreams have always been a kind of a guideline, a guiding light for me, you know, when I when I feel lost or unsure or disoriented, I look to my dreams and I think we probably all do. And certainly, you know, when you when you look at the state of the world, and there's a lot to be optimistic about, actually, I think that we're so used to all wringing our hands, but in some large sense, you know,

we've never been more prosperous and safe than we are now in many ways. So I don't wanna kind of fall in with this general human tendency to think that we're living in the darkest of times ever, cause that's simply not true, but there is a lot of uncertainty and disorientation out there and I do wonder if dreams could be that which Help us find our true north both on an individual level and also on a collective level, you know

a lot of indigenous societies engage in dream sharing. And I wonder about the possibility for some version of that in the current culture. Like, for example, on the podcast, are we engaging in a kind of modern version of dream sharing when we interpret a dream on the podcast? Or are we creating a place tell, you know, when we interpret a dream on the podcast or are we creating a place for people to come together and, and share dreams and can that be nourishing and

can that even be a part of what helps us find a new way forward? Yeah. Yeah. I'll chime in of what you know like Lisa, my own experiences with my dreams have just been so powerful. Sometimes puzzling, sometimes companioning, sometimes really really jolting, but having a sense that we all have an inner life and that's just a psychic fact. And Jung says the unconscious has autonomy and it has direction. And we can have more of ourselves. We can always go within. There is more of us. And it is very comforting and reassuring

to see beneath the ego where we're worried about this and we're anxious about that. And we have to get the oil change in the car and get the kids some new soccer shoes or something, that there is a depth and there is something else to us, in us, with us. Honestly, for me, I just wanna sell it to people. Of don't you know there's more of you? Don't you really, if you really know that in an experiential way, it's just as real as,

you know, brushing against a tree, a tree and feeling its bark or falling off a bike or any of those things is you know it, you have more life, you have more self and we have dreams every night. Why not go there? Jung also lived in a time where there was great turbulence and world wars, all kinds of skirmishes going on. And people came to him and they asked him, what should we do? What can one do? And after pondering, he said, the most important thing that we could do in the face of civilization

in chaos is to work on ourselves, to integrate our own unconscious material, to bring forward what is inside of each person, which takes an enormous amount of energy. So dream work is a way to facilitate an evolutionary process that is already going on by itself. All of us dream, unless we have some terrible medical problem, we don't have REM sleep, but every person dreams. And if who takes Jung's perspective that a dream is an artifact of a psychological event that happened the previous night and that psychological event happens whether or not you remember the dream. I think of dreams as medicine and so each night when we dream, we're getting a little spoonful of medicine from the dream maker that is nudging us along towards this fullness. Dream work is the ability to take that medicine and analyze it. And each time we review the dream, each time we look at it from a more and more comprehensive level, we are drinking in more of the medicine. We're drinking in more of the corrective, which in essence is moving us more

quickly towards that blossoming process than would happen if we simply ignored it and went along our natural way. So in times when there is great crisis, we need the support of our inner resources in a way that maybe we could have floated along without for a while. But dream work is probably the most important thing that we could ask people to do, to grow fast enough to accommodate a radically changing world. Yeah. And I think I was thinking as you were talking, Lisa, how there is like kind of a myopic tendency that goes throughout history to feel like we are living in the end times, that it never has been worse than this, which is kind of, I mean, it's a veil of tears. A lot of these problems,

I ask clients a lot, you know, point to this problem. Does it go back to the Bronze Age? Do you think it will be fixed in your lifetime? Maybe we can find a way to be happy here. Oh, I love that. You know, when Deborah was talking, I was thinking about the way that you had said that there was more to you than this. And I was thinking about how many people call and they say, I have to call you because somebody wants me to, but I want to drink alcohol or I want to do this thing. And I know it has these consequences. I know I have kids, I know whatever, I know whatever. Tell me this. And I'm like, you know, I believe that's absolutely true. And that's what you think. But I think that

you are also bigger than that in a way that you don't know yet. Yes. When you're asking me why come to therapy, I'm not going to debate that part of you. I'm just going to look for more of you. I'm just going to look for more of you. That's lovely. You know, and that is straight young. He says we don't solve our problems. We get bigger than our problems. We outgrow them. Yeah, we outgrow them. We get bigger and sometimes I literalize it by thinking of a sapling that somebody took an axe to and cut a big wedge out of its trunk that's only four inches in diameter. And it's like, Oh no, you know, whether it might be the urge to drink or trauma or any

one of a number of things, depression, it goes, this goes on and on and it's, and it's awful. If that tree grows and the trunk is a foot in diameter, yeah, the wound is just that much smaller in proportion and dreams are a way to do that. It's not the only way, but it is a big way. No. And, and I think Joseph, when you're talking about almost dreams being, or the unconscious itself is kind of this compensatory mechanism to help us like understand something else. I was thinking about how much like the brain has been modern, you know, modern for 2 million years. a modern for 2 million years, the way that it works, not just culture, but the way that it actually works, changed in response to the technological metaphors that we can draw, you know, the amount of social interactions that we have to be able to keep track of, the amount of objectivity that increases when there's language and writing and all these things. But it's not really biological changes to the brain that drive that, you know. And dreams are

kind of the place where that other part lives. I mean, that's kind of a messy image, but I hope it's helpful. I'm always trying to bring anthropology back into therapy, and not just evolutionary anthropology, but I feel like there's so much of that in Jung that connects him with a newer audience that kind of speaks a different language. Yeah, no, I think that's really great. I mean, the idea that there is kind of great wisdom in the subcortical regions. And I don't think that's- It's the point.

It's the point. And we don't study it. We don't study it because we can't aim drugs at it. It's like why everyone wants these cognitive theories of schizophrenia, where it's like, everyone wants these these cognitive theories of schizophrenia, or it's like, no, no, it's the indirect pathway. Like it is that one of my friends, Kathy Bird Navisar, who's a Jungian analyst that stopped doing her PhD in neurology work, because they went on to research what she wanted to research, you know, said, the indirect pathway is thinking

in these metaphors. And it's supposed to censor out all this physical information and all of this, you know other sort of Semicognitive information and when you have schizophrenia or a dopamine disorder in the family You know if you're not psychotic a lot of times you're a better researcher But if you have too much of it you start to mistake Metaphors for literal reality and there's no filtering mechanism now when I worked with outpatient schizophrenia. I went to this filtering mechanism. Now when I worked with outpatient schizophrenia, I went to this one of the clients I really loved, you know, it was pretty typical, like aluminum foil over the house and the government is coming in and doing these things. And one day I was like, you know, hanging out with them because you know, he, you just kind of sit there and

talk and he was like, it's like, you know, you used to say that you discovered this online or that you read this book about gang stalking or that now you're you don't have books, you don't have a car, you don't have internet and you're figuring out what the government's doing with satellites. So how are you figuring it out? And he was like, you get the feeling that you have right before you wonder if something's true, but then you just know it's true. It's like that is the best description of the illusion. I mean, fascinating, but it's like, that pathway is still active in everyone, you know, there's still that job to remind the patient that we are, you know, not logical beings that have emotions, we are sometimes we are emotional beings that sometimes have logic and right. Right. You know, yeah. So I don't know, how do you approach these keys in in therapy?

I mean, how do you use them when you're doing analysis? Wow, you know, for me, the way I work is so intuitive. That, that, you know, it's I'm sort of, and I think that's probably true for many of us where I'm just kind of monitoring hopefully closely what's going on in the moment to moment interaction and, and letting my interventions really be led by what's kind of bubbling up from, from the intuitive region. You know, one of, one of the things about this, the book is that, um, that is the way that I know I worked with dreams to was very intuitively, I think that's true for all of us. And one of the things we really wanted to do with the book, because it's such an implicit process when you're, when you're, you know, used to working with dreams. And, you know, it looks, it looks like magic. It looks like this black box, right? Someone tells us a dream and we're like, Oh, I think it's this, this and this. And then people are like, How did you do that? How did you get there? And in some sense, what we wanted to do with the book was try to make those implicit intuitive processes more explicit to give you the ability to work with your own dreams, right?

I mean, I always talk about how I work with dreams pretty much every single day, people bring in dreams, we work on dreams on the podcast. I mean, I must, I don't know, work with 10 dreams a week or something every single week. But when I wake up from my own dream, I'm often like, I have no idea, no idea what that means. So I think that there's such a barrier to being able to kind of see the perspective

of the unconscious when it's our unconscious that we really need some of the perspective openers that we try to provide in the book when we have these keys. Really, that's what they're meant to do. So the book has these 69 keys in it. And they're basically little prompts that you can apply to your dreams. And they're basically little prompts that you can apply to your dreams. And the purpose really is to pop you out of your conscious standpoint, so that you can maybe begin to see what this other part of you is trying to get at. Central to the idea of the keys is also the idea of differentiation and distinctions, and particularly significant distinctions. So we've all had analysis come in and say, oh, I didn't have a dream. You say, really? You didn't have any dream? They go, oh, yes,

but I had this stupid dream. I was nothing. It was nothing. Then they want it telling you, and it's substantive. There's a lot in it. But I think what happens is that when we look at the dream, or if we're new to this, when we look at the dream as a whole, we often gloss over things. We don't know how to tell ourselves how one thing is different from another. So the questions give us a sense of how to define the parts of dreams, which then gives us a sense of differentiation. So I'm biologically male and so a male figure is more likely to be a shadow figure for me. Just that alone gives us a way to take something and set it aside, coordinate it off and attach it to a particular piece of theory which is relevant for how we then take it back in and

make sense of it as a psychological metaphor. So the 69 keys are also 69 ways to tell one thing apart from another thing. And all forms of mastery are based on how to make significant distinctions between things. If you were cooking and you couldn't tell the difference between sugar and salt because they kind of look the same, it would be difficult to successfully cook. To be able to look at the image and say, oh, this is an Anima image and this is a shadow image in the same way in the kitchen of dream interpretation, it allows me to be more competent. I'd like to put in a word for feeling. We have a chapter in the book on feeling. And out of all the books we all bought and went through and studied and read and tried to process,

there isn't one in my possession that has a chapter on feeling and dreams. It's as if feeling is a subset that is woven through other more distinguishable seeming topics. But one of the truths about dreams is that they are images of affect. There can be several different kinds of affect in a single dream. Now, first everything was great. I was on the beach and it was warm and sunny. And then I saw this big wave out in the distance and I realized it was a tsunami and I got scared.

And then, and then, and then. And to be able to sink into and feel the feeling in an image the feeling in an image is really important. Wait a minute, what part of me, how does that happen to me? That everything looks like it's fine as if I'm on the beach, and then all of a sudden it feels like some sort of dark menacing thing shows up. What is that? But dreams are telling us about our feelings. And I think in our busy lives we often go whizzing past it. People may be anxious and depressed, but we don't let those feelings tell us what they really mean. And dreams give us a chance to do that. There's an image, there's an animal, there's a tree, there's all the hundreds and millions of things that dreams can bring us. And that we can just live with some of that feeling of let yourself feel the feeling. What was that like? I think it's enormously important. The feelings are there anyway. And you know, that takes us straight into

Jung and there's something from the shadow. And then can you get curious about that? You know, we have a choice. We can either get curious about this stuff and seek to integrate it into consciousness or it'll just rumble around in the underground and be there anyway. And in service to what you were saying, Deb, you know, the dream maker is kind of a novelist. And so, you know, the dream could be read like our own novel.

So for instance, you know, I woke up the morning and had coffee and sat there feeling like I was waiting for a tsunami to strike me. And that conveys a feeling. And this sense of universal feeling, because through the metaphor, perhaps anybody could imagine what would it be like to be waiting for a tsunami to come in and strike you or strike your home? That feeling of dread, that feeling of overwhelm, the feeling of inevitability, and so many other things are captured

in these extraordinary images that the dream maker crafts for us and in a way that our soul will particularly respond to, maybe not everyone, but your soul will respond to the images that the dream maker has given you. Yeah. The other thing I just wanted to mention, coming back to this idea of living in a time

of rapid change and uncertainty. And I do think about this, that Iulian, one part of the collected works, I think, talks about working with people that came to him at the end of their lives. They had some kind of a terminal diagnosis and he would do dream work with them. And he remarked on the amount of progress people could make, but also that the dreams almost never commented on their illness or their approaching demise. That the dream maker is still interested in every moment and opportunity of personal growth, secondary to anything that's happening out in the greater world or anything that's happening even in our own bodies.

So what I've noticed is despite the turbulence going on in the culture, most people's dreams do not reflect that. They're not dreaming about political problems. It's still the dream maker problems. It's still the dream maker, or perhaps humanity at whole, is still interested in the personal evolution of consciousness, regardless of the outer changes of a culture. The dream maker is interested in you, you know, not about which path you should take or what the political situation is or whether you should move to Nebraska or Finland. It's not fortune telling. It's bigger than that. I mean, the culture, the broader society puts people where they are But they still have to deal with that individually. It isn't and I think to mistake that work for messianic stuff is where a lot of people lose the plot when that intuition becomes unconscious and and a lot of people do that a lot of especially male Jungians do that at the end of their life where they start feeling like

They have this message to bring to the people in a way that is, I think, kind of, kind of, I like, I want to check that tendency myself, because I fear about, you know, inflation around the trickster archetype. I remember years back, Joseph said on this union life that he was giving a talk at a conference in front of a crowd and he wanted to say curse words into the microphone. And I was like, yeah, you should do that. That's how you, you get the score of who you want to talk to really quickly. It's you get rid of the people that don't have a sense of humor. It's a fight that impulse a lot actually.

So, yeah. I mean, that's, that's something that I want to check. I remember, um, it was like way back kind of 2016 era and I was seeing a whole bunch of young men that were kind of angry and online and I they were probably just seeing me because I was a social worker that was a male and that was rare and they were All you know afraid, you know it all was this kind of right-wing philosophy and and most of them had an absent father and

All of them had a mother that was either kind of unable or unwilling to meet any of their emotional needs growing up and You know this kind of certainty of here's this hierarchy. Here's the system. Here's the people that are good Here's the people they're bad was appealing and then we'd start to do brain spotting and that will make your dreams It will kick your dreams off immediately You know, I did work somatic stuff for a long time and when you do brain spotting that subcortical brain is getting a ton of information in the midbrain over a couple days. One of the things that would happen with homosalivum was that there would be this figure of the anima that would be terrifying because they're getting in touch with their

vulnerability and they're getting in touch with their capacity for a maternal sense and a compassionate sense and authenticity, but those things felt inferior and bad and scary. And so, you know, the monster would be kicking the door open and they're blocking it with stuff. And then finally the door flies open and they shoot it. And then it's a naked woman who looks so sad and she floats away and they're horrified at what they've done. You know, that your capacity for this kind of contra sexual opposite is reaching out to you saying you need me, you're you're not whole. But that that process feels like this attack, you know, on what the ego is, was just such

an interesting thing. And it wasn't, you know, there was no point in talking about politics of those dreams. But politics was probably a lot of the reason why I had, you know, you know, four of those dreams a day, you know, you know four of those dreams a day You know in that period of history but it's but it's interesting too because It's sort of like that mental that mental state that they were in that Psychology gate gives rise to a certain kind of political

Experience I want to say both in the person and perhaps even in the collective. Well, and I think a lot of those kind of tensions that are the microcosm and the macrocosm, you know, a lot of that really personal work you do as a therapist, you are kind of closer to whatever the zeitgeist is or where things are going. Yeah, you're in a position to kind of hear patterns earlier, maybe, than before they're on the news. Yes, I totally, totally get that. It's interesting, because there's a dream in the book that's a little bit like the dream you just told. And we have a ton of sample dreams in the book. And it's the dream about the guy who's, I think, think like eating the flesh of the eye of the Komodo dragon And then the Komodo dragon starts chasing him and then he turns around and it's a woman in a red dress, you know

Okay, so there's how you've been treating your feeling function Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating and one of the things I think is interesting about how lizards show up in a lot of those dreams is like a lot of that subcortical region of the brain, like if you look at the way lizards evolved, they have a, the lizards and sharks, some sharks have this clear scale that's like a parietal eye and it tells them how to handle their intuition and kind of, you know, what a primitive archetype

based on the time of year, because it can detect polarization of light. So it knows how much sunlight the sun is shining through. So is it winter? Do I want to eat this thing? Or is it summer? Do I want to get in the water? Do I want to make, you know, it changes the kind of archetype. And as we evolve a bunch of that parietal system that is reacting to color and all this, we lose the physical thing that is putting input into it. But it's still there and it's still thinking. And now it is really affected by hormones instead of visual input. So it's all kind of the

pineal system. And, but there is this kind of like, system of the brain that, you know, used to sense an energy around us, you know, kind of a cosmology that I think is interesting. And lizards do show up in a lot of those dreams. I don't know if that would be the kind of thing you could never prove objectively, but it's kind of a cosmology that I think is interesting. And lizards do show up in a lot of those dreams. I don't know if it's the kind of thing you could never prove objectively, but it's kind of interesting. It's very, very interesting, very provocative. Deborah was talking about the felt sense of dreams. I'm remembering a talk Hillman gave in the 80s where he told like a story and said, you know, like he would tell it, tell it very narratively.

And it would be like, this is not a dream, you know, and, he would tell it, tell it very narratively. And it would be like, this is not a dream, you know, and then he would go back and tell it like it was a revelation. And it was a very felt, you know, experiential language. And he would say, this is a dream. But it would be the same, you know, series of events. Do you guys use semantics at all? Like, do you have people kind of react to the posture they were in in the dream or go into any of that when you do work, how experiential is therapy? I did a lot of that. My first career was as an Alexander Technique teacher, as a movement therapist.

But much of that has been lost since COVID because most of my clients are now online and I get to see them from their collarbones up. I mean, I'm guessing they have limbs. So I wind up doing something that's a little bit more like brain spawning where as people are telling me a story, particularly in the first couple of analytic sessions,

if they look away and they kind of freeze for a moment and then they come back, I'll have them take that position, move their eyes into that quadrant and hover there to see what kinds of unconscious material might come forward. And that's been very helpful, particularly in the beginning of the work. But I feel very deprived of information and opportunity to observe the unconscious, the parapraxis is what Freud would say, but the unconscious signals from other parts of the body. Yeah. Yeah, but we're adapting. Yeah. Before COVID, I did something that I called somatic trauma mapping, where I would have people talk about the same thing and I would notice what the body did repetitively and then say do this and see what you feel. And when you when you've got this, and especially when you've got somebody on this in their car, you know, they're on like I have people who do tell a therapy well here but I just, the way my brain works that was not able to make that job.

Well, therapy well here, but I just the way my brain works, I was not able to make that jump well. But so the somatic part of dreams is always interesting to me, like there's a ton of people I call it the magician posture, you know, when there's somebody who's so intuitive, but they're not comfortable with direct confrontation, you know, usually they have a lot of anger, you know, you always kind of get this floaty fighters posture, and I'll just stop them talking in the first session and say, sit up, put your chest out, put your thing, get a warrior posture for a second and see what you feel. And they're like, and then immediately like,

oh, I don't like that. Like that, you know, because it feels like I wanna be seen, I have a right to be here. You know, all this stuff that we don't, as an intuitive that is kind of over identified with that and uncomfortable, we wanna kind of read the room and understand everything before we do anything.

There's not a willingness to have any kind of uncertainty. And this is just who I am, take it or leave it. That never was safe. And so much of that people make the connection to their dreams in a way where even if I was kind of talking about symbol and metaphor, I don't know that they would have believed that connection. Sorry, I didn't know how y'all use that.

I think for me, it depends a lot on who I'm working with. And I'm not averse to somebody who's really a thinking type or relatively new to all this stuff, who wants to know about symbol and language and so on. And I sort of image that as being, that it will percolate like coffee being percolated. It'll come down from the frontal cortex and it'll start to percolate its way down into feeling.

Other times it's really great to have somebody assume that posture or be like that animal in the dream. That the physiology of our bodies will tell us, will tell us things. Or ask somebody just to do a little body scan of, when you were talking about that part of the dream, you're gonna feel something, maybe your shoulders,

or just pay attention to where in the body there just might be information for you. body, there just might be information for you. My experience has been that that's part of the art of working in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis and with dreams is what is the pathway in for this person at this time? It might be physiological, it might be emotional, it might be more conceptual,

it might be any one of a number of things, but any point of entry will do. There's no wrong way or right way. It's just where do you have access to that part of yourself? And another way of leaning into what Deb is saying has to do with typology. Many people know about the Myers-Briggs,

but they don't realize that Jung was actually the pioneer of typology. And then it was turned into a kind of a standardized test by the Myers-Briggs folks. But when we get our typological profile, the fourth function, which is the least developed of the fourth function can, as Deb said, it can be your thinking, it can be your feeling, it can be your sensing or your intuition. And the deeper, less constructed, more spontaneous messages from the unconscious are going to come in through that function. We have a tendency to over-prioritize how do you feel, where is the emotion in part

because our culture as Americans particularly is not terribly emotionally literate. But emotion is not the only place that unconscious material comes out of and as you were saying you rely very much on sensation. But many people don't realize that thinking also can be a vehicle for unconscious material depending on your typology. I'm an ENFJ, which means my fourth function, my inferior function is thinking. So it's very common that it's my thinking function where unconscious content is going to come forward and that I even graduate gravitate towards stranger more exotic thinking systems like Kabbalah and things

like that because it appeals to that unconscious tendency in my own thinking function. So I think that knowing something about the client and particularly if you happen to know their typology or you can encourage them to do it, and particularly if you happen to know their typology or you can encourage them to do it, that fourth function is going to tell you right from the beginning where the unconscious is going to be whispering from. And one of the ways that I think that shows up

that is missed a lot in people that are more inclined to gravitate towards the emotion of the dream or the narrative Symbols of the dream is architecture. I don't know if you see that much but I mean that was the environment I always stop people and they're like, yeah, but where is this happening? Where's this conversation? Yeah, and it turns into oh is my house because that seems to be what the analyst misses and the patient misses It's like it was my house. It's kind of my house in the 60s actually kind of looked like my grandmother's house There was lime green here, you know, and I would have I was interested for a long time and Kind of the visual application of Jung's theory and you know

Somebody like Steve Jobs who came in and said I want the computer to be like a bicycle for the brain Someone just needs to look at it and know how it the mouse is the point moves and the X closes the window and you don't have to know command prompt and type. This is just you know and with new urbanism movement with architecture it was this attempt to go back and say how do people just relate to space and let's just meet them where they are. Let's find these kind of archetypal modes of being that most people walk to the right when there's a circle. They're not going to it doesn't occur to them to go to the left, why is that? And so I would start to ask clients, what is the building? What did it look like?

And a ton of times they're describing very specific styles of architecture that they have no academic training around. It's like, that's Danish modern. I mean, one person I was even like, you're talking about ink and revival. I showed him a picture of Blade Runner that frankly, right building. I was like, did it look like this? Were these the squares? And he was like, you're talking about ink and revival I showed him a picture of Blade Runner that it frankly right building I was like wow did it look like this were these the squares he was like yeah, that's it

That's like that's ink and revival, you know Another person and they was saying there was a circle on a mask and something and I picked up the actually that the labyrinth On my thing and said did it look like this pattern and he said yeah, that's it, but it was more squished It was like a lime of bean didn't know what a labyrinth was, you know? But that's one of those. Yeah. So those visuals, do you use those much? I mean, I think sometimes that is where people who are more emotional and more inclined to go,

yeah, it was very kind of minimalist, modern. I think maybe this is about me getting rid of all of the baroque ornamentation and getting out away from my pretensions and just into the real, you know? I don't know. That's what I see. I was curious if y'all encountered, you know You're really talking about sort of paying attention to all this sensory detail in dreams Which is not you know There are dream interpretation schools or schools of working with dreams where it's really about sinking into that

And and I would say that that hasn't really been a forte in Jungian dream work for the most part. Although, you know, we, we do recommend that that's a really good place to start. We talk about that in the book, just, you know, what did the air feel like? Did you smell anything? What's the quality of the light? You know, is it cold? What are you, what are you, what are the details that you notice, the visual details, the auditory details? I think it's so, it can be difficult because sometimes the details and dreams are so rich, but very difficult to convey. And that's why it can be fascinating if you have any inclination toward this. I don't think you

have to be a talented artist, but a lot of people draw their dreams. That's something that we're going to be playing around with a bit more in dream school is creating a specific space for people to engage and drawing their dreams and using drawing the dream both as a tool to help recall dreams but also as a way to deepen into the experience. But it's, you know, to me, it's fascinating because some of the, the things that I might experience, whether it's a feeling or a sound or a visual in a dream is so rich and luminous, but like, absolutely defies my ability to put it into words. Bill, when you were speaking, I was thinking about how the

unconscious and the dream maker becomes incrementally aware of the analyst or the therapist. So once the unconscious understands that the therapist is their ally, the dreams are both in service to the dreamer and in service to the therapist or analyst in facilitating the individuation process. So I'm imagining that as your clients understand that you can interpret these architectural nuances in the settings of their dreams, their dream maker is more likely to send signals through those differentiations because it knows that you particularly will pick them up. That's a great point.

Yeah, I, is there, what about color? You work with color much or do you feel like any of that? As I do emotional transformation therapy, which Dr. Vasquez out of Texas does, which there's these machines that do very specific colors, frequencies, direction of light on the pupil and also a flicker rate, which is kind of wild.

Like with the light device, you can't really see a flicker rate above about 150, 200, just people can't perceive it. But you'll move, you know, the color is just green for the person, but you'll move from 300 to 600, it hurts and the person's like, Oh, my chest is on fire. And you move back, and then it stops, but they don't know that I changed anything. I mean, they can't see the computer. And so so much of that is interesting. And color shows up as a metaphor a lot of the time, or just an association that we remember.

But I also think there are, ETT has convinced me, because my patients don't know those associations. Before we're doing the work, that there are pretty endogenous ways that we handle it that are universal too. So I didn't know, there's not a ton about color in the book. I know, just curious if you see that in your work. I'm not familiar with this method that you were talking about,

although I'd like to hear more about it. Yeah, it's really interesting. Really, really interesting. Von Franz wrote extensively about color symbolism and number symbolism. But you're right, that wasn't something that we have a tendency to go into too deeply. For myself, I don't always think to ask the color of each object, but it's interesting to have that brought to my attention through our conversation here with you. But if somebody does in their description mention the colors of things that of course rings and then we do have a tendency to go into it in that regard. But you're right, it is something that could be flushed out in terms of clarifying questions. What was the color of this and what was the color of that? So my background with color is a little bit more from the Western mystery tradition and I have some thoughts about colors and the various correspondences that they have. That is a bit systemized. I don't know that it's individual enough to be able to apply.

Yeah and why 69 keys? Where I land on that? That was kind of what... It just turned out that way. Yeah, the amount of keys there were. That's right. Strictly a bottom-up process rather than let's settle on a number first and fit it all into this box. This was the number needed and that's how it came out. Well, I think that y'all's book is probably one of the best that I found jumping into starting to use Dreams from somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience there or their therapist mentioned it to them and they want to know how to use it as a therapist. Now our audience is split 50-50 about therapists and then patients in therapy that end up, you know, listening to something or getting a resource.

So it's, you know, either way, I mean, I think that's probably one of the better places to start. Is there anything that I missed? I want to be respectful of you guys's time Is there anything that you feel like is not was not talked about that's an important element you'd like to speak on, you know It's a lead-up. I'd like to throw in the word adventure And invite people to be curious and to have an inner adventure People spend all kinds of money on vacations

and travel and all that stuff and it's all great, but there is an inner adventure awaiting you. And I think our book can be very helpful about how to get in the water, so to speak, and have something meaningful, interesting, enlivening, and feel yourself growing, expanding. Yeah. What comes to me as I'm asking that question, asking inward and upward, that Jung had a feeling, a vision and an intuition

that the old paradigm of religion religion 100 years ago, a thousand years ago, had served a civilized purpose, that it moved something along in the collective psyche. But that the reason religion has been losing its potency in the collective is that we need a new way for the individual to connect to the universal or the transcendent. And that it would need to be something that was highly individual to each person. And that the revelations around how you as a person and that the revelations around how you as a person can and are connecting to the transcendent is happening through the symbols of your dreams. So I think that dreams are also helping us

forge a new way of connecting to the transcendent. In Jung's writings on the future of Christianity, he had an idea that they would come a time when people in a community would come together and through dreams and active imagination, they would collectively share how they are connecting with the transcendent and in the storytelling of the community, they would forge an understanding of the divine, of the transcendent, and that would become an ever-evolving narrative. And the sharing of those dreams would be almost something like a Pentecostal experience, where something would be constellated through the sharing of that material.

So I think there is a profound evolutionary process that is happening both in the individual and in the collective. And attention to dreams is an essential part of that in as much as the collective is reimagining human civilization always, but particularly at this time. Jung said that a new religion is brewing in the collective psyche and it would take a couple of hundred years before it resurfaced in its fullness, but that it would emerge through collective dreaming. And I find that intensely interesting. And I'm paying attention to any of those signals in my own dreams, in the dreams of my Nalasans, as well as the dreams that people submit to us on the podcast, that there's a new relationship

that's being forged between the individual and the divine, which is both capable of saving us, but also creating great and interesting transformative demands upon humanity. Well, that's a great reason to pay attention to your dreams. And I think that that metacognition that is happening in all the depth models of therapy that I think are good, a lot of the post Jungian experiential stuff, voice dialogue, process oriented therapy, AEDP, lifespan integration, you know, any of those, what you're doing is you're finding this way to relate to the subcortical, there's a metacognition, there's a way of relating to the subcortical brain without being possessed by it. And kind of endless intellectual, very purely intellectual analysis doesn't ever really teach you anything. It makes you feel this pseudo certainty

or pseudo control. But there has to be this being able to connect with it without being possessed by it. And as the individual is trying to do that in dream work, I mean, I think the culture is also trying to do that with parts of our humanity that we can't repress, but we also can't completely go into. And that is kind of the broader conversation that's happening in metamodernism that looks a lot like a collective tension of the opposites and this oscillation, you know, that we're trying to figure out how do we do that, you know. So it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful book and, you know, always try and connect the micro with the macro, you know. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having us on.

Yeah. Love talking to you. This has been so rich. Yeah. So where can we go to get the book? Amazon and Sounds True for the audible and then also this You Can Get In Life website, which we'll link to all of that is Dream School if we want a more personal. That's right. That's right. Yeah, you can get it wherever books are sold basically. So whether that's bookshop.org or Barnes and Noble or Amazon or the Sounds True website. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys' time and I hope this connects a lot of people with your work. Thank you. Thank you too. It is so pure I can't arrive without the fear I see in my eyes