Dream Interpretation Reflections: Bonus Episode with Dr. Loren

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

So I have some questions about the first two dreams that you shared. Jessica's dreams. I can't remember them word for word. So I'm going to read from this paper. So what you've presented in those first two dreams, it truly took my breath away just how clear it was. Now, I know in doing the work it's not so clear. But your presentation made it clear that you allowed us to see that there are steps that we take and there's movement that takes place over time. But you look at it and you think, Wow, how could I not see that? It seems to that Jessica really had to be in touch with her feelings.

Do patients usually get to this pretty easily, or was she unusual in that? I think Jessica was unusual in that she for somebody who was not supposed to talk about her feelings, she wasn't fully a zero. She was there. And she may have had to put on a lot of that. But there was a core person there that had feelings about things and they would pop up in the dreams and she could talk about them openly, at least in session. So that was nice. She didn't start feeling I mean, maybe she wouldn't even have come in if she really didn't feel she wasn't allowed to talk at all.

So somewhere there was a part of this, I can talk and at least I can talk to you. But do people come in and they're just upset about something depressed or confused and they don't even know what to say. All the time. And sometimes they know what to say in the beginning, and then they're not so sure what to say a little after that. Because what if they've talked about all of that stuff? Everything you can imagine about people being comfortable, talking a lot, not being in touch with feelings happens. There is a certain self-selecting group, right?

There's a group of people who decide I will go to therapy. Some people may not be geared that way. It doesn't even occur to them that's just reality or some people feel it is so shameful to need to talk to someone. Many people view that as a weakness somehow. You can't just pull yourself up and you're not. So those people may or may not be able to come in and talk to someone. Hopefully, over time people will get more used to the idea that we need this and we have these sides of us and there's a whole world in there. And it's actually a strength.

And it's a strength. It's really a strength. I'm glad you said that. Yeah. To be able to explore yourself is a strength. This I always wondered about too. So what is it about an interpretation that helps a patient really get it as a feeling? And it's almost like I want to put blinders on and think, Wait, wait, wait, wait. That struck a chord. Is that what happens? Sometimes the simple answer is sometimes yes, you will get a hit and you can even see when you're talking to people, you might say center ahead because they feel or they might start to cry.

Do you have to inquire? What does that mean to them? Does it feel right? And you want to see? And sometimes people will say no. Yeah, you know what? I don't I don't think that's it or doesn't quite feel right. And I said, okay, then. I mean, I may be sold on it. That doesn't mean it's right, you know? And so I have to say. All right, Are they just not feeling it for whatever reason? Am I really? I've gone the wrong direction. Let me rethink this. Keep talking. Tell me what doesn't feel right. Okay. Tell me where it. Where does it feel, then? What?

What arena do you think we're in? If the person can say, and I have to try to see if I can come to it, sometimes I can't. That's just the reality. I would love to say I can wrap up each session with you know, a perfect interpretation. It's not like that. And so as I said, Well, all right, we'll pick it up the next time we meet. Let me come back to it. And we'll try to get it right and tell you. Okay. I think I think yeah, that's kind of that's what I'm talking about. So it's collaborative in that way. You really have to have the person's feedback.

And sometimes it is a lightning bolt moment or an epiphany and some dreams. Are you just moved completely And sometimes it's not. And even when somebody might say to me, I'm not sure I have to think about it, and sometimes it's very transparent, I think, how could it be anything but this? But okay, you think about it and let me know. Let's see and we'll watch the next dream. Don't stop dreaming. Think about it. We can always come back to it. Let your mind keep going. Let me see what the next dream says. Does it deepen it? Does it say more about it?

Does it say, yeah. Here, let me elaborate a little bit. You hit something. Maybe you weren't perfect, but you hit it enough. So you have to look at all of it. If someone were to say to you, Yeah, that that's not it, you're like, okay. And you can start to investigate other avenues. But if that. No, that's not it, is it that will show up down the road somewhere. It's going to show up and then you can figure out why didn't the person feel it or feel comfortable with it. And this I don't think many of us do very well. Is it similar to trusting your instincts and not stepping on your instincts?

Yes. That in itself is. Tricky. Because sometimes our instincts are so backwards because they've been stepped on so much. I see that they're all turned around and all over the place. So people say, Well, trust your gut. Yes, in the best of circumstances you might be able to trust your gut if you can hear what it's saying. But sometimes your guts off because you've got an imprint that put your gut not on the right path, you know it's going south and that's the North Star. It's got the wrong star. So we have to again, like everything I'm looking at, all the information.

It's never my goal to force an interpretation on somebody that doesn't do any good. It's, you know, even if it makes sense to me, if it doesn't make sense to the patient, then. You're not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere. And and there's no point. So let's figure out what doesn't feel right. And sometimes you're just working with that piece, what didn't feel right. And sometimes you have to figure out, is that person allowed to feel understood? Can they even relax enough to let you understand them, even if you don't get the dream right?

Are you allowed to be working at it? Has anybody ever worked hard, hard to understand what that person is saying, even if you don't get it right immediately? That's part of it, too. And that's lovely. What a nice space to be in in some of these interpretations where your patient then feels it and knows that that's the right path. Like for Jessica, she discovered that she wasn't allowed to have a voice. And when she discovered that, that must have been shocking on some level, I would think. I don't know. Maybe not. But it's certainly tragic to have lived all these years without a voice.

Do people generally, even though it's tragic or it hurts or it makes a person cry, is it also a glimmer of hope? Yes. Hopefully this gives people a lot of hope to find out that something has been happening out of your consciousness, even if you had hints of it to know what it is, while you may feel the sadness of it. Absolutely. But now you know what it is. Before you had no idea and you still felt the sadness, I think how hopeful to know and know that one could work through it. That, to me, is enormous hope. So, yes, sometimes it's a blow, but better.

You know what's happening, then? There's hope. How great to not have to think of yourself as a bad person or a flawed person because you can't do this thing. Whatever it is that this was an imprint you were given and you applied to yourself. That's very important because people will say, Well, aren't you just taking responsibility away from the person? The person has to be responsible for whatever it is? No, what we're trying to do is say, here was how it felt emotionally. These were the rules that were put in place. This is what you felt you had to obey.

It is now your responsibility to fix it, to change it if you want. So you have all the responsibility. Nobody's going to come in and do anything for you. You have to do all the work. It's your responsibility, but you have to know where it originated. And part of that is knowing your true emotional story. Here's what happened to me. Unconsciously, the whole unconscious piece is huge because people say, Well, this is what happened to me, okay. But I also need to know unconsciously, what did that mean to your mind? What happened as a result of all that?

Unconsciously, because the unconscious, seemingly silent as it is, is not actually we don't know about it. We're not in thinking, well, my unconscious just did something we're not. But it is actually governing everything. And well, it's giving us these loud messages in our dreams. If we choose to listen. Yeah. That's right. So listening to you share these dreams, more than once, I felt a twinge of. I can relate to that. that I can relate to that. And it put me in a place where I thought, I want to look at my dreams more and see if I can discover these things that maybe they show up often, or the things I have to think about the things that I thought were a truth.

Maybe they aren't. We spoke about this earlier, but on some level we can do that for ourselves. It's not the same as having you, but again, we can investigate our own lives, right? And think about what we're doing and what those around us are doing to help us do what we're doing, whether we like it or not. Yes, hopefully that's what people do. Get curious, get curious, start examining it. Look and see what you find in your dreams. Yes, it's hard. It is a big undertaking, but it's so worth it. You get to know yourself. Bails idea was Here's a way of understanding who we are.

I found it this way. I talk about it. I found it incredibly helpful to use that. Now, of course, you go into every session, I try not to sell. It has to fit into Bails theory. Yeah. I didn't cover everything, right? So you have to be open and just listen. But I'll tell you, it's a really good place to start. It gives you a way to organize things and be thinking that takes you back to the beginning. And the idea was, if you want to understand something, go as far back as you can. Go to the beginning. Why start in the middle? You're going to miss everything. so much.

So this is go back to the beginning. Well, where's the beginning? Back with Mom and Dad. Where did you start, Mom? There is a large group of people who don't know who their parents are. They don't know, you know, for various reasons. So that's important. That's very important. We have to take that into consideration. But okay, that doesn't mean most of the time that means you were raised by someone. That person will lay down certain expectations also. So it's all in there, the unconscious records at all. You're not going anywhere in your life where you're not interacting with the environment on this deep level.

We are right now unconsciously communicating. It's somewhere in there. We are feeling each other. For the longest time in my life, my father used to like, walk around in my head. Whenever I made a decision. I heard his voice. I saw his face. Is this going to be a decision that he's going to like? And that was so narrowing. I mean, given he was a strong, smart person. But through the course of, I'd say, thinking about my dreams and feeling different things relative to my dreams, he's there and I hear him and I say, okay, stand down. And that feels very good.

That's important, right? Why do I have to please you? Why? I wanted you to love me. But I'm not a baby anymore. I'm not a kid. I don't need you to really approve of that, too. Am I really so worried that I'm going to lose your love and die? Now, what about this idea that maybe I just do what I want? What do I. Want? That's novel. What if I don't hear your voice? What do I want? And can I just do that? Very liberating. Jessica had the dream about the to Robbins, and it was so full, even though it was really short. Was it clear to you what your interpretations would be, or was that from the beginning a matter of collaboration?

Both. I had a hunch. I had a feeling of where she was going, given everything she was saying, but I had to prove it. I don't like to make an interpretation that I can't support. I try not to just say, Well, my feeling is this is it. And it does seem that she kind of came to it through her free association. It's like, this, this, this. Wait a minute. Then there's this. Right. And and some of what wasn't in the session because I didn't do every single back and forth is I try to ask questions that elicit enough thinking on her part talking so that I can be listening to said, All right, is that the mother or is it her?

Who do I have here? Do I both? I hear about Robin. What's she like? Let me hear. So I may have a hypothesis or a hunch, and then I have to set about proving it. And then I have to say it and see what the responses. And then I have to say, is my patient just being nice because my patient wants to please me and won't say, What is she talking about right. There, ready to get out of there? They don't want to deal with it. No, she. Doesn't want me to talk either, so I better not say I don't like that interpretation. So you're listening for all of that?

When the patient finally feels that interpretation deeply, that's it. Does that just by virtue of that, does that release some of the trauma or reduce the trash in the trash can? Exactly. It reduces it. We've now got. All right. Here we go. We've got a category of trash. We now can be aware of it. It's not like that clears the whole place out. Then you've got to go in and have all the dreams in each dream pulls out another piece of trash. So it's work. And so your load is lightened and that feels good. So why wouldn't you want to lighten that more?

Jessica's dream about the password and the zero is so clear. It too seems so simple. I'm sure it wasn't. That wasn't as simple. But listening to you talk about it, it's like, wow, it's just right there. But I get that if it wasn't in your collaboration, her discovery of needing to be a zero in order to survive and then knowing that she was following in her mother's footsteps is awesome. And that's such big news to Jessica. I find this to be surprising and awesome. Or was she sort of like, yeah, let's kind of. I think that she had to work up to really understanding what that meant.

I think it sounded fine. I think she got it. I think she could see how her mother had not been able to become who she really wanted to be. But I think to get the full impact of that, that was not like you say it once. And she went, like that's wow, No, no. Took time. And I guess it's a big thing to contend with. Pretty frightening. It's frightening. What does that mean for someone? Yeah, What do you mean? I'm a zero? I don't think she came in feeling like a zero. Right. So this is a case that that's what she's carrying. So she didn't feel like a complete zero.

But what that would mean is that she would assume she was capable. She wanted to go do things. She wanted these job. She wanted to get it and couldn't understand why they would sort of all disappear. And she didn't understand that she's carrying her mother's requirement to be a zero. So every time she got close to doing anything where she wasn't a zero, the unconscious would somehow do something. It would communicate something, which is I'm not to have this. So it would make you crazy because you can't think of what happens. Why don't I get this job?

If they tell me I'm good, I interview. Well, everything seems like it's happening. Then it falls apart. And she didn't know that that pull to be a zero was going to be so impactful when she herself didn't necessarily feel like a zero in her life. There may have been some some things that were hard in her life, but I don't think she would have come in saying, I feel like I'm just a nothing. Yeah. In the first dream about Robin and Robin, Jessica found that she was sleeping. She was not engaged in her truth. As you said, she needed to be awake to be able to take in the meaning of other imprints.

And it seems that this one in the second dream, the one of being a zero, puts her almost at the base of all her trauma. Is that so? Do we have an imprint that's at the base of everything and then other imprints on top of that? Probably I say probably because I don't think I've seen every single case I want to be. I want to leave some room. Sure. Yes, we have some that are going to be more foundational. It doesn't mean the other pieces aren't there. But it's so interesting. I mean, sometimes you think you're working and you got to say, okay, I think we got say, boy, lo and behold, you might peel something else back.

And then yet which one is at the root? We may not need to even argue about that. You just have to know they're both there. But one was keeping you away from really knowing something, and that's always fascinating. So it's not sequential necessarily. For example, you said, you know, Jessica discovered that she didn't have the right to have a voice. And I thought, wow, that's that's big. That's really big. And then to find out that actually she's a zero huge. But so I understand there's you don't have to try hard to get to this one imprint they're all affecting work.

With it all see what the patient wants. What's nice is what you get to follow is what does the patient's mind want to know in that moment to grow? Because that's the dream that comes. I see. Yeah. So you're following the dream because that sets the treatment. It really says, Go here, go here now, go there now, go here now, Go back there. Because I'm. I'm still wrestling with this. Come back, Come back. So you get to follow the patient's mind, which is much better than me saying, here's what I think my patient needs to know about next. That's nice for me.

But that doesn't mean that patient needs that. So I'd much prefer I have to follow. What does the patient's mind want to know? And the information in the dream is always leading you to your truth. Or you might be dreaming something that is more representative of this internal saboteur like you've been doing. So well, I'm going to put your mind over here now. Yes, that happens quite a lot. Each dream. I don't assume all this is some truth about your life. I mean, I'm listening. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It may be a whole host of things, though.

Some of them have to do with something you went to and you may make a critique about it in a dream. Okay. Well, clearly, that was just important for the mind. It wanted this. No. Now you might have remembered that dream because it's a little less shocking than maybe another dream you had that night. You might start there because the mind that I can talk about. Okay, then let's start there. Let me start where you are. And then maybe the next night. then you have the other dream. It's variable because it really just depends on what the person is allowed to know.

Wants to know, needs to know, and is allowed to know in any given moment. And what you can see with an imprint and people having a prohibition against often knowing what the emotional truth in the family was, who was in love, who wasn't in love, who was cheating on whom, who didn't really want to be there, who felt trapped, who was really a baby looking for a mother or father and not ready to be a parent. All of it. Parents don't want all the dirty laundry hung out there for all the kids to know. So the unconscious goes to work and says. Blocks it all off.

So we have to see where are you? So start wherever you want to start. Dream about it and we'll find our way. That feels so comfortable. And that even that may be uncomfortable. True, right? Because somewhere the mind of But I know where you're going. You even if I haven't said it people you know they just an okay you're going to want to get to the meat. Well yes. If you do come as long as you want, if you're satisfied or you decide you don't want to go further, don't come anymore. You have that say. And yes, sometimes it's the internal saboteur that will make somebody leave treatment.

They're not ready, meaning they still have a lot of things they haven't worked out and would like to work out on some level. But they may say, I'm not allowed to even do this. And then then you can't. Yeah, and that's just what it is. So I think everybody who sees people, any therapist is familiar with this in some way. We just get to see it often with a dream. Sometimes I know before somebody is going to leave a treatment, you know, I mean, a sometimes you can just feel that, but also you can see it in a dream. And I might say, this looks like you're upset with me or you're not allowed to be here.

I'm not allowed to help you or you're not allowed to take in help, or you felt I was too much like your mother when I said this to you. I made this interpretation, and maybe the words were too similar to her. I'm looking for everything. So yeah, you had to keep a huge picture. I can't assume anything. Really. I can't even assume that Bail's theory is right. If I can help it, I don't even want to assume that. Let me say he might have a theory, and I found it to be helpful, but I have to again question it and say, But does it make sense here? And it's really comforting to have a theory, let me tell you, because you're out there at the end of a small branch hoping you can help somebody write the person in front of you.

This is there for help. They don't care what theory you've got. Who cares, right? Help me. Help me understand myself. So it's really comforting to have a theory. But even that if you can, you have to say, Let me just weigh the material as best I can. Let me try to use my internal voice, my feelings, to see where this person is. That's exciting. Part of the work. You get to challenge yourself every day, every session, knowing nothing is ever the same. It's lovely that sometimes, unbeknownst to your patient, perhaps, that a dream will show that they're kind of on the edge.

They're like close to getting out the door so that you're given an opportunity to actually go over that with them. Yeah, Hopefully you're given an opportunity to go over everything. We touched on women generally feeling unconsciously like zeros. We spoke about that after we were talking about Jessica's dream. It seems accurate to me and it seems like truly a major loss for humanity. We seem to be on the edge of just almost losing control as humanity. How do we overcome this? This is such a big question. I think really, it's by this process. But outside of this process, do you think that we're getting somewhere currently?

I mean, women and women's rights are sort of a popular discussion these days, but are we getting to the root of it? Well, it seems like we're going backwards in certain ways, So I'd have to say no. I mean, we're told all the time, Now speak up. Talk about these ways you've been hurt or shamed. And then you get a backlash. If we're not all looking inside. Men and women. Men and women start their look inside every single human being started in a woman. I'm not saying men are important or involved, but even the men started inside of a woman. So you got the same trash delivered to you that the woman sitting next to you, God.

And you were in the womb of a woman who already knew that she was not equal. Yeah, that's right. Everybody starts in a woman who knows she's not considered equal. That's a problem. That is a problem for humanity. One of our biggest. One of the biggest, because it's the root. Go back to the beginning. You know, let's look at the ripple effect. What ripple effect does that have when you're out at the 10th circle of starting in a woman who feels like she is less than in some way doesn't have the same opportunities, you name it, education, work, power, a seat at the table, can't decide about her own body, whatever it is.

And that attitude then by the 10th Ripple, or maybe the fifth Ripple, is just just wrote. Of course, men deserve more money doing the same job as a woman. You know, it's things like that where you don't even give it a second thought. And you don't know you felt that way. That's your point. You don't know what started where it started. So, yes, if everybody can start to look inside first and this isn't navel gazing, this isn't being completely just occupied with yourself for a real purpose to understand how you work so that you're not out there in the world making trouble.

When trouble's been done to you, you will make trouble. We're all making trouble. We're all making trouble. You can look around. We are all doing something wrong. We're not looking at problems in the right way. And this is just to say, look, I'm not saying this is going to fix everything, but I can certainly tell you, if you start to deeply understand yourself in your unconscious and understand that this started from the beginning of your life, you may start asking better questions. We have to ask better questions. If you think about it just a little bit, that's a pretty simple thing to do, really, to ask better questions.

As different questions, we have to open up our minds and say we've been doing the same thing for a long time. We have to open, we have to go in, try to see where we're blocked. We just may not even have imagined yet what is the framework for the right, a better thing, even. What does it look like? We're using our old technology, even though we look fancy with our electronics, we're using very old technology to imagine life. This is a way to begin to open everything up, expand. Then maybe new ideas get to come. Maybe we don't have a political system yet designed that really represents the people.

Yes, we haven't even thought of it yet. We haven't thought of it. It hasn't occurred to us yet because we're too shackled internally and. We don't know how to think of something outside of what we know. What we know. That's right. Bernard said that imprints generally are just beautifully simple. Maybe they're described in a line or two. It is hard to grasp that something so simple can truly create such havoc. For me, it seems like what happens when you disrupt a glassy, smooth lake by throwing a stone into it? We were just talking about that. A complicated ripple effect is created in nature, though that is so gently taken away and the lake is once again smooth in Jessica's case.

Well, or in anybody's case, is it easy to let the simplicity take hold? We seem to be set on complication. What I mean is, can we just sort of buy in to that simple thing that we were just discovering about ourselves, or do we want to pile on stuff? Well, it can't. It can't be just bad. It has to be more difficult than that. Right now. We pile on all kinds of stuff. For us, it doesn't dissipate. That lake never gets smooth again. I suppose at some point we are just returned to, you know, a different form of matter. Maybe you could say it gets smooth in your soul, has to figure out what else it wants to do.

But we pile on a lot and maybe in, I don't know, hundred years, 500 years maybe. The idea if this takes hold, if it makes sense to people, maybe they say, right. It started at the beginning of my life because it starts at the beginning. And there were all sorts of things that disrupted me. And it's easy. I wasn't supposed to say my mind. Okay, I get it. That, yeah, I felt that my whole life and I'll work on that for a year or so and then I can let that go. Or maybe in 500 years you'll just kind of sit there and some of them I think. Yeah. Yeah.

This is sounds like what you're talking about. Right. And we'll have evolved. Yeah. It'll be more part of who we are. Yeah. You'll just know that exists and it's not such a foreign concept. Now. This is a foreign language. What do you mean? And our unconscious is a foreign place. And so hopefully over time, our unconscious is not such a foreign place. We all have it. It's working all the time. Go there. It'll just be part of our day to day. Yeah, and this is difficult to do on your own, but I think at least you start to get some ideas and you can start thinking about your own life.

And that's enormous. That's terrific. That's it for the questions I have. But if you leave me alone long enough, I'll come up with a whole new list. Okay? I'll be happy to try to answer them. Thank you again. Thank you.