Written by Gilly Crow

THE MAGICAL WORLD OF DREAMS

Review by Gunnel Minett

Dreams are often a very powerful way to meet your unconscious self. They can offer a fascinating insight to a side of yourself that you are not familiar with. This is particularly the case when you have the opportunity to analyse your dreams in a dream group or when dream interpretation is offered as a part of psychotherapy. And, as the author emphasises; “The dream is a call from the unconscious to look at something more closely in waking and/or inner life.“(p134) 

Understanding our dreams requires more than just comprehending them, and how we can benefit from them. Reading about dreams and how the dreamer themselves interprets them can be very useful. As this book illustrates, dream interpretation can be very much a practical exercise. “Try not to intellectualise or theorise but be more aware of intuitive and somatic responses to the material being shared.” (P134) Dream interpretation can also be compared to learning a new language. Apart from learning the basic ‘grammar and structure’, it is very much a question of getting examples with which to practise. There is no better way to learn a language than being exposed to examples and practicing them yourself. The main focus of this book, therefore, gives detailed accounts of dreams and how they have been analysed and understood. This provides a good guide as to how you can ‘learn your own language’.

Dreams constitute a language of images and symbols, with which however  most of us are unfamiliar. We generally invoke logic and common sense  when analysing our experience of the world around us. But in dreams those limitations can be removed. As we learn in this book, in dreams we can fly, be in several places at the same time, travel through time and space, meet know and unknown entities, dead or alive people, friends or strangers, talk to animals or anything else our minds can fabricate. To understand and make sense of dreams can therefore be a challenge. This is why there are so many dream-dictionaries on the market. You dream about a house and simply look up the meaning of ‘house’ in your dream. But, as the author points out, it is not that simple to learn the language of dreams. You have to learn your individual language. Learn how your unconscious communicates with you. 

A good way to do this is to participate in a dream group and get feedback from others. Or, as the author suggests, the dreamer can be encouraged to act out their dreams. The role of group participants is not to interpret your dreams, but to help you interpret your own dream. The author relies significantly on the work of Carl Jung, who was a pioneer when it comes to using dreams as part of psychotherapy. Books about dreams tend to be either academic and technical, with lots of explanations of symbols, or over-simplified, to the point where they offer the wrong incorrect information and/or false help. This book gets it absolutely right: it is both simple and easy to digest, while at the same time accurate and very much to the point. 

Published by Matador Books, Market Harborough, UK, 2024, 154 PP, ISBN 978-1-80514-174-7