During each night of sleep, we experience an average of four or five cycles of dreaming For many years I have been curious about dreams, paying attention to my own, and attending to the dreams of other persons, in my clinical practice and in ongoing dream councils. Not only am I curious about the dreams, I am also interested in how we choose to relate to dreams. My work with dreams has led me to develop a way of relating to
dreams that I call "Dream Tending." To "tend," says the Oxford English Dictionary, is to turn the mind, attention, or energies: to apply oneself to the care and service of a dream. Methods of Dream Tending which I present in this article are based upon certain assumptions, certain beliefs about the very nature of dreams I believe that dreams are alive. The images in dreams have lives and bodies of their own; they are not merely projections of the dreamer. The dreamer is not necessarily the center of the dream. Autonomous images may appear in the dream to interact with the dreamer, but the
totality of the dream should not be reduced, only, to "a story about me." I imagine a dream as a
community event, a town meeting of images each image having a life of its own, yet also
relating to other images (including the dreamer). These images often have something to say
about their own lives, their own plights in the world. Part of the value dreams is that we have
access to these voices of other beings in the world, and we have the opportunity to relate to them
in a deeper way than we often do in our waking life.
My second belief in Dream Tending is that the human psyche is inherently multi-dimensional. In conceptualizing the psyche, I delineate four levels. These levels are the Ego (consciousness), the Personal Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious and the World Unconscious. Although each of these levels of psyche is distinct, they also are deeply interrelated.
A given dream may emphasize one particular level more than others, say the Personal Unconscious, yet the other levels are also likely to be present in the dream. The art of Dream Tending includes exploration of these levels and a consideration of "what" and "who" live between them.
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