DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES - A GESTALT HYPOTHESIS

This article is based on the writings of my good friend Martha Preciado, now deceased, who was the director of the Gestalt Institute of Guadalajara, Mexico. I was visiting Mexico in the 1990's and did some training in that Institute. Martha was a great leader and therapist and inspired many students, now graduates, to carry on the excellent gestalt tradition. I have the honour of translating her paper from Spanish and invite the reader to reflect on her ideas and give me feedback later.

 

DREAMS AS NIGHTMARES – A GESTALT HYPOTHESIS

            By

 

Martha L. Preciado – Translated from Spanish by Yaro Starak

 

Introduction

 

Working with dreams as a gestalt therapist gives me great personal insight as a human being and it also enables me to be in touch with my own magical/symbolic part.

It is also a wonderful opportunity to enable people to become more whole and more in touch with their existential self. When this happens, the person discovers more energy for living a fuller life, takes more risks or challenges in their daily life and for many it fulfils an inner purpose or destiny that life presents them.

As a gestalt therapist, I have often reflected deeply on the issues that our dreams place before us. Of particular interest to me are the dreams commonly called “nightmares” In my own experience and in the experience of many other psychotherapists the following are the basic questions that arise when we work with nightmares:

 

• What do nightmares offer us?
• What special messages does the nightmare send us?
• Can we learn and develop further by working with our nightmares?

 

When I work with clients that present their dreams as nightmares, I find that they have a strong urgency to do something about their dream. They either want to get rid of these nightmares quickly or want to find out why they are coming to bother and frighten them.

Gestalt therapists often work with recurrent dreams and nightmares. The fundamental grounding literature about nightmares points out to the notion that nightmares consistently produce strong feelings of anxiety, fear and horror. They are experiences that often are related as some sort of horror movies.

However, such simplistic answers are not enough and as a result I began to focus my observations carefully on my clients’ nightmares in my own practice. My observations led me to the following hypothesis that will be elaborated in this article. First, let us review the question more specifically: “what are nightmares”?

 

What Are Nightmares?

Nightmares have at least two specific and distinguishing features:

 

(a)    They are charged with a high level of anxiety. This anxiety is experienced for some time, even after the nightmare is interrupted and the person is fully awake and

(b)   Nightmares bring about strong, frightening images but often, when a person awakens, he or she will not have any sense of fear or anxiety about them.

 

For example, a client reported a dream/nightmare and stated that she dreamt of a cup with red liquid and she was sure that this cup was full of human blood. After this nightmare the client had a major anxiety attack and was afraid to go to sleep.

Another client of mine presented the following image: She dreamt of a deformed, mutilated female body without legs or arms and was covered with wounds smelling quite putrid. However this client had no particular feelings about this dream when she spoke about it.

Although in the first case the dreamer had a strong reaction to her image, and while in the second case there was no affect present, both dream experiences can be classified as nightmares. In many cases nightmares are experienced following a traumatic event. Such an event may be an upsetting horror film, experiencing a shock, being in or watching an accident or having an unusual amount of stress in life which precipitates fears and worries.

For example, one client reported that after her divorce she had the following nightmare: “ I am at a café, sitting and reading a book. Suddenly a man enters holding a big knife in his hand. He begins to kill every customer in the café and I feel that he is going to kill me any moment now. I feel totally frozen and unable to move because of this horrible fear I have. I wake up in a sweat.”

 

Some Theoretical Reflections about Nightmares

Gestalt therapy has developed a special method of working with dreams that has a specific therapeutic outcome. Dream work is a subtle way of entering into the “magic” world of the client’s inner self. However, the therapist enters this world carefully not interpreting the meaning. Also without leaving behind the process of healing by using the therapeutic method.

The basic philosophy of gestalt dream work is to re-integrate the disowned (split) parts of the inner self with the purpose of promoting a healing of the whole person. We call this process ‘the holographic principle.’ We follow the assertion that the dreamer creates all parts of the dream. No one else is creating the dream. A dream is totally and fully our own production, our own drama and our own direction.

If this assertion is true, then all that constitutes a dream is our own projection phenomenon. Fritz Perls was the first proponent of this assertion. He stated that our own disowned parts of the self are expressing themselves in the dream as if it were a play on stage. However this principle is not as simple as it appears to be. Since we may identify with each of the parts in the dream, we also develop an automatic resistance to these parts. We will invariably resist the images in the dream that are not too attractive, pleasant or acceptable to us. For example we may ask; who wants to identify with a dirty pig, a killer, an evil or a horrible monster?

In the case of nightmares, where images are extremely frightening and negative, we naturally tend to refuse to confront such parts, let alone identify with them.  We experience these horrific images as a direct threat to our personal integrity and our own idea of sanity.

The second theoretical reflection is about the gestalt notion of “unfinished business”. This means that something is in the foreground of our awareness and the rest is in the background and hidden from our awareness. When an experience in our life is not complete (finished) the figure/background process tends to become rigid and develops a protective ‘guardian’ that may appear as a ‘solution’ to what has been an unfinished situation.

For example, if I am a child, and I am lacking the maturity and perspective in solving life’s problems, I am not able to handle the attacks upon me by my alcoholic or abusive father or other such difficult and painful situations. As a result of this trauma, I develop a protective pattern of splitting away from my body whereby I will not feel any pain when I get maltreated.

As I grow up this protective pattern is repeated again and again when I encounter what I perceive as abusive situations with others. In spite of the fact that many of these situations I can handle perfectly well as an adult, my early familiar pattern gives me immediate although temporary relief. In time this pattern may develop into what we call “a frozen gestalt” and become a compulsion, a neurotic habit, an addiction or become entrenched in body symptoms. In other words, I develop an avoidance pattern called retroflection.

Retroflection is an internal body symptom that emerges when we do to ourselves what we want to do to others. (I want to fight back and hit my father and instead I fight with myself).

In nightmares we often experience both phenomena at the same time – retroflection and projection. For example, I am dreaming that I am being violently attacked, dismembered and feel like a victim but also in this dream I am the aggressor who attacks and inflicts the pain. Now, what follows is my hypothesis as a result of my practice in working with nightmares.

 

Hypothesis

A scenario: There were times in my life that I experienced a traumatic or difficult situations in which I had a wish/desire/urge to retaliate or release my natural aggressive impulses. However my impulses were stopped by stronger or more powerful opponents. As a form of defence, I retroflected (turned against myself) my aggressive impulses and developed symptoms that enabled me to deal internally with the unfinished situations that required finishing outside myself. This repressed/aggressive energy I turned against myself and as a result I developed pseudo-solutions to my issues like self-hate, low self-esteem, self-mutilation, addictions and so on.

And so, while sleeping I begin to dream of being aggressive and project my aggressive impulses onto images that become so strong that they bounce back at me as nightmares. Thus the process of retroflection and projection goes in both directions – into/against me and out of myself and against others while I am asleep.

 

Working with Nightmares in Gestalt Therapy

Working with nightmares using the gestalt approach we often experience new resolutions to the problems presented by the dreams. Here is a brief description of the steps we undertake in such work:

• A person narrates the nightmare in the present tense (here & now).
• The therapist encourages the client to select an image that may be at this moment most significant, strongest or in the person’s foreground.
• The client is encouraged to become more aware of the specific details of this image.
• Invariably the aggressive (energetic) impulses will emerge and are explored in the here and now situation.
• The feeling of excitement/anxiety may be amplified at this time in the context of the ‘safe emergency’ of this session.
• The therapist enables the client to ‘stay in the present’ and encounter the dream image.
• There may be an opportunity for a dialogue with this strong image, however, the mere facing the image may be enough.
• The therapist pays particular attention to the emerging unfinished business in this encounter as it unfolds in the session.
• There may be strong, aggressive language, powerful feelings, memories of earlier experiences, emotional release and so on manifesting itself as the blocked  energy is released behind the unfinished situation.
• Next the therapist pays close attention to the retroflective patterns (e.g. Self-fulfilling prophecies) that may appear as a “frozen” figure, a sense of losing power or losing energy altogether. Here we may see the ‘impasse’ phenomenon.
• The therapist does not attempt to change anything but simply supports this process as it is.(paradoxical theory of change).
• When a strong figure emerges, from this impasse, the therapist encourages the client to re-identify with this figure.
• In the supportive environment of the therapeutic session, the client is encouraged to identify with and take the position of the strong figure in the dream and make contact with it.
• Having identified with this figure the client enters the dream once more and expresses him/herself fully as this dream figure, e.g. “I am the Devil!”  “I am the witch!” “I am the killer!” and so on.
• The nightmare scenario is recreated again with the support of the therapist and work continues until the unfinished situation become complete and no longer threatens the client with nightmares.

As a working example, a client began to express images of a nightmare that appeared intransigent (uncompromising) and began to get stuck in a ‘frozen’ figure.  Suddenly a memory came up of a time when she was a teenager and in a relationship with an older man. She reported that he was often violent and abusive to her and this lasted several years. She felt powerless and stuck, unable to leave him. She also felt guilty and remorseful about the relationship.

In the nightmare she is watching a cement truck covering the streets not with cement but with a dead body that someone threw into the cement container of this truck. The truck was ‘cementing’ the streets with what she described as a “human mixture”.

The therapist recreated the dream asking her client to be the driver of that cement truck and put the man she felt abused by in her life in the container of this truck. While she identified with the truck driver she began to imagine that she is covering the streets with his material and his persona and began to shout: “yes, yes, it is him and he is in my truck” While she drove the truck in this recreated dream she began to say: “here I am cementing al my insecurities that are left from that time with him”, Now I am cementing all my fears of new relationships”……..and so on.

The therapist kept monitoring her feelings and supporting her strong ability to act both physically and emotionally in the new dream scenario.

After this enactment of the dream, the client stated that she felt rather strong, satisfied and happy about the way her life went on. She became more integrated in her relationship with others by not feeling so powerless in the presence of men. When asked what the nightmare’s existential message was for her she replied: “the dream said to me that it is time that you take charge of your life, you are strong and capable now and you can heal yourself!”

 

Conclusion 

Gestalt work with nightmares is mainly intra-personal; it enables a client to combine the left brain activity of the narrative and the right brain activity of the created images. In this way the person can develop new tools for living a full life.

By integrating our interior life we will be able to integrate fully our interpersonal world and increase our capacity to grow and relate with others more fully and in a new way.

In gestalt work with nightmares the outcome is often positive, the nightmares disappear and life becomes a joy to live.

In the meantime, the therapist must be in close contract with the client for some time to ensure that the inner process is no longer psychologically disturbing and that the client has fully finished what the inner world of dreams is presenting to him or her.

I trust that this short article and my hypothesis within, may be of some help to therapists that attempt to enter the world of the nightmare and shed some light on some of the least known, murky and shadowy aspects of psychotherapy.

 

References:

Ferud, Sigmund; 1948. “Introduction to Psychanalysis” part 3 in the “Dreams” section.

Perls, Fritz; 1974. “Dreams and Existence” Editorial 4. Vientos, Santiago de Chile Publisher.

 Downing, Jack & Marmorstein, Robert;  1973, “Dreams & Nightmares” Harper and Row publishers.

 

 

Fritz Perls by Otto Dix, artist.