Veronica Whitty

It was a Tuesday morning in Stanley. Stanley is a small town outside Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. The street names in Stanley tell some of its stories. They include Lenin Terrace, Engels Terrace, Marx Crescent and Keir Hardie Avenue in South Stanley. In East Stanley can be found Closes named after Byron, Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Betjeman, Blake. Famous women are not forgotten so in the area where the community centre is located can be found Nightingale Place, Bronte Place, Aylward Place, Pankhurst Place, Darling Place, Cavell Place and Fonteyn Place.

Not far from Gladstone Street is Mandela Close. My walk from the bus-station takes me near Engels Terrace and along Mendip Terrace and Cotswold Terrace.

The North Durham Health Care (National Health Service Trust) has asked me to do dreamwork as part of their series of workshops for parents living in Stanley.

This morning nine women, some with children, were gathering for the third dreamgroup session. Only one woman had been before. She had attended the first two sessions. She had had quite a detailed dream interpreted the previous occasion in February. We had some tea and coffee and a chat and then went through the relaxation process and were ready now to begin.

A woman in her fifties had been sketching her dream. She showed the picture and explained:

Everyone had a good laugh over the five tomatoes but what a great dream! It was simple, short and with a distinctive unusual feature. The dreamer had no idea what it meant so we set about asking questions. We got nowhere until someone asked when she had had the dream. The dreamer, let's call her Pat, said she'd had it the previous year. She was asked what was going on in her life at the time of the dream i.e. recent concerns as in the dream worksheet.

Pat said her son, aged sixteen, who was about to sit his exams and possibly go into the army, suddenly left home and moved in with a 32-year-old woman who had… she didn't need to finish the sentence as several voices said “five children”. There was silence. Pat had been devastated, she told the group. There had been no contact from her son since then but she had heard through various people that her son was left to baby-sit the five children while his partner went out drinking saying to him he was too young to drink!

Pat was deeply concerned about these five children living in this strange environment.

“He can come to you but you can't reach him,” observed one woman looking at the picture. She pointed out that the fence allowed access from the corner but not from Pat's bedroom. She would have to wait, said the woman, until her son was ready to contact her.

“But why tomatoes?” It's a nest and you find eggs in a nest, not tomatoes. Any unusual feature is pointing out something the dreamer is focused upon or needs to focus upon.

“Eggs”, observed another woman, “get hard but tomatoes are easily bruised.” Hence her protective feelings towards the five tomatoes. The affect had led us straight to the interpretation of the dream.

Everyone pondered this observation. Good dreamwork like this affects everyone present. It touches on all our lives. We are all human beings and we are all inter-dependent.

Those who had contributed knew they had done good work and the interpretations and solidarity of the group was a comfort to the dreamer. She had shared her concerns. They had been heard. She had been supported. The self-esteem of the group had risen because they had ‘cracked it’. What was once baffling had, with a joint approach, been deciphered. There was no need for a leader or facilitator, except to keep to the process and for the group to keep questioning. Symbols are very cleverly presented by the unconscious. Everything is in the symbol but it needs to be examined from every possible angle.

When we met again the following January Pat had received a Christmas card the day before Christmas Eve in which her son had written his new address and phone number. He was to be a father. Pat now knew where they were for the first time. Although she wasn't thrilled with his news she felt better about her son.

In dreamwork look for the unusual details first. They are the ones the unconscious is pointing to. It's as though the unconscious is saying: “Look, here's a common setting, something you're familiar with, but look over here at this. And ‘this’ will be an exaggerated detail or something missing or something in a different colour than it normally is. It may be something or someone behaving in a most unusual way. This is how your unconscious draws attention to the important aspects of the dream it has created for you.”

A dream could be like a drama with the first act being the present, the second the past and the third the future. (Jung said there were four acts in a dream.) At one dream conference our small group looked at colours. Later that week I went to a workshop specifically on colours. Someone mentioned that in her experience a dog can stand for God backwards and in one dream she worked on, it evoked images of a mastiff and Thompson's poem “The Hound of Heaven”

The group at the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conference advised asking the dreamer where his/her age was known in a dream to ask “What happened to you x years ago?” “What have you been doing for the last x years?” One dreamer in our group recalled a dream he had sometime in the past. The fact that he recalled that dream, said someone in the group, could mean there was still energy in the dream for the dreamer. “What are you seeking from this dream now?” she asked.