Your Mind Matters With Maria Kempinska – Gabrielle Pinto & Martin Pollecoff, Dreams In Therapy

I don't dream. That's what I'm often told by clients and friends. But everyone dreams, it's been proven. And if you keep a pad and pen by your bed, it will prompt you to remember this is your matters. And I'm Dr. Maria Kempinska. Before I introduce my guest today, for the discussion on the topic dreams in therapy, their personal and social meanings, I'll give you a very brief history of dreams. Freud said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. All symbols in dreams, as far as he was concerned, are sexual. They were sexual representations of his psychosexual theory. But of course, there were times when Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. Jung, however, said the dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is, not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. The Lakota Indians saw dreams as visions, dreams and visions as the same. A dream meant nothing without a manifestation for the community. And Joseph Campbell, who has influenced the Star wars films. I was going to say trilogy, but it's much more than that. Said a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our unconscious lives. And a myth is there in society's dreams. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. But one of my favorite quotes is just a woman in Camden who was shopping and she reportedly said to Fraser Boa, who had extensive interviews with various dream interpreters and dream psychotherapists, she said, I'm interested in my life and I believe dreams reveal my life to me. Finally, before I introduce my two guests, the Greeks used dreams from. And they would offer these up to Apollo, hoping he would come in to their dreams and heal their diseases or illnesses. And when the healing had occurred, they would then process that the climax of their healing was made into some artistic form, whether that's a piece of art, a poem, a song or a story. And this would be spoken to the public. And I absolutely love that idea because it becomes the culmination of the totality of healing. So to join me today is Martin Polikoff, the ukcp, that's the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists, and a psychotherapist in his own right, and Gabrielle Pinto, a homeopath, who both look, and both of them look at dreams in their therapeutic work. So, firstly, Gabrielle, welcome. And can you tell me how you view dreams? And can you give an example of dreams in your therapy? Hi, Maria. Thank you for inviting me today. I was trained Classical homeopath. And I noticed this is over 40 years ago. And I began to notice, because I was always very interested in psychotherapy, that sometimes patients came or clients came with very meaningful dreams and that these, during the process of seeing me as a homeopath, would start to change. So I started to document what was going on. I don't know whether other homeopaths have done the same thing. But anyway, I also carried on with my studies as a therapist, working with a lovely couple in America, Dr. Hal Stone and Dr. Sidra Stone, on a particular type of training called Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves. And what they began to research and understand is that lots of aspects of ourself, parts of ourselves sometimes manifest in the dreams. And I will explain this by discussing a couple of issues that cropped up during my practice. So the idea very much that I have followed over the years is, apart from the fact that we have this very rich history of symbols and ideas, of visions in dreams, is that sometimes the people that populate our dreams can be parts of ourselves that we may be having difficulty, difficulty with, or other people that we may be struggling with in the real world, and they come into our dream time. So that's my sort of base that my general base. Jung said exactly the same, didn't he? Put the dreams into different areas where if you dreamt, if you were a woman and you dreamt of a man, that was your animus, and if you were a man dreaming of a woman, that was your anima, who was like your muse. And they would represent something not only in your present day, what's going on in your life, but also in your deep internal life. So it's very similar. Yes. Well, basically, Hal was a Jungian analyst who had originally been studying with Jung briefly, and he's now passed away. But if I tell you these stories, perhaps they'll just elucidate what I'm trying to say. So one of the clients who came to see me, her presenting physical complaint was really bad lower back pain and sciatica. And she was a teacher and she was a very conscientious person, very responsible, and she never really ever missed any work. She would always carry on working whenever she could. She had quite a demanding head teacher, but she'd also had a very distressing falling out with an old friend. So that had upset her. And her neighbor had bullied her and agreed to cut some. And she'd agreed to cut some trees down in the gard. Anyway, she went back to teaching and her back was Much, much worse. And eventually I prescribed a remedy for her. But she also said to me at the time, all I'm dreaming about are sharks going circles. In my dream I'm underwater and these sharks are dangerous and they're circling me and I'm really struggling with these awful recurrent nightmares and a dangerous sea. So when I gave her the remedy, I asked her to carry on documenting the dreams and to come back to me with a follow up in about six weeks time, making sure that she also did a bit of resting in between to rest her back. Anyway, she carried on working and she came back to me about six weeks later and reported the following dream. In this dream she was again back in the water and it was still a very difficult sea. But instead of being circled by sharks, she was being circled by dolphins who wanted to connect and play with her. And the very interesting thing that had happened was that she had stood up at school and said to her head teacher, I can't take on all this extra work right now, I really need to be careful and cut back a bit. She had managed to sort out the relationship that had been very much distressing her with her friend. Now the way I view that dream is as follows. For me, with my training, the sharks at the beginning of the dream, in the first dream very much represent what I call our instinctual energies. The parts of ourselves that we have, sometimes consciousness, sometimes we don't know is there. So they're underwater, so to speak, in the sea. And these sharks are dangerous. And for some people who are kind and soft and sweet and who take on a lot of responsibility and often work very hard, it's quite difficult sometimes, I've noticed for these kinds of people to say no. So for me, the sharks are the parts of herself that are circulating, trying to connect to her, to put, to give her a little bit of what I would call shark energy, which is a bit more fierceness in order to say no, yes, that's, that's really power. It could be seen that there's two elements to that, couldn't it? That exactly that part. And also the fact that they could be sharks as literally. Not literally, but metaphorically circling her outside or that's how she sees them. It's possible we can view the dream in many ways. What I was interested in as a homeopath was I had very little interaction with her. What was interesting to me was the following dream where the, what we would call the instinctual energies had become much more friendly and how she had resolved the situation and started to get better was of interest to me again, because the dream, for me, heralded the change, and that's what I was interested in. And she did, in fact, get a lot better. Her back got better, and she was more empowered to say her no. And do you think that just by telling the dream. I'm not saying just by telling the dream, because you have to be in a certain atmosphere, you know, so you have to be engaged with somebody. There's. There's what they called in psychotherapy, the analytic third that happens in a session between the therapist and the client. That you have to have this understanding between each other before you can truly relate on that therapeutic and healing level. But do you think that just her telling you that dream, was that enough, or was it your interpretation as well? I didn't actually interpret it at the time. I just gave what I. What's interesting to me is I gave her the homeopathic remedy that I felt she needed. Because of the dream? Because of the dream and because of the back and because of her behavior. Yeah. So we had a view. But, Maria, I totally agree with you. We don't know how an intervention works. And that's one of the problems always to measure what actually happens in this type of situation. What I'm interested in primarily, and I agree with you, is, you know, the healing, really, and what happens afterwards with someone's ability to change their behavior and to readjust their thinking so that they have a better life. Yeah, no, that's wonderful, wonderful story. And I know you've got some more, and I'm really looking forward to hearing those. And can we move on to you, Martin, to tell us how you use dreams? And what premise do you start using dreams, and when do you start using them in your therapy? I start using them before I take anybody on. So I say, look, what I want you to do is to keep. And this may sound weird and you may not dream at all, but I think you will. And I want you to keep a dream diary. Now, just because somebody said yes then doesn't mean they do that, but it means I can call on dreams later on. For me, the dream is the only authentic art piece and artwork or creative work of the psyche. Everything else is filtered through consciousness. So dreams are quite truthful in a way, but they're not literal. And it does take some time to get your head around what the dream is about. I think very similar ways to Gabriel in that the dream normally brings in people or incidences that we've rejected in our consciousness. We think of Ourselves in one way, and the dream brings up other ideas. Violence, sex, anything goes. A dream is not politically correct. Anything goes in a dream. And so I want to know what's going on under the hood. I talk to my clients, I create a relationship with them. And then, as you said, the dream acts as a third, an art piece we can both sit back and critique. You know, it stands between us. And sometimes I might have a dream about the client and I'll tell them that dream if it's useful, if that dream is useful. When I say dreams are truthful, you've got two forms of censorship there. One, you can't remember the whole thing. And two, you might not choose to tell your therapist the whole thing, but I want to flavor what's going on. And sometimes the dream is ordinary stuff, like anxiety dreams, which are pretty standard. So an anxiety dream is something like, I've got to be at the airport at 3 o', clock, my car won't start, I get in a cab, the cab goes in the wrong direction. I get off at a tube station, I get on and there's been a strike all the time. It's getting nearer the. You know, nearer the time of the plane, and you're getting further away from possibility. Or it's one. Here's a really common one. I'm back at college, I'm back at school, I'm in an exam room. I open the exam paper and it's blank, or I can't read it, or it's something I haven't prepared for at all. Those are anxiety dreams. They show an underlying anxiety and something we can talk about then and help the client to move through. So they give us a flavor of what's going on under the hood. And that's how I use them. Martin, I know you deal with army. Military. I'm not sure whether you deal with military inaction or post action. Post action I don't deal with. It's always veterans. But there are soldiers dreams and soldiers dreams go back to Shakespeare, basically, and a soldier's dream, something like, I'm in a foxhole, the enemy's charging towards us. I put someone in my sights, I pull the trigger, it doesn't go off, the gun's jammed, I'm unjamming the gun and the guy's right up above me, he's going to shoot me. And then they wake up. It's that kind of anxiety. It's another anxiety dream, but it's a military anxiety dream. It always ends up with either killing or being killed or Just about to kill or just about to be killed. And that's pretty typical. My father, who developed late life ptsd, had a dream of being in a landing craft going ashore at Normandy in the invasion, the landing craft is bumping over the corpses of English soldiers who are coming back on the waves. He developed this dream after, say, probably 40 years after the end of the war, but after my mother had died. So a large part of the support network which kept his psyche going was removed and he went back to these wartime experiences which he had suppressed since 1944. There's nothing he mentioned to us. And that's a veterans type dream. And in your dreams, I take it, there are symbols. And do you find that there's a common symbol in your dreams as opposed to, say, yours, Gabrielle, in the work you do, Martin, you've given us some, you know, sort of actual experiences that people might dream about in anxiety. But are there certain symbols that might come up? Well, I don't work in that way. I mean, it's rather like symbols. You used to be able to buy books who tell you, a tap means this, a tap means this, etc. But I don't work in that way because every individual, I say to them, what does that mean to you? Got any friends like that? Has that happened to you? And take whatever it is that comes up. We have a peculiar. And say, what do you think that's about? I'm always asking the client, first of all, what's that dream about for you? Tell me. Or they say, I haven't got a clue. And then we can sort of pick out bits of it and see where it goes with dreams. And learning about dreams, it sounds very formalistic in the same way, learning about music is formal, but once you're playing, you can't think of that. It's instinctual. You're working, you're on a roll. Right? So it's very difficult to go back to that teaching role and saying this is how you handle a dream because it's how it impacts me emotionally is the thing that I want to work on. And what about you, Gabrielle? Do you have certain symbols that recur or certain symbols with certain illnesses that recur? I. Why don't I just give you this other story which has very. Which we could say was very symbolic and we could interpret it in many ways. And then I will talk about how, what I feel. And I think, Marie, it would be very interesting to hear what you think about the dream. So shall I tell you this story which might answer that question? For you? Yes, I had a very. A young man, he was 16 or 17, very extroverted young man, quite laid back and sweet, who was having very bad acne. And he came to see me because he was very spotty and struggling and I asked him some more personal questions. Anyway, also turns out he was quite anxious. Dying was just an existential anxiety. And also there was something going on at school that I didn't quite understand. But I think there was some kind of peer group bullying or maybe an older boy bullying him or something going on. Anyway, but one of. And so I, as usual I asked him and do you have any dreams? And he said yes, I have actually, I have had some nightmares. I've recently again had the dream of a snake rearing up and about to attack him. And he'd had that dream a few times more recently. Now as the homeopath I try not to interpret at this point and we can talk about it when I tell you the end of the story. So he didn't come back for two or three months because he was at boarding school. And I had a follow up with him. As I say, I think I saw him in the September and I think he either came at half term or at Christmas and his skin had been much better. And I asked him if he had been dreaming and he said yes, I have been dreaming. And this time he said I dreamt about the snake. And the snake in the dream was no longer fearful. In fact, the snake was trying to speak to him. And then he reported to me. For some reason, sometime after seeing me, he somehow had sorted out this row he'd had with his friend or whatever this peer group problem was. And he felt he had. What he said to me, he said, I feel different inside. I. I feel I'm stronger or I have some sort of different authority. He was a theology student, so it was. He had a very strong, a good use of English I noticed. But what was interesting to me was again this strengthening inside and the snake becoming his friend. And we definitely recognized that snake dreams could have many symbolic references. It could be his sexuality, it could be the feminine in a sense because of Eve and the snake and the apple. I mean, what do you think about the dream? Yeah, I love that dream because people often have snakes in their dreams. I spoke to a client who had multiple snakes in her dreams and it did relate to a moment when she saw a snake. And it's so powerful, the snake. It's such a sort of archetypal symbol because there's also the power of healing isn't there? And but if he's in theology, I presume his attachment to it would also have been, you know, sort of the Adam and Eve and the snake being as it represented, that sort of the potential of vice, sin, you know, where do we go, how do we behave on the morality spectrum? But it's so powerful and also it's got that dual or it's got a number of different symbols. The power, the Kundalini power, the power of healing, the power of actually the questioning of my own behavior because that's what the apple was. It gave us our own ability to make up the snake in Adam and Eve was, you know, sort of temptation to make up our own minds. Basically you are being given, let's say a gift, if you like to see it like that, of being able to make up your own mind in life. Instead of following the garden that is the, you know, the garden that has everything, we were throwing it into our own world. The gift of making up your own decisions, basically. So it's got many, many parts for him. And I think that's the joy and the difficulty of interpreting dreams with somebody because there's so many facets to it. But if somebody recognizes that within themselves and that symbol resonates within themselves, what they actually did within that process and within your ability to give them a remedy, it actually activated something for him that gave him a little bit more confidence in acting in a certain way. Because it seems to me that the animals or that a very deep instinctive, as you say, symbols within us all. And that's why that dream about snakes is so powerful. And I don't know if you know this story and it's quite a well known story, so I'm sure you do. It's about the scarab beetle. When Jung was in therapy, he had a client that was a scientist. And I think you'd like this Gabrielle, because your training was science in the therapy room. And she, she would not deal with dreams at all. They were superfluous. It was a game. It was just nothing. It meant nothing. And he said, well, come on, come on, tell me your dream. And he, like you Martin had said, keep a dream journal just in case. And she had had a dream. Okay, I'll tell you my dream. And it was about a scarab beetle. And as she was telling, she really told half heartedly with very little energy behind it. There was a tap on the window. And Jung turned around to open the window and there was. And he let, he captured the, what appeared to be A fly. And he captured it and brought it into the room. And it was actually the closest you could get in Europe to the scarab beetle that had been tapping on the window. And that is synchronicity, isn't it? Lovely story, yeah, it's such an amazing and powerful story. Of course, from then on in she absolutely sort of delved into all her dreams and understood that there was something else that went on in the world. And of course Jung's work through synchronicity, he dealt with that with Pauli, who brought in the concept of quantum physics. And I think we're all stepping, allowing ourselves and equally scientists are allowing themselves to step into that world in between. That manifests something for us that is outside what we actually know. Because, you know, it's like art, it's like imagination. It happens before we can prove something. I wanted to say something very important as well about what I felt about this young man's dream, particularly for a student. And he was, as I say, studying theology very much he would push his anger away. And what we do very often when we're struggling with our instinctual life is we socialize too much, we socialize our anger away. And instead of being able to put some boundaries around his relationship with either his friend or his peer group or wherever he was having a struggle with, he'd cut himself off really from that energy. And I think that the dream brings an awakening or an understanding that you do have these energies inside you, they come out in full force. We only need a little bit of it. For example, she didn't need to, the previous client didn't need a full on shark energy to head off all the problems in her life. She just needed to take a little bit of what that shark was, which is impersonal and strong and very boundaried and very clear and just say no. And the same with the snake dream. He just needed to, to have a little bit of snake energy in him. Not push his anger down, not stop what needs to be said, have better boundaries. And I think that's what I see happening quite frequently with clients with these kind of dreams. I love that, I love that interpretation because I think, as you've said, it depends on the person. And if you've got somebody that is very easygoing, quite kind and they are willing to do whatever it takes to, you know, at work or in the family life or in friendship life and they always saying yes and then suddenly it gets too much. And that's what her back, I presume, was telling her. It's all got too much. It's weighing you down. So that shark energy, as you say, that little bite that it can give you, what she feels is a bite back is a normal thing for most of us. Yeah, yeah. And I do think sometimes in some people, especially super responsible people, that backs can be what I call honorable discharge from duty. It just, you know, it's the only way to avoid the conflict. So suddenly you've got a pain or. And we do see a lot of somatization of suppressed anger or a voice that can't say, you know, the voice that can't say no anymore. How do you see that in actually physically, physiologically expressing itself? Well, she came with a bad back. And is that common? Is it the bad back that tells you. I do think that, you know, there are a lot of situations, and I saw it when I worked in primary care in the nhs, that we do get a lot of situations where very, you know, sweet, kind people who are overworking and over responsible end up with complaints. Now, we don't know why it shifts into the physical level or how it does that, but we just notice it. It's something that's really worth tracking. Actually. Actually, a friend of mine and Dr. Robin Royston, he wrote about dreams which he called prodromic dreams. And he said one of his clients came in and had a dream that a panther had jumped on his back and dug his claws in his back. And when he explored the dream with his client, it later transpired that the client had moles or something at those points in his back. And when he went to the doctors to have a look at what was going on, he actually had cancer. Wow. That's fantastic. That talks about how linked we are, how linked we are. What do you think of that, Martin? I'm really not surprised. It's a bodily function. Dreaming is a bodily function. It's not a function of the intellectual. But you brought up an issue a little while back when you said about the Adam and Eve story, because it's whatever we interpret is interpreted by the psychotherapist, probably, and. Or the client, but it comes out of their position. So Adam and Eve's story is naturally that the reason there's evil in this world is the snake and Eve. The girls did it. Right. Or you could say the foundation of humanity, because Adam and Eve are not human. The foundation of humanity was brought about by that. The snake, the apple and Eve. But it wasn't a disaster. It isn't the fall. It is the movement from a perfect, empty, eternal life. Which can't exist into being fully human, which is always a struggle. So depending whether you've got a Christian minister listening or somebody who's more on the educated in Greek myth, etc. Is what the interpretation you're going to get. So I always work to interpret something that's going to move the client somewhere. I don't do bad interpretation. I might say, if somebody had the panther on their back and mocks, go and see the doctor. Because I'm always saying, let's check this out. If you dream your car's brakes have gone, check the brakes on your car, please don't bring that as a major symbolic dream, but check your health on this. So I'm working between medicine and psychotherapy. So for instance, when I worked in the nhs, if somebody had a sudden personality change, we'd want to know if there'd been an accident. If there's any problems with the brain, they go for a brain scan. Before we spent our time wasting time on psychotherapy because obviously a phys, the physical side has to be checked out. So it's great this guy was sensitive enough to send somebody to the doctor to get checked out for the skin cancer, whatever it was. Yeah, he was vilified in the world of psychotherapy, as I'm sure you can recognize that. It's such a pity that there isn't more an expansive and, you know, sort of opening arms to this aspect of the symbols of dreams and what they mean and in the biggest sense, both in the physical and the mental, because we are all drowned up, I believe. But coming back to the point of Adam and Eve, both Jung and Freud, in their basic, the basic tenants of their belief, both said that we're born with some sort of anxiety. And I know the Catholic religion had that with the original sin and a lot of the religions have that, that we come in with some sort of anxiety. And we can either see it as Freud saw it as, you know, sort of the Oedipal complex. Jung saw it as something with the amfortas wound, the father, you know, the son who wants to heal the father in the patriarchal society. Plus plus plus and so it goes into a bigger, my much more depth which a myth can help us. It's sort of like a concentrated part of life. It gives us a little story that we can open into and feel and sense that there's something there without being able necessarily to put words to it. And we all have a little bit of anxiety. I see it as both a positive and negative. Oh, my goodness, I'm waking up feeling anxious. Where does that anxiety go? As you say, you know, is it my exams, is it my car, is it life, is it love? Because everybody has a little bit of anxiety, but also there is a psycho evolutionary nature that needs to move you forward. And I think without anxiety we would never move forward. I want to share another dream, an anxious dream, which you'll all love. That in fact, a friend of mine had. May I do that? Because I think it's a privilege. I'd love you to. Definitely. Anxious dream. So she's driving down the highway and she gets to a place, this is where she gets stopped. And into her car come loads of ladies who lunch and she's trying to push them out. And these are women who have nothing else to do in their lives, but they've got time on their hands and they can go and have as much time off as they wish. And she woke up with this dream in a terrible state. Now I think this is a wonderful dream because really what it's speaking to her about the fact that she never takes time off. And here in the anxiety dream, where, you know, all these people are crowding into her car, which is her life, are all these people who have an easy time in their lives and take time off. And here she is working incredibly hard and she has completely, what we call, disowned the part of herself that needs to relax. And here you see the balancing of the anxiety. This woman, we can call her Jane. Jane, you need to relax. Imagery of all the ladies who lunch and hang out. You need to embrace a lady who lunches in your life, that is yourself. Go and have a light hearted day and some fun. And I think that's a very beautiful dream to look at for anxiety. They're not all heavy dreams, they're funny. Totally. And you know, when I was growing up, I was growing up when I was in my twenties, I remember again an archetypal dream that lots of people have of a burglar breaking in to my room. And funny enough, around that time I also did almost have a burglar breaking. And I called the police, but he ran off. So symbolic. The inner and the outer world collide. So it's telling you something. We'll go into that shortly. But what I found in my own interpretation today, which I didn't get then, is why was I so afraid? Why was this the masculine, he was a man breaking in, or as you can call the animus breaking in. Why was I so afraid of it? And had I had my Hat on my understanding now to that dream, then I would have understood that I wasn't necessarily afraid of the masculine breaking in, but the type of masculine that would break in. Because if that animus, which is a part of all women, was to come to the fore, maybe I was afraid of the wrong type of masculine elements to take over my life. And then if a client came to me with that, I would look at how do you identify the masculine? What is it about the masculine in your life or in your parents life or in your family's life or around you? Do you see that you don't want to be that frightens you so much if it became a part of you? And funnily enough, later on in my. As dreams often have series, later on I dreamt about my father when I was doing my MA Funnily enough, with psychotherapy and healing, I had a dream of my father who was in the other room waking up and coming into my room. So almost then it sort of gave me the answer to what type of masculine was trying to break in. But unless you have a therapist that fully understands, and I'm not putting my therapist down, by the way, by any means, it's. Unless you have a full understanding and can explore all sides of the masculine and really understand what was being given to you, you don't really know what that symbol means to you. Because everybody has an individual and, you know, very special and personal interpretation. There's a social interpretation, a general one, but there's also one that's very personal. I think they're powerful dreams, and I just wish I had had more understanding and more training in dreams. And I wish we could explore dreams much more the way we're doing today. I think the figures that. I mean, this is just my view, my training, but I think the figures that come into our dreams that are very scary, whether they're figures or snakes or sharks, are really interesting dreams. And we need to ask those figures what they're trying to say to us. So sometimes it might be that there are areas where we're not able to articulate our boundaries. And I do think that's quite common. As I said earlier that sometimes these dreams turn up at times when you're struggling with issues of, you know, how do you speak your mind in some certain places. However, as you said, Maria, they can be many, many things. But in my particular training, I very often ask my clients to talk about what that person who's trying to break in would like to say to me or would like to say to the client. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And I think it's incredibly difficult to, in that moment, to understand for me, later on, I fully understood that my father, who was, you know, I mean, a Polish refugee, you know, to be a barrister in Poland. My mother was a mathematician. But over here, we ended up. He ended up working in a factory and my mother ended up making Christmas crackers. You know, he was all for education. And I think when he came into my room, for example, from the other room in my dream, when I was doing my ma, it sort of, ah, that's what it was. It was, ah, that's okay. You're achieving something that your father thought or knew you could achieve. But I didn't know that at the time. You know, it's. Which aspect of him is. In my dream? Which aspect of him is trying to break in and talk to me? Because at the time, it's very difficult to see that. And I sometimes wonder why, whether a man would have seen that as a therapist, quicker than a woman. Because sometimes when I had my final therapist, who was an amazing man, Nick Spicer, he saw that because he'd worked and he saw a part of that. And do you think that's true, Martin? Do you think a man can help sometimes more than a woman can? It just depends on the plant and what they choose. The first question people ask is, you know, if they're looking for a therapist, they want somebody who's relatively nearby, probably, and not too near, but relatively nearby, and they want a man or a woman. They've already decided that that's what they look for. But pure masculinity to a woman is terrifying. Pure femininity to a man is terrifying. These are major, major features of life when there was purely masking. But the idea of this, the beast type, right, versus the feminine, with the feminine, you know, the woman of the moon who can see everything, who's got that thing. It's just. They're terrifying. So as a child, we're very scared of the strength of the opposite sex. And we were talking about anxiety that the Greeks used to call human beings, the animal that worries. We're born to die, and we know that. We're aware of that. And that is the big, big issue. We're also sitting on a rock, hurtling round the sun. Now, if that doesn't worry you and give you anxiety, The date of our death is unknown. But when we die, we leave everything behind. Everything we tried to do, everything we tried to become is gone. And that's. It's A struggle for existence. Of course we're anxious. Most animals are anxious. And coming back to when I said I had my dreams were about a burglar, and then I had somebody who was trying to get into my room. Gabrielle, do you think sometimes that. Do you ever look at occurrences that people have or events that people have as a symbol in their lives? Yes, I do. I mean, like Martin says, you're led by the client rather than what you think or believe. Although probably I'm a bit. I do sometimes jump in a bit quickly sometimes with my thinking on a dream, if there are threads, you know, if I've seen a series of dreams, but very client led. Maria and I have this idea, which I always work with, that if a client comes with a big issue, as he or she solves it internally, that is, their psyche shifts around it, it returns, it comes back. So it's rather like an exam you have to take. It comes back, maybe in a different form, but the same thing will come back. This time they have the facility to overcome it. So, for instance, I had a client who had been appallingly tortured by his dad psychologically. He was one of five brothers, he was not the youngest. And he was picked on by them and everybody else. So he was a weird cat, you know. He had a very, very difficult childhood, but he'd been very successful as a lorry driver and had lots of lorry, owned a garage with lots of lorries. And then he got cancer and all that went away. So when I met him, he was about 55, and he'd never really gotten over this rejection by the father who he adored. But the father really picked on him. And we did work for months. In the beginning, he was so disturbed by things, all he could do is draw them. He would draw these fantasies in his head. And we got to work. And then suddenly he exploded into this dream world. And in the first dream he had, he was in somewhere like Holland, Amsterdam, and he saw a giant black creature, not a black man, a black creature, grabbing this child and hauling the child off. And the child had scratched on his arm in blood. Help me. The second dream, he went back to the same place. He defeated the giant in a fight and he ran off with the boy, pursued by the seven angry fathers. Then he started dreaming this all the time. Dreaming it during the day, dreaming it at night, in which he went off with the child and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked. And he really reassured the child the child was now safe. And this went on for maybe two Weeks, day and night, these discussions they had in the park. There were daydreams and night dreams. And he said, well, the child's a lot like me. Didn't say, of course he is. Say, of course he is. But he was fascinated by this. It provided something he'd never had before. So when these dream series was over, there's a phone call and his father is now dying. My client to look after him. Now, we had a difficult meeting because I said, I don't, you know, he said, I think I better shoot myself. So rather you didn't do that. Why didn't you just say no to your father? And he said, I can't, it's my duty and I'd rather he didn't do this. But I was wrong. He took on the father and he was like a Christian saint in looking after him. And he was there closing his eyes. The father demanded him to look after him. Room, not the other brothers. And from this relationship they had, you know, when father died, he was there, close the child's eyes, closed her father's eyes. And a nurse said, you must have really loved that man. He said, if only you knew. And it was the making of him. He overcome his childhood fears. It was a sort of biblical change. And you get that. That's one of the ways dream work can help. Yeah, it's so powerful. I've had a young client, a teenager coming back. I love teenagers and dreams as well. But she had a dream about a joker, the clown, with that terrifying clown and she didn't want to talk about it, but it became apparent in her world and I was wrestling myself inside. Do I tackle this dream with her specifically or do I skirt round it? And because she didn't want to tackle it head on, because it was such. It brought up so much fear inside her and anxiety. I sort of skirted around the idea of the image of a clown that is meant to be cheering everybody up, making everybody laugh, but at the same time full of fear as a symbol inside herself of what was going on externally as well in her life, that she could actually reach in and allow that part of herself. Much like you were saying, Gabrielle, with the shark, to find that part where she can speak up for herself. What would you make of that? And do you think I was right in not pushing for her to interpret it? Gabrielle, what do you think? Yeah, I think. Look, Maria, I think with young clients, I tend not to. I let them. I think with them. How's that sound? I think with them about the dream and I don't put my thoughts or my interpretation out there. I'm much more careful. So I think, you know, it's. You know, I agree with you how you. How you managed it with her. It's very interesting. We had this friend who was a dream worker. That's all she did. And she. These public things. And she was doing a dream thing in some theater in London and a member of the audience. So my son's here and he has these terrible, terrible. Being attacked by lions and things. And she didn't really know what to say, but it was too short a thing. She didn't know the boy, didn't know anything about it. And she said, well, I can't really interpret that dream for you, but what I can say is your son is going to be a very, very courageous man who deals with the physicalities of life and who has courage, and that's what he's being prepared for right now. Yeah, I thought it was a great way of dealing with a way of thinking about it. Yeah, it's perfect. It's absolutely brilliant. I had. I love that. Totally love that. I had a client who. I didn't know how desperate her life was, but she came in and she had a dream where she was moving through space, an office building, and amongst people that she didn't know. And one of these people, one of these particular women in this space was somebody who dealt with material. She made things out of material in different ways. She was a craftswoman. That was her art. And then as she walked through, she went in outside, and in the outside space there was a little, very soft kitten and that being pierced in the heart. And had these dogs at the base of the cage barking around this little particular animal. And we talked as much as we could around that. And I found that symbol of the animal very. So deep, not only as an instinct, but also potentially as, you know, a representation of our physical illness. But it transpired many months later, or not so many months later. For me, that was the big dream in her life that did a turnaround because we discussed not only the sensitivity of that particular animal. What did that animal mean to her kitten? You know, sort of a fluffy, warm, cuddly, feminine symbol, if you like. And also she had cats and also the dogs, what they meant, but also the woman who was creative that she'd passed. And when everything came together, because it's almost like you can you acknowledge these parts of somebody in a dream, you represent to them what they are believing themselves because it's their dream. They bring to you Something. This is a part of me that's hidden, but I'm bringing it to you. Can you see what I see? Am I putting it in a framework that we can discuss together? That's what we were talking about earlier. Martin, do you see what I see? Do you validate who I am, what I'm feeling? And later on, I heard from her that she was going to commit suicide. And that dream, somehow, because she had dealt with some of the very deep issues that that was the first one of many that she could actually present the pain, the deep, wounded pain that she was feeling. And in representing that within the room, within the setting, it actually enabled her to look at her life in a totally different way. And funny enough, or naturally enough, if you like to say, she started engaging in some craft work herself, which, again, I love the whole idea of art or craft or something that you make yourself that represents yourself into the outside world, that people you can love or you can give or you can make for somebody else, because it's a part of you that continues. Do you believe in that? Yeah. But also, you know her. To come up with that dream, to actually share it with you, means that there's a much. There's a fantastic strength of relationship there, which is necessary because a lot of people are ashamed of their dreams. I don't know why they're ashamed of the dreams, but they are, and they don't want to share them. So to say something that vulnerable to you means there must have been a great relationship between the two of you. Let's move on to. We're coming sort of to close, but I don't want to close. I think this has opened up, I hope, to the listeners a lot of people's eyes to the value of dreams. A lot of therapists might start engaging in dream work and seeing how that can express people's internal worlds, even though they don't recognize it themselves in the world of words, because words are quite. They're sort of. They're too narrow, let's put it that way. They can't express everything. They don't express the depth of what you're feeling. But that's why mythology and stories are so powerful. But in the world of social dreaming, as the Lakota Indians say, you know, here we are in a tribe, you've had a dream. How does it benefit us as a tribe or us as a society to move on? Martin, particularly your work with ex military and the veterans. Do you think there is something that can be used from accumulative dreams, from Soldiers that can help us move on. Well, soldiers tend to know soldiers dreams. They're pretty standard stuff, actually, but social dreaming. There's a very interesting book called Dreaming in the Third Reich I've read ages ago. It's not in print at the moment. It's bloody expensive because the family don't want it reprinted. It was written by a woman called Charlotte Barat. B E R A D T and it was written in the. It was taken from dreams of people who resisted Hitler. And what's interesting about it is a lot of the dreams are about being friends with Hitler. The pressure of being in secret resistance where you could be killed if anybody found out what you thought is so high, that in the dreams they're relief. They're dancing with Hitler, having tea with Hitler, with shaking hands and hugging each other. It's just a fantastic painting of what happens when you're in a very repressive, totalitarian society, you know, because the other side of that, it's just they. There's a wish fulfillment there. They weren't doing what we'd say. They're taking a brave stance, but it has so much toll on my psyche. And that's all in the dreams. So Jung talked, and both Freud and Jung talked about the compensatory nature of dreams. And there's this wonderful book called Bad Men Dream what Good Men do and Vice Versa. And that sort of encapsulates it because they're wrestling with being friends with not only Hitler, but the Third Reich and a system that was so oppressive, and I presume in the dream, it enables you to actually experience that. And what does that actually mean, if I were to experience that? So it gives us another dimension to actually living something out. My teacher, Dr. Helstone, for example, used to speak very much about how dreams are trying to balance the psyche in some way or another. Maybe our dreams, in a bigger social context, of which I don't have enough information on, could be considered to be balancing, you know, a social situation. But I certainly know that he used to speak very much about the individual and how the inner world produces a dream that is really there so that you can help yourself balance better and steer your way through life in a more productive way. So coming back to our society, and if we were to, you know, the Holy Grail, the utopian society, how would you introduce dreamwork and would you introduce dream work in all elements of healing and all psychological learnings? Would you, Martin? I wouldn't know, because in this society, as opposed to the Lakota society, we Divide life very clearly into conscious life, conscious dream life and unconscious dream life takes a really third step. It's so far away. People, oh, I don't dream. As you started off saying, I don't dream. Or our dreams, they're rubbish, aren't they? They're just nonsense. They're just the body rebalancing itself or something. They have no meaning. And they're only given meaning by being given consequence. In my work, I give them consequence. I start off by saying, I want to see your dreams. Okay, please do this. That's what I want you to bring. Don't worry about anything else. So I give them consequence and wait. And after a while, my clients, whilst they're in therapy, because it stops afterwards, will dream a lot and then give them consequence. But until we take that seriously, I have one client who's Korean, and she comes in, says, well, I saw my father last night. Now I know he's been dead for 10 years. So what did he want? So I'm not sure. I'm not sure. He didn't say, because for her, the dreams and other life are linked. So that's the kind. If you live in that kind of society, then dreams do have a big consequence when they're totally linked. And what about parents with children? I did used to talk to my children about dreams, but sometimes they found it too much. What about do you think. And just to tie up. Gabrielle, do you think parents would help their children by talking about dreams again? Maria? I always ask parents to think first about the child and whether that's possible. It's very difficult to give a sort of general answer to that because a lot of the work I did with parents, I just see them all as very individual. I'd love to say a sort of blanket yes or no, but I don't think I can. So just as we're ending, I just think parents need to be aware that children do dream and sometimes those dreams need to be talked about. And that is a wonderful way to end because it's so individual. And I think this has been a most powerful discussion. Thank you both so much, Martin Polakoff and Gabrielle Pinto, for joining me today in do youo Mind Matters? This is on women's radio station and men's radio station, and I look forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Thank you.