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The following is taken from the book,
Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, by Eugene Gendlin
By asking yourself the following questions, you may come to understand what your dream is trying to tell you.
- What comes to you?
- Feelings in the dream.
- Yesterday’s context
- The place where the dream takes place.
- The dream story
- People in the dream
- What part of you is that?
- Be that person?
- Can the dream continue?
- Symbols
- Body symbolism
- Is anything counterfactual?
- Something about childhood?
- Personal growth?
What are your associations in relation to the dream?
What comes to mind as you think about the dream?
Take a piece of the dream and ask yourself, What comes to me in relation to this?
What did you feel in the dream?
Sense the "feel-quality" of the dream. Let it come back as fully as possible.
Choose the most puzzling, oddest, most striking or most beautiful part of the dream. Picture it to yourself and let a felt sense of it come in your body.
Pick one part of the dream and ask: What in my life feels like this?
What does this feel-quality remind you of? When did you ever feel like that?
What is new for you in that felt sense?
What did you do yesterday? What preoccupied you yesterday?
Scan your memory of yesterday. Also recall what you were inwardly preoccupied with. Something related to the dream may come up.
With all questions, focus on the feel of whatever you examine, and wonder what is like that in your life.
Visualize and sense the layout of the main place in your dream.
What does it remind you of?
Where have you been in a place like that?
What place felt like that?
First summarize the story-plot of the dream. Then ask yourself: What in your life is like that story?
Summarize the events of the dream in two or three steps: "First…and then…and then …" Make it more general than the dream.
Example:
Take the unknown person in your dream. Or, if you know them all, take the most important. (Or take them up in turn.)
What does this person remind you of? What physical feel-quality does this person in the dream give you?
Even a person whom you didn’t see clearly may give you a bodily sensed quality.
With familiar people: Did the person look as usual?
According to some theories, the other people in your dreams are parts of you. We aren’t sure that’s true, but try it out:
What feel-quality does this person give you? What sense comes in your body? You needn’t name it. Just notice it.
If no quality comes, ask yourself: What is one adjective I could use for that person?
Now think of that adjective or feel-quality as a part of you.
If that is a part of you, what part would that be?
You may or may not like this part of you, or know much about it. But let it be here for the moment, anyway.
Does the dream make sense, if you take it as a story about how you relate to that part of you?
Act out the part of the person in your dream who most interests you. You can actually do it, or just imagine it, but be sure to do it with your body.
Exaggerate the part.
What comes to you to say or to do? Don’t make it up. Wait and see what words or moves come from the body-feel.
These things can be applied to any aspect of the dream, even a wall. "Be that wall."
You can also act your own usual way of being, as you were in the dream. Exaggerate it, see what it is when you let it be even more so.
Vividly visualize the end, or any one important scene of the dream. Feel it again. When it comes back as fully as possible, just watch it, don’t invent anything.
Later: What impulse do you have, if any, to do something back at the image once it has done something of its own accord? Usually just one of these is helpful.
What symbols in the dream have cultural meaning, spiritual meaning, international meaning, meaning throughout the ages?
Three books can be helpful:
The Herder Dictionary of Symbols, ISBN 0-933029-84-5
The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, ISBN 0-14-051254-3
Dictionary of Symbolism, ISBN 0-8160-2593-2
What is the felt-sense of the symbol?
Something in a dream may be an analogy for the body. For example, a long object may be a penis, a purse may stand for a vagina. The car may be your sexual activity. A house may be your body.
Does this fit? The attic or other high place can mean thought, being in your head, far from feelings.
Downstairs, ground level, can mean feelings, being in your body lower down, grounded.
The basement, underground, or underwater can mean the unconscious, or what is not visible.
Odd-looking machines and diagrams often make sense if viewed as body symbolism.
What in the dream is specifically different from the actual situation?
Exactly what has the dream changed? Why would the dream make these changes?
What childhood memory might come in relation to the dream?
If you think of your childhood, what comes?
In your childhood, what had this feel-quality from the dream?
What went on in your life at that time? What was it like for you?
This can help change the effects on you and you can overcome certain limitations that have beset you.
How are you developing or trying to develop?
What do you struggle with or wish you could be or do?
In what way are you a one-sided, not a well-rounded person?
Could the dream or the characters in it represent what you still need to develop? Suppose the dream were a story about that? What might it mean?