Call it the secular equivalent of PTL. Call it New Age pillow talk. Call it dream liberation. By any name, it is attracting all kinds of new enthusiasts -- artists and academics, ministers and scientists, trained therapists and just plain folks. It borrows techniques from psychotherapy, its vocabulary from sensitivity training and its cheery, take-hold-of-your-life spirit from gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. "Once dreams belonged exclusively to oracles or psychiatrists," says Ann Sayre Wiseman of Cambridge, Mass. "Now dreams belong to the dreamer."
Welcome to the Dreamwork Movement. Across the nation, growing numbers of Americans are keeping dream diaries, recording their visions on paper, tape and computer disc. Many are joining dream-sharing groups, ranging from weekly home gatherings of a few friends on Manhattan's Upper West Side to twice- monthly meetings of the Metro D.C. Dream Community, a 150-member network. Others are visiting dream consultants. At the San Francisco Dream Center, run by two duennas of the movement, Psychologist Gayle Delaney and Psychiatrist Loma Flowers, a private 50-minute session costs $90, and a 90-minute group meeting $35 to $50. Scores of devotees showed up in Arlington, Va., for the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams. There they heard the latest scientific findings on dreams, traded visions at breakfast and acted them out after dinner. The meeting's climax: a dream ball, with participants dressed as dream characters and symbols.
Freud called dream analysis the royal road to the unconscious. Psychologist Robert Van de Castle of Charlottesville, Va., agrees. But Freud, he contends, "gave us an unfortunate legacy, equating dreams with neuroses and revealing only the gutter side of our personalities." Dreamworkers are more positive. Explains Psychoanalyst Walter Bonime of New York City: "You can discover assets in dreams as well as pathology." Indeed, declares Psychologist Marcia Rose Emery of Grand Rapids: "If we honor our dreams, they can help and guide us."
When Carol Warner, a social worker in Washington, found herself at a personal impasse, she turned to her dream journal, spending up to two hours a day for more than a year analyzing the entries. The effort, she says, gave her the confidence "to be more assertive in work, to make the split from a male friend and to start playing the stock market."
Devotees rely on a variety of methods to interpret their dreams and arrive at that stage of enlightenment known in dreamwork circles as "aha!" One popular technique is re-creating the vision as a drawing or collage. Many groups favor a method devised by Psychiatrist Montague Ullman of Ardsley, N.Y., in which one member relates a dream to the others; listeners then respond by expressing how it makes them feel. In analyzing their visions, dreamworkers often find solutions to their problems. Indeed, says San Francisco's Delaney, nighttime images are a "reflection of your own mind considering challenges that you have been working on during the day." Delaney focuses that dream power with a technique called incubation: state the problem in a sentence or question and, once abed, keep repeating the sentence as if it were a mantra.