Navigating Their Dreamscapes Together
It’s like entering the enchanted forest. Pass through a gate made of metal flowers, light a candle near an open door, let the woman holding the gray feather use it to direct smoke from her incense pot your way until you smell like sage.
That’s how the evening begins for 10 or so women who meet every two weeks in a Santa Monica living room for what they call a “dream circle.” In the course of the evening, they describe and interpret their own and each other’s dreams.
Connie Kaplan, who leads the group, began to take the subject seriously 14 years ago when a lingering illness caused her to sleep long hours each day. She started paying more attention to her dreams, which eventually led her to give up her career as a television producer and study dream interpretation. Ten years ago she formed her first dream circle because she wanted to teach others what she had learned.
Many of the women have been members for years. By now, no sleep-time story is too silly for these brainy interpreters, who include a college professor, a naturalist and a reiki massage therapist. Kaplan, who has a master’s degree in psychology, is a minister in the nondenominational Universal Life church.
Most of the women are middle-aged and have made peace with themselves and their lives, says Kaplan. “The people who come to me have already done their psychological cleanup work,” she says. “They are dreamers who know they’re being informed in dreams but don’t know how to crack the code.” To help them get started, she teaches them certain symbols that she has found to be common to many dreamers. Cars, for example, are karmic vehicles that carry us through life.
Beyond that, she relates dreams to the changing aspects of the moon, which she learned about by studying the customs of Yaqui Indians.
It is difficult to quantify, but dream circles seem to be growing in popularity. In addition to private teachers such as Kaplan, bookstores and college extension programs organize them. Each group has its own personality. Kaplan considers her dream circle part of a spiritual routine and compares each gathering, which can last more than two hours, to an extended prayer. She often begins an evening with a session of drumming.
At last week’s meeting the women, who refer to each other as “dream sisters,” looked the part in their flowing skirts, crystal jewelry, satin vests and glimmering fishnet sweaters. They read their notes about scenes that came to them during sleep: driving a big rig for the first time, watching a somber memorial service turn into a hoedown, hiding from forest rangers in the ladies’ room of a national park, telling a husband he is beautiful by saying, “You look like a gopher.”
Members say that peeling back the layers of such dreams has led to startling results. One quit psychotherapy after her second dream circle meeting, one changed careers from TV costumer to masseuse, one fell in love at age 50 and married for the first time, one returned to school and is studying to be a cantor.
“Just being aware makes a difference,” says Kaplan about how such changes begin to happen in a person’s life. “In dreams, we move into a state where everything is possible.”
She places most dreams in one of 13 categories--from the mundane to the prophetic. The first type reworks ordinary events from the day. The other taps the realm of possibility rather than probability. Dreams, she believes, can also be clairvoyant, telegraphing what is about to happen, or healing because they help someone “move toward wholeness.”
Most members of the core group have been part of it for at least four years. By now they often dream about each other during the same week, or pick up on the same theme in dreams. Wedding and funeral parties dominated last week.
While many psychologists interpret dreams as hints about our hidden fears, desires and motives, Kaplan’s circle considers them a form of divine communication. “We’re looking for a deeper connection to the soul,” she says. “Psychology has almost co-opted dreams, they’re all about the individual dreamer.” Her emphasis, she says, is on the collective unconscious: “In most dreams we are dreaming the same themes other people do.”
In the unconscious mind, we all carry memories of certain ancestral experiences that affect our behavior, according to the work of the influential psychologist Carl Jung. Dreams are thought to reflect these memories, sometimes in the form of the archetypal figures who appear in them. An old man or woman can be a symbol of wisdom, for example.
Kaplan’s set of images, which she teaches to her students, goes beyond standard archetypes. So while “dream sister” Elaine Levi’s dream about a plane trip to New York might sound ordinary, she believes it’s about something profound. “Planes, like cars, are karmic vehicles,” she says. “Metal is a karma conductor. You’re headed east so you’re moving toward illumination.”
More traditional interpreters would not read such a dream that way. “Karmic vehicles? No,” says Dr. Bernard Katz, a clinical psychologist who teaches at Nassau Community College in Long Island, N.Y. “When I hear a person’s dream I feel I’m getting a message from their unconscious,” says Katz, who interprets dreams with patients in therapy sessions. “In terms of spirituality, you either buy it or you don’t. Personally I don’t. I’m a zero on the spirituality scale.”
The dream sisters are not overly impressed by traditional psychological approaches. In her 1999 book, “The Woman’s Book of Dreams” (Beyond Words), Kaplan describes her system of dream interpretation and advises how to form a dream circle. (Men dream too, of course, but she has chosen to focus on women.)
This month, two of her students published their own book inspired by the circle. “Entering the Temple of Dreams” (Jewish Lights) is by Tamar Frankiel, a UC Riverside religious studies professor, and Judy Greenfeld, an assistant cantor at Temple Beth Emanuel in Beverly Hills.
Their book suggests preparing for a peaceful night of dreaming by ending the day with prayers and meditations. “We want to untie the strand that goes from our heart to those we have relationships with by day,” Frankiel says. “This allows us to fully access all that dreams have to offer.” According to Jewish tradition, she says, “the soul travels at night.”
Greenfeld attended the dream circle first, and soon after introduced Frankiel to the meetings. “When we align ourselves with prayer and ask for guidance before we sleep,” she says, “we can learn what we’re here for and what we’re really supposed to do.”
Most women in the group might call the dream circle a part of their spiritual practice, but they don’t relate it to a particular religion. Jeanne Dancs Arthur (the naturalist who compared her husband to a gopher) joined the circle 10 years ago. She stayed because she found a safe, nonjudgmental atmosphere. “I’ve learned to appreciate the tremendous wisdom,” she says, “that comes of people working together in love.”
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Connie Kaplan’s e-mail address is conniekaplan@ hotmail.com. Tamar Frankiel can be reached at tfrankiel@juno.com.