Active Pause

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. wrote the internationally acclaimed book, The Developing Mind:  Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (1999).  His most recent book is The Mindful Brain.  Dr. Siegel is an associate clinical professor psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.  He is also the Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization that focuses on how the development of individuals, families, and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes.

January 2008. See printable PDF transcript. See also conversation with Dan Siegel on Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Linda Marks, MSM, is a body-centered psychotherapist, life work counselor, social architect and author.  Through her work with individuals, couples, groups, and her personal example, she helps others heal from the soul level up and create new heartfull possibilities for their lives.  She is the author of Healing the War Between the Genders:  The Power of the Soul-Centered Relationship (HeartPower Press, 2004) and Living with Vision:  Reclaiming the Power of the Heart (Knowledge Systems, Inc., 1989).  She has appeared on numeral television and radio shows and founded the Institute for Emotional-Kinesthetic Psychotherapy in 1990.

December 2007. See printable PDF transcript

Alice K. Ladas, Ed. D., is a pioneer for body psychotherapy, educated childbirth, breastfeeding, and sexuality education.  The research she and her husband did (Women and Bioenergetic Analysis)  led to meeting her co-authors on the NY Times best seller The G Spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality. Alice was chair of the research committee of the US Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP) for many years. In 2008, the USABP honored Alice by naming its research award The Alice Kahn Ladas Research Award to honor her for her tireless efforts to further research in Somatic Psychotherapy. She is a licensed psychologist in New Mexico.

November 2007. See printable PDF transcript. See other conversation with Alice Ladas.

Leisha Douglas, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist trained in several modalities, including Transactional Analysis/Gestalt, and Hakomi.  She has taught in the United States and internationally on topics from mindfulnesss to intuition.

Published October 2007. See: Printable PDF transcript

Kevin Frank is an Advanced Certified Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner.  His work focuses on articulating and integrating Hubert Godard’s tonic function model of structural integration, and he has authored aritcles on this topic.  He and Caryn McHose are the co-authors of How Life Moves:  Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness and are co-founders of Resources in Movement, a center for movement and consciousness inquiry in Holderness, NH.

July 2007. See printable PDF transcript

Linda Ciotola, M.Ed., CHES, CP/PAT is a TEP (trainer-educator-practitioner) of psychodrama, health educator, and fitness & yoga instructor.

June 2007. See printable PDF transcript

Freud thought of dreams as the manifestation of how we attempt to digest information in our subconscious. From this perspective, deciphering the content of a dream means being able to get in touch with information that is important, but difficult for our conscious mind to access.

As neuroscience started exploring dreams from an experimental perspective, some findings suggested that dreams may actually be random (i.e. not be related to meaningful information processing). Then, other studies suggested that they may actually be! So there is currently no consensus as to whether or not dreams are a language that accurately reflects the issues in our minds, as opposed to random images.

Does this mean that we cannot benefit from paying attention to our dreams? Not at all.

You’re familiar with the Rorschach test: you look at inkblots, and describe what you see, whereby reflecting what’s on your mind. Your dream functions as such a point of departure. It certainly feels more poignant than an inkblot because it contains imagery that is pertinent to you: You have singled it out from many other dreams to actually remember it (we all forget the vast majority of our dreams, so what we remember is special).

In other words: The fact that you remember the dream is a sign that there may be something of importance to you in it. Uncovering its meaning is more akin to exploring what Rorschach inkblots mean to you than to translate a text from a different language (say, the way you would translate Spanish into English, or hieroglyphs into English). Instead of looking for standardized dream meanings, it is far more powerful to explore what dreams mean in the context of your own life.

This creative process is outlined in the page about Creative dream interpretation: How to understand the meaning of dreams. You can also listen, below, to a radio interview in which I describe this process.

This page provides two more examples of creative, embodied dream analysis: One is an audio recording, and the other is a video.

The following audio is an on-air interview of Serge Prengel by radio host Larry Flick. Unlike most interviews, where the host essentially asks generic questions, this time the host was so interested in the topic that he was willing to go through the process of exploring the meaning of a recurring dream of his while on the air.

He was willing to share this with his audience and allowed me to post the recording on my website as well. The first part of the audio is a discussion about the meaning of dreams in general and is featured on another page. The 19-minute audio on this page is the exploration part. Radio host Larry Flick experiences what it is like to explore his dream from the inside out, to live in it, feel what it’s like, and learn directly from it.

The following is a videotaped session. A young woman, Rachel, agreed to be videotaped to show what it’s like to explore creative ways. She is a dancer, so when she listens to her body, she is able to eloquently express what she “hears” in movement form. This doesn’t mean that you have to be a dancer to be creative in interpreting your dreams. Creatively paying attention to the body is different for each person. The idea is not to apply a “cookie-cutter” method to all but to get to what feels just right for this person at this moment.