Dreamtelling: The value of dreaming and sharing dreams in relations: Part I: From collective preoccupations to shared dreaming

Excerpt from a dream shared in a therapeutic group

I was walking naked in the street, wearing only my worst underpants. I was terribly ashamed . . .

The first part of a shared dream is often the ‘introduction’ to a process of digesting deep preoccupations (Friedman, 2002). These half-hidden ² preoccupations ³ are seldom sensed by the listeners. For therapists, such an introduction poses questions to their approach to dreams: Should they intervene in a group with a similar psychoanalytic intervention used during individual analysis? For example, should the group-analytic therapist first interpret the dreamer’s possible inner conflict, implied by the feelings of shame?

The subsequent work in the group made it clear that, by sharing this dream, emotional situations are not only reported but also created in the group. We detected an impressive parallel process between the dreamer’s shameful nakedness and the shame experienced in and by the group in the here-and-now. The dreamer’s shame in the group following the dream’s narrative reproduced feelings of embarrassing nakedness on the street.

Participants are usually able to sense these group dynamics, and if a space for their responses opens, they can refer, and maybe elaborate this point. Thus, instead of interpreting the dream, it is only natural to invite all participants in the therapeutic group to first resonate and mirror the dream, which can then help them to address both manifest and latent emotions.

Soon enough, discussion evoked shame in the dream and the unconscious relationship between the group and the dreamer became apparent. The participants’ resonance to the dream also highlighted their ambivalence to protect the dreamer from her pain.

Can the therapist allow group participants to understand dreams differently and beyond his or her own understanding? I will later describe further communication subsequent to the dream, which helped to transform the relational configuration between the dreamer and her listeners.

I will try to address the question of the specific and often unique benefits of working with dreams in a group by trying to reflect on the experiences and lessons of practical and theoretical work. An interactive, non-interpretative approach was named ‘dreamtelling’ by participants of a doctorate seminar 25 years ago in Rome’s University La Sapienza. They felt that a dream told was only the start of an interpersonal and transpersonal (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957) communication process, facilitating the digestion of conscious and unconscious challenges.

I am aware of the range of my approach to dreams and view my contributions as continuing development, rather than a final position. Is it possible to start a dialogue with the reader on how to understand a ‘dreaming cycle’ or how to reflect on the experience of dreams shared in groups? Group analysts surely possess much unshared experience with narrated dreams. Together we can extend a new understanding of a modern approach to multi-personal work with dreams.

Dreams as collective ‘digestive’ processes

Through dreaming, a mental process takes place where excessively threatening/exciting emotions are worked through during sleep. In his book Dream Life Meltzer describes how such a containment process takes place 24/7 (Meltzer, 1984). Dreaming as a continuous activity in our mental life (see also Bion, 1992; Lavie, 2002) is one of the important human adaptive mechanisms. While many are only interested in dreaming as a function of the dreamer’s personal adaptation and regulation of inner mental life, experience provides us with a new perspective: that this digestive may not function for an individual only.

Could there be collective mental processes, which activate a shared, rather than a totally private digestion through personal and then collective dreaming? Norbert Elias maintained that a person is not a ‘homo clausus’, a ‘closed and autonomous unit’ but rather, always part of a figuration of ‘homines aperti’ (open people) who, ‘through their basic dispositions and inclinations, are directed towards and linked with each other in the most diverse ways’ (Elias 1939 [1978: 14–15]).

I suggest that dreamers, being ‘open systems’ ⁴ , activate manifest and latent interpersonal communication whose elaboration goes beyond psychic boundaries. Foulkes (1964) later called this the ‘transpersonal’, a deep understanding of human communication which enables the creation of collective preoccupations and the following engagement in a multi-step shared digestive process. The step following the (often unconscious) detection of a collective preoccupation is often the activation of dreaming. Below is an example of this personal and social mechanism:

Following a family dinner during which two sisters and their parents had a good chat, there were some minor, and barely felt conflictual moments. That night the father dreamt that a volcano erupted through a huge chimney. The next morning, he shared the dream with the daughter who stayed overnight. This sharing led to a conversation about the difficult side of the relationship between the two sisters, which seldom emerged.

As could be understood from later talks, dreaming and dreamtelling served not only the father’s own digestive process, but helped all those who participated in this interaction. The latent symbolic volcano, perhaps unconsciously threatening the whole family, had manifested itself through the dreamtelling process, which includes both telling the dream and opening an exchange of personal responses with ‘the audience’. It became clearer that this volcano expressed the present situation of a known but unthought sibling conflict. This became a ‘collective preoccupation’ in the family. We do not have an answer to the important question ‘why was this dreamer chosen’ to dream the dream. We do know that he tried to expel his own anxieties through the chimney, but he also made an effort to digest the family’s animosities, which existed alongside the sisters’ loving relationship.

Typically, the dreamer’s effort to digest the family’s volcano was also connected to conflicting situations in the family’s history. The parents later remembered the turbulent relationships of the previous generation—with a cousin whose nickname was the ‘Volcano’. For the previous generation, difficult emotions seemed less likely to be ‘acted out’ openly, but would transit through a periodical, unconscious elaboration using transpersonal communication—and now it returned by dreaming the conflict and sharing the dreaming. The dream’s communicational aspects achieved some containment of the rage (the volcano being expelled through the chimney) and some influence (taking the destructiveness of the conflict seriously). Later, it led to the reparation of relationships between the dreaming father, the daughters and the whole family.

Re-viewing a key group-analytic notion: Transpersonal communication

In Foulkes’ first quotation of the transpersonal he writes: ‘. . . psychodynamics are rarely, if ever, confined within the boundaries of the individual but regularly include a number of interconnected persons. They are transpersonal manifestations’ (Foulkes, 1964: 180). One of the functions of transpersonal communication is that its reach beyond psychic boarders enables dreamers to detect a collective preoccupation in their social space. The other function of the transpersonal mechanism is the relational influence it exerts on the dreamer, and later on its listeners.

We shall call the first function of the transpersonal, its informative use, and the second, its transformative use. Following the detection of this shared concern, a collective digestive effort is requested and activates dreaming, which is both a personal and a social adaptive mechanism.

The move away from the view that dreaming is an exclusively personal, intrapsychic and autonomous mental process, to the view that dreaming has an interpersonal, digestive function, is itself a small revolution for many. In our individualistic culture, many feel their (traditionally believed) autonomy is threatened by the possibility that one person’s dreaming contributes to a collective digestion process in families, therapies or friendships of shared excessive emotions, ranging from trauma to glory. Still, our psychic borders are permeable, which permits the transpersonal communication which is so important in our lives.

Further, the transpersonal dimension in our communication focusses on how we can be touched without touching and often knowing the unspoken through our own unthought responses. Our guts resonate unthought communication, all of which makes us and those close to us (and often larger society)—reciprocally exposed to our emotions.

Having written these almost strange assumptions on communication, dreaming and relations, I suddenly understand why this dream’s excerpt was so unconsciously significant for me personally. The assumptions about the transpersonal and an unconscious delegation to dream give rise to fears of being professionally excluded and even rejected. The notion of an open-boundary individual, exposed to social accusation, arouses anxieties not dissimilar to the dreamer walking around ‘naked in the street wearing the worst underpants’. The dreamer’s shame infected me, the writer, and threatened my personal autonomy.

I find myself also challenging the traditional approach that ‘daily residues’ (Freud, 1900), which are usually believed to be the personal generator of the dreamer’s dreaming process, are only individual. In contrast to what many of us used to think, it seems that ‘daily residues’ are often relational and may be shared by many who need to cope with ‘collective preoccupations’. Rather than personal concerns, followed by ‘autonomous’ dreaming processes, we find relational, interpersonal and social concerns to co-ignite shared digestive processes, which result in dreams.

My previous assumption (Friedman, 2008) was that the main reason for sharing a dream is to continue an unsatisfactory internal elaboration in personal dreaming through external partners. While this still seems to be true, I build on this by the thought that the dreamer’s personal digestion need is unconsciously part of an interpersonal digestion. Partners (the listeners) seem to be needed — to continue, together, the elaboration by the contribution of their transpersonal responses. Even when the listeners are not the original partners to the ‘collective preoccupation’, they are usually able to respond — partly — to the personal and collective request for containment and engage in shared elaboration of the emotional excesses. This is a fuller understanding of dreams as ‘the royal way through the other’ (Friedman, 2002), where partners respond to personal and collective concerns as reflecting and elaborating subjects.

The perspective of a matrix

On the other hand, this view can be seen as a simple transposition of Foulkes’ (1973) notion of a matrix on the dream’s context. By matrix Foulkes meant the total network of communication between individuals-in-relations, which provides meaning to the particulars. The matrix is a way to understand that dreaming and shared dreams have a configurational value or valency. Dreams told have many meanings, not only one, and not only for the dreamer, but also for his or her audience. Dreams are created in relational waters, for example in the liquid state of a group-analytic-group or in familiar or friendly relationships, and cannot be understood without this context. A matrix approach to dreaming also helps to understand why dreams, like fish, like to return to these relational waters.

As previously mentioned, dreams and dreaming are mostly used unconsciously in at least three ways (Friedman, 2008). In addition to shared dreams being used as providers of conscious and unconscious information about the dreamer and his or her relations (the classical approach to dreams), dreams shared will also have formative and transformative functions. Telling dreams may form and create relations and unique settings for groups or organizations who can elaborate difficulties and promote development and cure or destroy them. This formative use of shared dreams can only be detected or denied during longer processes of working with dreams. These functions are complemented by a transformative use of dreams told, communicated by usually disguised requests for containment and demands for influence on relations. These communications in dreamtelling have reciprocal interpersonal and transpersonal effects.

Informative and transformative aspects of transpersonal communication

From this perspective, the notion of transpersonal communication can now be differentiated into having informative, formative and transformative aspects. This differentiation may be helpful to understand the centrality of the boundary-less communication.

The transpersonal’s informative value is that without sometimes going through our conscious senses, we ‘know’ (e.g., something unspoken). The transpersonal also helps us to dream the emotional difficulties’ transformation. It is the transpersonal which threatens or promises glory and pushes for its first digestion during dreaming. It also pushes out the first request for containment. Of course, the transpersonal also has a formative value, as these communications are used to create intimate spaces (among others).

When a dreamer’s unconscious need to be significantly understood is fulfilled, it enables dream sharing with the possible gain of information. Tolerance of a dream’s incomprehensibility—together with feelings that the transpersonal transformative potential—can allow dreamers to feel ‘contained’. I learned that: ‘where there is a container there will be (remembered and shared) dreams’.

Transpersonal communication as the basis of the ‘personal responses first’ approach to shared dreams

It is important to explain more about Foulkes’ notion of transpersonal (1957) communication. Conscious and unconscious communication affects relations by moving beyond interpersonal interchange into a different quality of influence ⁵ . Transpersonal communication makes it possible to sense without words, involves being understood without intentionally showing, and in the end, it often means co-creating a common mind (Foulkes, 1973).

A transpersonal understanding of human permeable psychic boundaries means that both the communication and the elaboration of emotional content happens beyond the individual’s mind and can be found between individuals. Such a transpersonal approach is a central characteristic of all group analytic processes, starting with people’s latent feelings about how and why they join a group, how they relate to others, and what basic communicative mechanism enables their joint re-enactment of interpersonal dysfunction and curing patterns. The same transpersonal approach is especially valid to shared dreams and their multi-layer communication. Dreams’ verbal and non-verbal communication seems especially apt to permeate a listener’s psychic boundaries like x-rays (one of Foulkes’ descriptions of the transpersonal). It is: ‘an endo-psychic common union between . . . primary worlds’ (Foulkes, 1966: 154, remarkably appropriate to touch on moments of deep communion felt by a group working on a dream.

Historically, the notion of the transpersonal may well be a result of Foulkes’ collaboration with Norbert Elias ⁶ . There is no evidence that Elias’ views on an ‘open person’ in the ‘Society of Individuals’ (Elias, 1939) or Foulkes’ view of the matrix were based on Freud’s earlier suggestion (1913) of reconstructing a patient’s unconscious from the derivatives of one’s own unconscious responses. Freud reported that ‘while I am listening to the patients, I, too, give myself to the current of my unconscious thoughts’ (Freud, 1913: 134). Two years later, in The Unconscious (1915), he describes how one person receives another person’s unconscious without it passing through his own consciousness (Freud, 1915: 186). Clinicians are often aware that there is a preconscious intermediation between people enabling ‘the receiver’s’ ability to perceive unconscious communication and through some kind of mentalization that enables one’s eventually shared resonance and mirroring.

In Freud’s encyclopaedic article Psycho-Analysis (1923), he summarised:

Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of suspended attention, to avoid as far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious. (Freud, 1923: 239)

Half a century later, Ogden’s (1996) connected (unknowingly) with Foulkes’ concept of the ‘transpersonal’ by the suggestion that the listener to a dream adopts a mental position close to Bion’s (1970) ‘reverie’.

This reverie, a kind of ‘suspended attention’ state, makes it possible for even lay listeners to dreams shared, to become what Grotstein (2002) rightly called the ‘dreamer who dreams the dream’. Similarly, 25 years ago, my own dream-group participants named their ‘free-floating’ responses to the dream: ‘re-dreaming the dream’. Thus, emotionally touched listeners, who allow themselves to be exposed to the dream’s (manifest and hidden) communications, are able to share their personal intuitive responses by the ‘free floating discussion’ ⁷ (Foulkes, 1948) which ‘re-dreams’ the dream.

‘Personal responses first’ and the development of increasingly trusting one’s own resonance and mirroring to shared dreams

Our experience in ongoing group-analytic groups shows that participants in a healthy relational atmosphere can increasingly trust their own personal emotional responses and evoked memories to reflect a valid understanding of their relational exchange. Relying on personal responses to conscious and unconscious messages is a process which can be optimally achieved in a group through a reciprocal communication process where individuals grow through experimenting with the reliability of their social senses in relational exchanges. This understanding may be an addition to the usual group-analytic principle of learning to ‘trust the group’, which means progressively relying on the relational potential of the group-as-a-whole. It presupposes that individuals in relations acquire a configurational ⁸ (Elias, 1939) trust in one’s own responses as well as in the responses of others. The trust is not only in the transportation of information and feelings between dreamers and their partners, but also in the creation and transforming influence of their relations.

Thus, we can add to the already mentioned transpersonal exchange as a basic facilitator of both an informative (Friedman, 2008) as well as a transformative use of communication. It allows all listeners to a dream to detect and eventually express latent meanings and messages, complementary to, or instead of, classic interpretation (Ogden, 1996). The notion of a transpersonal communication in particular helps towards a greater awareness of unspoken and unconscious requests for containment or demands for influence on the listeners of shared dreams.

Bion’s (1970, 1992) approach to dreams, which both complements and expands Freud’s work is important in this context. He describes how dreaming contributes first to the dreamer’s development of thinking, and later to digestion, and especially to his or her epistemic functioning.

Introducing Bion’s main approach to dreams as developing thinking (Bion, 1962), Grotstein considers that by ‘dreaming, (the dreamer) introjects emotional reality so as to (alpha-) process it for acceptance’ (2002: 124). Ferro (2009) believes that this (new) perspective produces a psychoanalysis which gives priority to dreaming as the development of the apparatus for feeling and thinking. Reis (2019) thinks that the focus of the dream’s work moves from the dreamer’s contents and memories (Freud) to Bion’s approach of developmental and pathogenic processes of the dreamer’s thinking and symbolization.

All these approaches to dreams and dreaming address individual processes. Now we will address the understanding that dreaming goes beyond individual dreaming to the multi-personal, social aspects of digestion and elaboration. It is important to mention that in approaching dreaming and dreamtelling as interpersonal and transpersonal functions does not eliminate the thinking done for dreaming for individual purposes, but rather, complements them. A preoccupied group engages the listeners with dreamtelling’s reciprocal developmental functions. Collective aspects of dreaming and shared digestion of shared dreams are central relational aspects in human partnerships.

Dreams-in-relations

Bion (1992), beyond understanding a dream as a space for the individual’s development, takes a further relational step by connecting the dreaming process with the containment potential of a relation. He describes a patient with a ‘murderous super ego’, who could only dream ‘with precautions, e.g. of being with the analyst or . . . only allowing the dream to develop when he knows someone is there’ ⁹ (1992: 40). Similar to Ferenczi, who as early as 1913 asked: ‘To whom one relates a dream?’ it takes dreaming into relations.

Group analysts’ experience makes them increasingly aware that dreaming and the dream’s content are influenced by (external and internal) connections, as in the case of a family or the dreamer’s inner group. As the significance of the triangular connections between dreamers, their dreaming and related listeners to their dream becomes clearer, it is impossible to consider the dream alone, unless as an abstraction serving a clinical or social purpose ¹⁰ .

Following Winnicott’s (1960) statement that ‘there is no such thing as an infant’ (without his maternal provision, Winnicott, 1960: 39) can be used here: ‘there is no such thing as a dream . . . without its relational context’. Bollas (1995) called it ‘countertransferential dreaming’, emphasizing how the dreamer’s partner ability to be susceptible to the dream’s communication helps the dreamer ‘to process his unconscious communications: one dreamer to another’ (Bollas, 1995: 12). The patient sends their messages through the dream in order to actively engage with the analyst in a processing movement. A dream cannot be fully elaborated without understanding the dreamer’s relations and maybe the notion of a dream’s matrix should be considered as well. In a group-analytic group, therapy is provided ‘by the group, of the group, including its conductor’. It means that analysts rely on the group’s collective interaction and its transpersonal communication qualities to cure and help its participants to grow.

Moreover, the transpersonal perspective shows how natural it is to unconsciously dream (digest) and re-dream ‘for others’. Mothers and fathers dream for their children and often vice versa. Similarly, therapists and their individual patients are often so close that they may dream not only of each other but also for each other. Transpersonal communication similarly influences couples as it influences therapeutic groups, a fact which can be learned from related listeners reporting of how much of the shared dreams actually belong to the group. Likewise, it seems natural to dreamers to use the responses to their dreams in order to ‘re-own’ concerns and hopes in the narratives and associated fantasies.

The transpersonal perspective saves us from a false dichotomy between the dreaming process ‘owned’ exclusively by the dreamer or actually pertaining to the whole concerned group.

Summing up, related persons are often in need of ‘dreaming’ in their effort to digest a collective preoccupation and they will use a touched dreamer, able or fit, to engage in a shared digestive process. In Part II, I will discuss the location of the elaboration of a collective preoccupation. Sharing dreams ¹¹ , especially if there is a space in which the dreamer’s partners respond first with resonance and mirroring ¹² , can be part of healthy human growth, and carry a developmental potential for relations.

Approaching the dream cycle. Dreamtelling: The royal way through the Other

Following an example of a dream shared, I will describe a ‘dream cycle’ from its inception until the dream is shared and responded to. As an abstract I would say that the first of the four steps of the dream cycle is the encounter with a (often collective) preoccupation—which requests containment through dreaming—and which is the second step. Next, the dream is remembered and re-told to one’s inner relational world, and the fourth step is sharing it with partners.

The dream of a kiss. A first example of the transformative use of dreams in relations

Thirty years ago I had a patient who introduced me to the secret of the unconscious communicative aspects of a narrated dream, especially of its transformative use. He fell in love with a woman whom he watched from a distance at a party. While he did not find the courage to seek any closeness to her, after the disappointing experience that night, he dreamt that he passionately kissed this woman’s red lips and it was reciprocated. I remember that when I heard this part of his account, it did not move me. I thought that my ‘hero’ had once again just dreamt a ‘wishful thinking’ dream, compensating for his anxiety and insecurity.

But his story had a surprising ending. In our Mediterranean area, during our long summers, many of the party met the following day at noon at the ‘student beach’ for a party. So, our dreamer arrived at the beach equipped with his dream and approached the woman. What did he do? Did he kiss her? No, he told her about his dream. How wise this decision was! She immediately responded by falling in love with him, which he felt was a miracle (and to me as well).

I was surprised by his ‘creative’ use of dreaming. I learned that telling dreams in a responsive environment has potential relational aspects. The young man was at the end of his second year of therapy, and his insecurity with women was only starting to improve. It took me a while to get a fuller understanding of the unconscious communicative dynamic in what was later called ‘dreamtelling’. He confessed that from the moment he fell for this woman, as it had often happened, he suspected that he would not be able to muster the courage to directly approach ‘someone like her’. Sharing his dream provided him with a surprisingly new experience, but the dream’s birth was interesting too. We both felt that he dreamt this dream to contain his own insecurity, and later we also understood that her desire, even if barely sensed, contributed to the dreaming process. ‘Using’ the non-verbal communication of her longing and belonging (Schlapobersky, 2005) to overcome his overtly avoidant anxiety, he gave voice to the wish to co-create a partnership by his kissing her in his dream. By telling her his dream he requested the containment of his anxieties and demanded to have an influence on their relationship. She responded in kind, becoming a ‘container-on-call’ (Friedman, 2002)—and a secure, non-rejecting partner. Under the influence of their transpersonal communication during the party, he had been able to dream the new kissing part of him, who approached a woman who might react positively rather than negatively. By being able to dream of a ‘kissed woman’ he could progress to a new step in the creation of a mature relationship.

A fascinating encounter between two worlds had been dreamt, which could just for the sake of understanding, be described as ‘internal’ and ‘external’. The dreamer’s ‘internal’ phantasies and wishes, which also carried the anxiety provoked by past experiences of insecurity, met with the ‘external’ input of a preoccupied woman. The transpersonal communication during hours of non-verbal interchanges and barely sensed clues of his approaching difficulty, and her wish for connection created their ‘collective preoccupation’. Both became partners in the difficult process of moving from their passive to a more active position. This significant meeting point with a common anxiety on the edge of consciousness co-created a collective preoccupation which ignited a shared digestive process. This process included his dreaming and later dreamtelling on the beach.

The dream created from this collective preoccupation was their first child. Pregnant with their wishes and relational difficulties the dream informed both of this collective preoccupation and the hope to overcome it. Telling the dream at the beach started to form ¹³ their relation, co-creating a sharing space. In this space a transformation of their relation started, creating a ‘couple of individuals’, where a ‘request for containment ’ met a ‘container on call’ (Friedman, 2002).

Questions of being ‘delegated’ to dream

Why did my patient dream, remember and share their dream—and not the woman he met? Stierlin (1981) conceptualized a ‘delegation’ mechanism, where someone in the family is unconsciously ‘chosen’ to carry a psychologic disease, like anorexia, ‘for’ the family. Kaes (2002), through his concept of a dreamer being a ‘porte-voix’ ¹⁴ , tackled the idea of delegation further: Not only someone’s voice in a group speaking for the emotional difficulties of others, but a voice in a dream expressing a common preoccupation ¹⁵ .

Agazarian (1994) describes someone in a group who can become ‘a scapegoat, an identified patient or (cocreate) a deviant pair’ in what she calls a ‘containing role’ (Agazarian, 1994: 39). The scapegoat, for example, has a relational function: he or she has to contain and elaborate difficult emotions which emerge in the group, e.g. hate, weakness or the anxiety of collapsing norms. A person ‘open’ to influences, also helps further to configurate this (almost weird) unconscious mechanism: the dreamer seems open enough to be chosen to try to elaborate an uncontained emotion for a family or a group. The dreamer is ‘used’ (Winnicott, 1969) by others to start the digestion process. When the dream is later shared, one can often find evidence for the fact that the listening partners are as equally busy with the collective preoccupation as the dreamer. Through dreamtelling, the chosen dreamer’s personal digestion is fed back into a partnership, e.g. a group. The group’s function is to dream further the dreamt dream through responding freely, unconsciously—coping together with the collective preoccupation, as the lovers did on the seashore.

In the above example, while both ‘partners’ needed to elaborate their collective preoccupation, my patient seems to have been the person with the stronger need to digest rejection anxiety.

At present this is the closest I can be to understanding the troubled relational process of this person and the dream, which resulted in dreaming a collective preoccupation alongside the need to be in relations with a desired partner.

This example adumbrates the ‘dreaming cycle’ which I describe below.

First Step: The touch of collective preoccupation

The ‘dreaming cycle’ starts when the ‘dreamer’ is ‘touched’ by a preoccupation they may share with others. The shared concern, transported by transpersonal communication in the dreamer’s relational circle, demands digestive efforts because it evokes excessive, threatening or manic states. These emotional excesses include the first request for containment and ignites a digestive/adaptational process. This process continues by personal dreaming, then remembering and self-reflecting on the dream, and finally sharing the dream with elaborating partners. This sharing includes a second request for containment. Dreaming cycles can repeat themselves in many ways.

A mother dreamt about the envy of a young co-worker. When the dreamer shared her dream with her daughter, they both realized that she was trying to help her daughter’s uncontainable envy. By exchanging their feelings and memories about the dream’s narrative, they both re-dreamt the dream. While the mother’s dreaming aimed at processing (also) her own envy, it was mainly the ‘collective preoccupation’ about her daughter’s unbearable envy which had ignited the complex and fascinating elaborative process of dreaming.

The ‘daily residues’ may well be collective preoccupations. Our approach considers a social concern like a family’s difficult or a communal difficulty as a collective preoccupation which triggers dreaming and later dreamtelling. Pre-dreaming threats and excitements endanger not only a dreamer, but also the ‘society of individuals’ (Elias, 1939).

Second step: Dreaming a collective preoccupation

In the next phase, the elaborative process during sleep which we call ‘dreaming’ creates a dream. Palombo (1992), a psychoanalyst dream researcher, provided for the best conceptualizations of this process. In short: using the unlimited reservoir of our unconscious stored experiences which includes emotions, relations and protagonists, the dreamer’s mind elaborates preoccupations by comparing similar, past situations and relational configurations. We seem to have stores full of potential protagonists, who are cast in order to ‘play’ in brilliant scripts that contain ‘troubles’ in condensed relational situations. The ‘young co-worker’ in the jealous mother’s dream was dreamt to locate her envy. It is an example of a ‘relational configuration’ which served the mother’s elaboration. These protagonists and scripts are integrated in ‘videos’ or ‘movies’ (Schlachet, 2002) and playwrights (Grotstein, 2002), by what seems to us today as a computerized juxtaposition. Some of the human, most creative moments are displayed in dreams, which often seem to be the artistic results of the dreaming process. Often a dreamer cannot finish the elaboration of a collective preoccupation alone and, a remembered dream can be understood as an invitation for others to further investigate it.

Third step of the dream cycle: A dialogue with inner and outer groups?

An analyst dreamt of his fear of his patient’s anger. In his dream he was being threatened by the patient’s uncontrollable aggression.

The analyst wakes up in panic of being hurt, feeling great relief that it was ‘only’ a nightmare. From what I understood later, the analyst, while being deeply connected and identified with his patient’s journey with violence, still dreamt their collective preoccupation about boundless aggression. While the analyst’s dreaming was probably an effort to digest his own violence, his basic aim was to dream and cope with the shared fear of destruction, which preoccupied the relation. This digestion helped to survive an oncoming attack on the therapeutic relationship.

An equally interesting point was that when the dreamer woke up, he immediately imagined sharing the dream with his former therapist and his supervision group. Why was he addressing the dream’s narration to these audiences? Such accounts were more frequent than I expected at the beginning of my work with dreams-in-relations and I think, for many, the moment of remembering and narrating the dream to oneself or others provides for a moment of reflection. For many dreamers this moment is also a significant bridge to the dreamer’s inner groups. The dreamer’s elaboration processes make a short stop at his or her internal relational environment, before it is shared with the external group in the next step as dreamtelling, with potential elaboration partners. Partners, whether phantasized or real, make both remembering and sharing possible.

In this third step in the dream’s cycle, the ‘reflection phase’, a half-awake dreamer silently mumbles his dream to an ‘inner audience’ of past and present partners. I suspect that in the same way Meltzer (1984) hypothesized a 24/7 inner ‘dreamlife’ we also have semi-conscious, unthought relations with an ‘inner group’. Ada Abraham, a group analyst, mentions: ‘the inner group . . . is an intrapsychic construct which determines the individual’s perception of the group . . . it is an acquired mental apparatus, defines the group’s meaning for the individual and dictates the matrix of interpersonal interactions in it’ (Abraham, 1990: 391). Kaes (2002) also quotes Bakhtin’s (1929) idea of ‘an inner social audience, which is specific for every individual’ (Bakhtin, 1929: 123). Thus, the dream’s remembrance becomes a relational event, a kind of unthought dialogue with internalized others and ‘creates an atmosphere in which deductions, reasons and appreciations are produced’ (Bakhtin, in Kaes, 2007: 391. It is even thinkable that this ‘inner group’ co-creates the dream’s contents and helps to put them on stage. Probably this ‘inner group’ is a significant element of what Foulkes (1957) referred to as the ‘personal matrix’, an inner community which accompanies individuals when they meet a ‘dynamic matrix’.

Fourth step: Dreamtelling

The last step of the ‘dream cycle’ is to share the dream in order to continue the unfinished elaboration of the personal or collective preoccupation ‘through the other’. A group-analytic approach suggests after sharing a ‘personal responses first’ phase, listeners to the dream allow themselves to be touched, and enter into an exchange of resonance and mirroring with the dreamer and their dream, rather than taking an interpretative stance. The listeners feeling they ‘re-dream the dream’ (see above) is actually a ‘free-floating discussion’ which co-creates an open communicative space between the dreamer and their co-opted partners.

Citing Foulkes (1975) ‘One might go so far as to say that interpretation comes in where analysis fails’ (Foulkes, 1975: 117). By ‘analysing’ Foulkes meant the group’s free-floating discussion group and its clinical translation is the ‘personal responses first’ approach.

Dreamtelling, as an interpersonal and transpersonal communicative space, can be seen as ‘the Royal Road through the Other’ (Friedman, 2002: 46). The ‘via regia’ ¹⁶ to the dreamer’s mind would also be the road to the ‘shared mental matrix’ (Foulkes, 1975: 250). It should be kept in mind that the dreamtelling phase has informative functions, through insightful communication together with unspoken formative functions, creating states of mind and structures. Further, its communication includes transformative functions which I describe as ‘requests for containment’ and ‘demands for influence’ (Friedman, 2008) ¹⁷ .

The shared digestion in the dream cycle, which provides for the development of all participants, has strong resemblance to Bion’s container/contained circular process (1963).

Summary of the ‘dreaming cycle’

The first phase of the dreaming cycle is when related individuals become preoccupied with a collective concern, which calls for an interpersonal elaboration effort. The transpersonal communicative qualities of relations provide for significant ‘moments of meeting’ (Stern et al.,1998) in the beginning of the dreaming cycle.

In the second phase, dreaming proper is ignited in an almost magical relational interaction. While dreaming can develop the dreamer’s thinking ability, its main function is relational, going through a process of digesting personal and collective emotions. One dreamer takes on himself the initial elaboration and digestion of a (collective) emotional difficulty and the result is the creation of a dream.

During the third phase the dreamer remembers the dream, tells it to himself and often to his inner relations or group. This reflective phase seems to be part of the elaboration process of dreamt preoccupations.

The fourth and final phase of the dream’s cycle is dreamtelling proper. By sharing their dream, the dreamer also makes their personal matrix available for the group’s continuing digestion of collective and personal preoccupations. By dreamtelling, the collective preoccupations meet (again) the dynamic matrix. By allowing themselves to listen to the dream, related individuals become partners in a shared digestion. They also may fall under the spell of the dream’s influence. By responding ‘personally first’, rather than by early interpretations, the group’s unspoken and unconscious communications are activated and used to further contain threats/excitement, as well as to transform their relations with the dreamer^{18, 19 , 20} .