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OPEN  MEETING
Friday 9th June, 2017       
All welcome  
St Luke’s Community Centre, 130 Remuera Road.

6.00 pm  ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING of DNANZ – Come and discuss future developments for our Dream Network.    
7.00 pm A light supper.
7.30 pm Presentation by CLARE CALDWELL, BFA,

Post-Grad Certificate in Expressive Therapy:

WHEN VISIONS

INTERVENE

IN LIFE AND ART
Clare is a practising artist who will discuss her experience of impactful dreams and visions in her life, that guide her art practice and her work as a tutor of therapeutic and fine art. She currently provides a weekly class for the marginalised and homeless people at the City Mission.

        Entry fee: $20.00 ($10 unwaged). Pay at the door.
 Enquiries:
Margt Bowater, mandebowater@gmail.com or margtoland@xtra.co.nz
 
EDITORIAL
Dear Dreamers,
Welcome to our second bulletin for the year, the DNANZ May 2017 Bulletin.  I hope you are all keeping warm and well with winter approaching.  It is a great time to curl up by the fire and read our latest edition. 
  • This month we are advertising our DNANZ open meeting in June with a presentation by Clare Caldwell. 
  • There is a dream contributed by Sarah Lassally entitled Two Cats which Sarah interprets as representing two aspects of herself - her healthy and unhealthy selves. 
  • Margaret Bowater contributes an article on Jungian Dreamwork based on Dr. Chris Milton’s talk to the Open Meeting of DNANZ.  She explains his theory that dreams help compensate our egos unconsciously in order to adapt to our changing environments. 
  • I report on Bev Kaho’s very interesting talk to our May Dream Supervision Group on how dreams have helped her to cope with the grief of losing her husband. 
  • Stanley Krippner’s book “Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with them” is reviewed.
  • And finally, in Research Corner, Margaret Bowater presents an idea from an article by Katja Valli that suggests that dreams have a survival function which is described as the “sentinel function.”
Happy reading and dreaming.
Lynette Papp (Editor)
Report on Bev Kaho’s presentation for the Advanced Dreamwork Supervision group in May 2017.
 
 Bev Kaho presented a very interesting one - hour talk and discussion on the role of dreams in assisting the healing process after significant loss.  She presented extracts of dreams and reflections from a collaborative book Bev is co-writing with Lynette Papp.  The dreams represented both dreamers. They document the healing process through theme, metaphor and imagery. 
 
Widowed after more than thirty years of partnership Bev and Lynette noticed some very significant parallels in dream content and decided to collaborate on a book that they hope to complete in draft by the time of the dream conference in October this year.
It became apparent to Bev and Lynette that certain stages of mourning were present in the dreams.  Moreover, that included a pre – cognitive stage.  Both women examined dreams they had in the two years prior to their loved ones’ deaths.  There were images that appear to have signalled impending disaster such as Bev’s “death nurse” and Lynette’s safety officer in a nuclear holocaust.
 
A second stage involving magical thinking seemed to occur in the early grief phase where there was a theme of the partner being still alive.  Lynette experiences holding Walter as he sings a song in Rarotongan Maori. Bev experiences Tavak wearing a green shirt and being very physically slow.  The second stage is also interspersed with a theme of burial and putting to rest. Lynette finds herself dead and buried and then re-animated whilst Bev dreams her partner is ritually buried in the Tonga way and herself singing.
A third stage seemed to signal the beginning of acceptance of life without the loved one.  Bev experiences herself united with Tavak and her family on an orb or small planet out in space surrounded by constellations.  Tavak envisaged as a star in the sky brought comfort. Lynette’s “Bad Smell” dream where she brings Walter’s body out of the freezer signalled she needed to move on with her life.
A third stage seemed to signal the beginning of acceptance of life without the loved one.  Bev experiences herself united with Tavak and her family on an orb or small planet out in space surrounded by constellations.  Tavak envisaged as a star in the sky brought comfort. Lynette’s “Bad Smell” dream where she brings Walter’s body out of the freezer signalled she needed to move on with her life.
The fourth stage showed acceptance and a new journey beginning. Bev’s final dream shows a goose and a boat tethered in the moonlight ready to take her in a new direction.  Lynette’s dream in this stage shows her dancing and spinning like a whirling dervish and finding a playfulness and joy in new relationship that was completely unexpected.
Bev summed up by saying that she believes that the metaphors in dreams provide an opportunity for preparing for and enduring great loss.  She hopes that the patterns that she and Lynette share in their two recovery stories can provide hope for others in their grief journey.  It may take some time but our dreams can aid the healing process if we take time to journal and work with them.
By Lynette Papp


DREAM REPORT  
                                        
TWO CATS
 


by Sarah Lassally 
I am walking through a garden centre holding two cats, one in each hand. One cat is healthy, the other is sick. A man calls out to me not to carry the two cats together as the sick cat will infect the healthy cat.

I had this dream after returning to New Zealand from a stint abroad. I had left an unhealthy relationship when I left New Zealand. Upon return I had been in contact with this ex-partner again. Cats in my dreams are usually symbols of myself, especially my emotional health. After working on the dream I concluded the healthy cat was the person I had become while being away and the unhealthy cat was myself prior to leaving. My ex-partner is a gardener hence the setting of a garden centre. The dream seemed to be telling me not to reunite these two parts of myself, i.e. not to go back to this relationship as it would be a return to something unhealthy, undoing the personal development work I had done outside of it.
Research Corner:   Margaret Bowater
 
ORIGINS OF DREAMING                  
Why do we dream at all?  How did dreaming begin in the development of human beings?
  • We know that dreaming is a characteristic of the mammalian brain, and not of the reptilian brain that preceded it in the story of evolution. Extra brain power assisted survival.
  • Mammalian brains are more complex and require a daily period of sleep for growth and maintenance. But sleeping leaves the creature defenceless, and the earliest mammals would have been constantly at risk from reptilian predators. Might dreaming have given them an evolutionary advantage?
  • In 1966 Frederic Snyder suggested that the cyclic pattern of brain waves that creates Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep (with dreams) is followed by a brief awakening, which would enable the animal to check its environment – a ”sentinel” function - at regular intervals. (In modern humans, that’s the point when we turn over in bed.)
  • Having read about Jouvet’s experiments with cats (1959), observing that their sleep behaviour clearly suggested they were dreaming of stalking and hunting, Snyder deduced that dreams provided the opportunity for animals to practise survival skills; and that waking directly out of such dreams would mean they were physically ready for immediate action to fight or flee.
  • This makes intuitive sense, even if the theory is not provable. Other dream researchers have built on this idea.  More about this in the next Bulletin.
[This material is based on an article by Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo,”Evolutionary Psychological Approaches to Dream Content,” in Vol 3 of “The New Science of Dreaming,” 2007, edited by Barrett and McNamara, published by Praeger.]
BOOK CORNER:
____________________________________
 
EXTRAORDINARY DREAMS AND HOW TO WORK WITH THEM

By Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran and Andre Percia de Carvalho,
Published 2002, by State University of New York Press, Albany. (paperback)
 
Although this book is not new, it is one I recommend for all health professionals to read. Written by leading researchers in the International Association for the Study of dreams, it’s a readable summary of 14 different kinds of dreams and visions you might be told in the course of listening to your clients.

The authors give a chapter to each of the main types, including creative, lucid, healing, out-of-body, clairvoyant, precognitive, past-life, visitation and spiritual dreams. After a general introduction, each chapter presents background information, recent research, new examples and practical guidelines for working with this type of dream.

I find it helpful to know how to recognise the different kinds, and be able to reassure dreamers that the more unusual dream-experiences are not indicating madness, but come within the range of known human experience. They may also carry significant meaning for the dreamer.                                                   
Margaret Bowater
Copyright © 2017 Dream Network Aotearoa New Zealand (DNANZ), All rights reserved.


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