ASD Newsletter Volume 10, No. 4 Fall 1993
Teaching Dreamwork To Inner City Youth
Jane White-Lewis
I feel very lucky. I have always loved my work as a psychotherapist and Jungian
analyst. The intimacy of the analytic hour and the analytic relation is a very precious
experience. It is a rare privilege to enter into the imaginal life-to hear the dreams,
fantasies, and concerns-of another, and to bear witness to another's transformative
process and to feel oneself (as therapist) changed by the experience. In my work I am, it
seems to me, a midwife, assisting, enabling new life to come into being.
Quite content with my chosen profession, I was quite startled a few years ago when I
was at a college reunion and the partner of a classmate challenged my on my work, on the
exclusiveness, the elitism of my work. We had been discussing therapy, short term therapy
and group therapy versus long term individual psychotherapy or analysis. A cognitive
therapist, my challenger believed wholeheartedly in the efficacy and value of short term
therapy. He asked me, "How can you do what you do-spend so much time with so few
people, a privileged few-when there is so much to be done, so many people in need of
therapy?" It was true. Given that I usually see my patients two or three times a week
for years, I have worked, compared to this short term therapist, with very few people. My
response to his question was this: "Yes, I work on a small canvas, but my practice is
composed mostly of therapists and educators, also a lawyer, an executive in a construction
firm, and mothers and fathers, and potential mothers and fathers, that is, people who are
in a position (or positions) to impact others, affect the lives of others. If I can work
deeply and increase the consciousness of these people who are in contact with many others,
then there will be that much less toxicity in the world, and, through the ripple effect,
my practice does not seem so small." That was my answer.
But the question, "How can you do what you do?" stayed with me, troubled me
and began to take on a broader significance as I witnessed the appalling deterioration of
life around me, the hopeless condition of the poor and homeless in New York City, the
frequent drug-related tragedies in New Haven. I ached with pain for the children, women,
and men victimized by the social and economic conditions of their lives, and I raged at
the previous president and administration who persisted in defending their privileged
positions, with no vision, no heart, no sense of social responsibility. But was I fooling
myself? Perhaps I was no better, reassuring myself of the social impact of my practice as
I worked as an analyst with mostly upper-middle class patients in my comfortable
consulting room in Guilford, CT, a beautiful, old New England town. Wasn't this a luxury?
But what could I do? The problems were too immense. What could I do that would make a
difference?
About the time I was wrestling with these questions, I decided to start graduate work
at the Union Institute, a non-traditional, alternative, interdisciplinary graduate
program. On applying to the program, my plans were clear. I had written on the psychology
of nightmares and nightmares in literature. At Union I wanted to focus on the interface
between psychology and literature and planned to study literary theory, theories of the
imagination, feminist criticism. One requirement of the program has to do with social
responsibility, social relevance. As stated in the catalogue, "The Union Institute
does not support research in a vacuum, and it defines doctoral study as a force of social
change."
This aspect of the Union program, social responsibility, was given special emphasis in
the particular opening colloquium I attended. To prepare for the colloquium our group was
asked to read Jonathan Kozol's book Savage Inequalities, which describes the wretched
conditions in some of our city schools and the unfair, the "savage inequalities"
in our school systems. This is a powerful book that should be, in my opinion, required
reading on everyone's list. It is the kind of book that changes your thinking; you learn
something and can't unknow it. Life just isn't the same after you read the book, at least
that is how it was for me. When I went to the colloquium I had been considering reaching a
course on dreams in the local high school, in Guilford, to fulfill the internship
requirement of the program. But after I read Savage Inequalities and after I heard Toby,
one of my colleagues and an Afro-American executive at Procter and Gamble, describe his
plans to work with young men of color in the inner city to help them gain some sense of
self-empowerment, it all fell into place for me. What is more empowering than knowing
oneself, one's inner life, one's dreams, one's potential? I decided that I would not teach
a course on dreams in Guilford, but rather in the inner city, in New Haven. In June 1992 I
visited the High School in the Community (HSC), an alternative, magnet public high school
with a student body that is diverse in both academic ability and ethnic/racial
backgrounds. There are children of Yale faculty; there are students from the poorest, most
stressed, most beleaguered neighborhoods in the city. This teacher-run school is
especially interested in interdisciplinary studies and innovative approaches to education.
Meeting with the teachers, I presented my reasons for wanting to teach a course on
dreams, I said that it seemed really strange that one hears almost nothing about dreams in
school. We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping; dreaming is, as we all know, a
wondrous aspect of being human. We are blessed with a dialogic imagination. Psyche loves
stories. We love to listen to stories, we tell stories to others, we tell stories to
ourselves in our dreams. But we do not talk about dreams in school. WHAT A WASTE! There is
so much we can learn from our dreams.
I described four of the educational, creative, psychological, and social benefits of
high school students studying dreams. 1. By considering the images of their dreams as
metaphors and imaginal expressions of their feelings and concerns, the students could move
from concrete to more abstract, symbolic ways of thinking, thereby increasing their
capacity to think symbolically. 2. By studying and reflecting on their dreams and in
tapping into their imaginal worlds, the students could get a sense of their own cast of
characters and inner literature, both as a source for their own creative expression and as
a bridge to literature, to the imaginal worlds of others. 3. By imagining dream figures as
aspects of themselves and the dream as an expression of their inner conflicts, the
students would begin to know themselves better. In dreams we find missing parts of
ourselves that point the way to our psychological development; we also find the rejected
parts, the inner enemies, the seeds of prejudice. 4. Increased self-awareness fosters
self-empowerment, self-esteem, a fuller sense of agency, and more responsible life
choices, all of which have social implications. To the extent that one is more
psychologically conscious of inner conflicts, the less likely one is to project these
conflicts (this toxicity) onto the world and the less likely one is to act out in self and
socially destructive ways.
The faculty response to my proposal was enthusiastic; they loved the idea. By the time
I left the school after my short visit, I was signed up to teach an elective course
entitled "Dreams and the Imaginal Worlds" during the second quarter, November
through January. The response from the students to the announcement of the course was
equally enthusiastic; over a fourth of the school population signed up for the course.
Before starting the course on dreams, I had had minimal teaching experience. Through an
odd set of circumstances my first job had been teaching. Although my field in college had
been economics (international finance), I found myself, after graduating from college in
1957, teaching 7th, 8th, and 9th grade English at a girls' college preparatory school in
Cincinnati, Ohio, not exactly preparation for teaching in a New Haven public high school
in 1992.
I had, of course, been thinking about the course for months, but I had not done much
actual preparation; i.e., no course design no lesson plans. As this was new territory (to
my knowledge, no one had ever taught a course like this), I felt that I had to get a sense
of the terrain before I could determine in which direction I wanted to go. A few days
before starting to teach, I did, however, begin to panic at my lack of preparation. Trying
to comfort me, an experienced teacher friend reassured me by saying that I had been
preparing all my life for teaching this course, which was true, I guess, but undoubtedly
more teaching experience would have helped.
And so at the beginning of November I started teaching a class of 18 juniors and
seniors. We met for an hour four days a week, Monday through Thursday for nine weeks. Then
in January, I decided to teach a variation of the course the next quarter to a group of
ninth and tenth graders. The comments that follow generally refer to both sessions.
The major project for the courses was to keep a dream journal, to make daily entries,
if the student could not remember a dream, there were many other possibilities-for
instance, childhood dreams, in fact any dreams from the past, dreams of friends or family
members, any dreams encountered in novels, short stories, poems, T.V. Also they could
include any references to dreams or nightmares used as a metaphor-for example, "I
have a dream," "It was a nightmare situation." The journals were kept
mostly at home; I would, however, review them and comment on them several times throughout
the quarter.
What happened in class? A variety of things. In one of the first classes, as an
introduction to talking about images, the students made collages, picking out images that
appealed to them from a pile of magazines. We talked about some of the images. For
example, cars turned up in a lot of the collages. So we talked about cars. What is a car?
How is it different from other modes of transportation? What might a car mean in a dream?
The students were most interested in understanding their own dreams, so we spent a lot
of time working as a group on dreams in a Jeremy Tayloresque fashion. In both classes,
some students were immediately forthcoming with their dreams, and when the class felt safe
enough, others offered their dreams. Of course, not all students shared their dreams with
the class, and there was no pressure to do so.
Sometimes the class would enact a dream through role-playing, creating a kind of dream
theater; sometimes the students would use pastels to draw a response to their dream or to
a dream told to the group. Sometimes the class would write about their dreams-dream the
dream on (continue the story), or dialogue with one of the dream figures. The students
also wrote about their earliest memories, family stories, their own personal
histories-that is, the imaginal context of their lives and their dreaming. To understand
projection and our tendency to color what we see, a couple of classes were devoted to
projective tests, the Rorschach and the TAT. We talked about the literary use of dreams in
novels and short stories, and dreams in movies.
Although I had had an intuitive sense that a dream course could be valuable, it was
only in the classroom that I fully recognized the powerful potential and endless
possibilities inherent in teaching a course on dreams at the high school level. Let me
give you a few examples of what can happen.
There was Ray's dream as I listened to Ray telling his dream, I was startled by the
remarkable similarity to opportunity to talk about sensitive issues in a non-judgmental
way. For instance, many of the students reported dreams of police. A fairly typical dream
involved the student being engaged in some drug-related activity and hiding from, arguing
with, or running from the police. I asked the class, "If the dream is a reflection on
an inner state or conflict, who is the cop?" their own inner authority figure, their
conscience? If the student can consider the cop as an inner figure and the image of the
dream reflecting an inner conflict, then there is the possibility of taking some
responsibility for the choices being made and not unconsciously acting out, projecting the
disapproval onto the outer cop/parent/authority figure.
Another example: Many of the young women dreamt of having a baby, and usually jumped
immediately to a concrete interpretation-the baby in the dream represented the baby they
wanted to have with their boyfriend. Teenage pregnancy is a real problem for many of these
girls. Two of my 16 year old students were teenage mothers. What if the baby in the dream
is understood as some young part of the dreamer, some potential that needs to be mothered?
A literal pregnancy is not the solution for a young woman who wants to fill her inner
emptiness with a baby, to feel more important by becoming a mother. The last thing in the
world these young women, these children, need is to be trapped into a lifestyle that will
interfere with any attempt to get an education. If the child in the dream can be
considered as an inner child, inner potential, that needs to be mothered, cared for,
educated, there is a possibility of choices and chances of escaping the hopelessness and
despair of being poor and uneducated with few options.
As you can imagine, the teaching was not always easy. Some days were really difficult
and discouraging. And I made mistakes as I struggled to learn what worked and what did
not. Whenever I got into my lecturing mode, talking about Freud vs Jung, or archetypes or
whatever, I could see their eyes glazing over (the fact that the class was right after
lunch and the last period of the day did not help). When I let go of having to teach them
and stayed with their imaginal material, anything I wanted to teach emerged; that is, the
theory would naturally come out of the practice. For example, one of the students, Tina,
dreamed of a girl she hated, an excellent example of what Jung calls the
"shadow." Her image was engaging and memorable and offered an opportunity to
talk about this useful Jungian concept without my launching into a boring presentation.
In the first group I made a major mistake in trying to teach Wuthering Heights which I
had adored when I had read it when I was twelve years old. Bronte's literary use of a
dream in this novel is brilliant. In the third chapter, a nightmare appears which shapes
and resonates throughout the novel. But most of the class hated the book; the language was
so difficult it was like reading a foreign text. They refused to read it. I even tried
showing a film version of the novel; most of the class dozed off during the viewing. In
the second group, instead of watching Wuthering Heights, we watched an episode of
"All My Children" and ended up having a lively discussion of themes and
archetypes.
All in all, teaching the dream courses at the High School in the Community was an
enormously important and unforgettable experience in my life. Certainly, I will never be
the same. I suspect the same is true for many of my students, as well as other teachers in
the school who were especially curious about the course and by the end of the semester
were telling me their dreams.
During the winter quarter, I will be teaching the course again to a group of ninth
grade girls. I would, by the way, welcome any comments or ideas for the course from
Newsletter readers (my address: 29 Broad St., Guilford, CT 06437).
In closing, I want to come back to the question I asked myself, "What can I do to
make a difference?", and shift to, "What can we in ASD do to make a
difference?" Sometimes I get impatient with ASD and our smugness and self
satisfaction; we know how important dreams are to us and we talk to each other about them,
share our work and ideas with each other. I do NOT, in any way, want to diminish the
importance of this exchange which can be enormously valuable. It has been for me; ASD has
been instrumental in both my personal and professional development. But can't we do more
in terms of the world around us? We have so much unrealized potential in this
organization.
My first real awareness of the transformative power of dream groups came during the
1991 "Dreaming in Russia" trip led by ASD board member Robert Bosnak. More
recently, in listening to the dreams of inner city kids and taking them and their imaginal
lives seriously, has made me acutely aware of the power of dreams in an educational
context. So I ask, "When are we as an organization going to put social responsibility
as a priority?" Each one of us has the capacity to change things in the world, make
things better. Are we doing the best that we can do? My choice has been to work in an
inner city school, an obvious place to start as there are many opportunities at all levels
not matter what one's interest. Each one of you-writers, psychologists, teachers, artists,
dancers-dreamers all-could find a way to contribute in a school setting. And of course
there are many opportunities outside of the schools, in the community.
We now have more than 500 members in ASD. For ten years ASD has brought dreamers
together for fruitful, enlivening discussions and connections. Isn't it time to share,
more consciously and conscientiously, our riches with others?
Jane White-Lewis is a Jungian Analyst practicing in Guilford, Connecticut