Narrative drea m analysis?

Towards a narrative therapy

response to acknowledging people’s responses in drea ms

by Ron F indlay

Ron Findlay, in Melbourne, Australia, has been using the narrative approach of White/
Epston for 30 years in both the private and public health sectors. He has also taught it
at a postgraduate level. Ron can be contacted by email at ctc@labyrinth.net.au or
ron.findlay@latrobe.edu.au

Abstract
This article starts with a brief overview and critique of classic dream analysis, then follows
with a review of a sample of published narrative therapy approaches to dream analysis and
working with dreams. He then outlines another possible approach focussing on attending to
unique outcomes, initiatives, and responses in dreams already occurred.

Key words: narrative therapy, dream analysis, dream work, personal agency

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Can there be narrative approaches to dream analysis, so
as to help people with troublesome dreams? Back in 2011,
some words of a Melbourne colleague, and then student of a
postgraduate narrative therapy course, Ange Scuderi, got me
thinking. I thought what she said described a candidate new
idea, or at least the kernel of it, for inclusion in the narrative
approach – one I immediately playfully named a ‘narrative
dream analysis’. She reported that while trying to assist a
young girl with troubles in her dreams, she asked the girl how
she had responded to the troubles while in her the dream.
A first for a therapist – to ask about unique outcomes,
initiatives, responses that people do, in of all places their
dreams? Well, at least this version of asking, as I discovered
other narrative practitioners (see below) had already
described valuable approaches. And importantly, too, as
Ange Scuderi was then a student of narrative therapy,
this also reminds us how great new ideas can come from
narrative students too.
An ancient pedigree
Dream analysis has an ancient pedigree. Biblical accounts
abound. Some indigenous peoples place great importance
on dreams. There is the plethora of psychoanalytic texts of
the 20th century too. Some physical scientists have credited
getting answers to problems they are working on in dreams.
In these accounts, important knowledge is bestowed or
transmitted in the dream. Some of the transmitted wisdom
can be an explanations of things, of great news, or about
troubles existing or to come. If this knowledge and its source
– whether spiritual power, subconscious processes, or
something else – is true or not depends on the beliefs of
the person.
A first passivity: A focus on effects
and the passive receptacle
Not to dishonour or disrespect these beliefs about dreams,
I do note that these classic ways of valuing dream analysis all
seem to have one thing in common; the dreamer is positioned
as a passive recipient to receive this expert dream wisdom.
Now, if a person has revealed to them things like a path
of how to help set themselves or their people free, or they
receive images on how to solve complex scientific problems,
that can be celebrated and honoured. Yet, this ‘passive’
positioning has an emphasis, a focus, on the externally-
granted message in the dream and its possible effects on the
person and their life, both good and bad. Alternatively, as we
may understand in narrative practice, effects are only half
the story of what happened; how a person actively responds
completes the story (White, 2004, p.47; Yuen, 2009).
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No-one is a one hundred percent passive receiver; when
there are effects on people, there are always active
responses by those people.
A second passivity:
The expert knows all
And another thing we often find with knowledge in society is
that local knowledge is devalued, and expert knowledge is
privileged as the only worthwhile truth about how things are
to be understood (Findlay, 2012; White, 2003). This often
happens with classic dream analysis too. The person is
often cast passively a second time – they are informed they
need an expert to interpret these messages, thus a double
passivity. Passive to get them, passive to understand them.
(At least the dream is free; the expert interpretation is usually
the opposite.) There have been professional demarcation
disputes, too, about which profession should have legitimacy
in the expert dream interpretation industry. For years,
philosophical and religious experts competed for market
share; in recent centuries, psychology is the new up and
coming contender in the field.
Poststructuralism cautions us further
It is here that structuralism and poststructuralism can
contribute to the discussion about problems that can go with
expert interpretations. If we accept that there are truths, then
they may understandably and usefully need to be shared,
transmitted, passed around – in other words, distributed
in messages. Any message will be a ‘text’, such as video,
images/pictures, sound, and written script. Understanding
the problems that go with reading and interpreting text is
the debate between structuralism and poststructuralism.
My understanding is that structuralism says you can get to
the real essential truth in the message, uncover, and reveal
it. You just need the skill or code (like the experts claim
to possess) to translate the message. Post-structuralism
disagrees, saying that it is almost impossible to get any
exact essential truth out of any message as, amongst other
things, when we read a text we can’t avoid injecting some of
our own beliefs into it, therefore contaminating and altering
the result. So does poststructuralism say there is no essential
truth to be read somewhere, anywhere in any messages?
My understanding is that there may be, there may not,
but if there is, then for the above reasons it is nigh
impossible to ever get at it.
I believe aspects of the narrative approach and
poststructuralist thought have a wary scepticism regarding
‘experts’ reading any truth in any message accurately –
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including dreams. To reiterate, as well as the political problem
of rendering the dreamer passive to the expert for reading the
dream, poststructuralism may caution us that that expert’s
reading may be a problem too – the reading may be more
about the ‘experts’ and their beliefs and what is the truth for
the ‘experts’, not whatever elusive truth is or is not in the
dream.
Narrative therapy alternatives
to working with drea ms and
drea m analysis
These critiques are not to show disrespect to the search for
truth in dreams. They are simply cautionary critiques and
safeguards that apply to any search for truth, including in
pure science, pure reason, or pure psychology, as well as
I suppose in any search in spiritual understandings. And
perhaps not all dreams warrant mining for wisdom and
truth. Perhaps one helpful function of dreams is to keep us
entertained in the long hours we are asleep.
But if we do wish to learn and benefit from our dreams,
or help people with problem dreams, are there alternative
narrative therapy approaches described to working with
dreams, including to dream analysis? One candidate could be
David Epston’s (1986/1989) ‘Counter-dreaming’. Long ago,
he wrote how he provided positive dreams he had ‘authored’
about someone he was working with to counter the impact
of negative dreams about them another family member was
having. I am not sure it escapes all the concerns that go with
the ‘classic approach’, as first, the solution still came from the
therapist not the client, and second, the dream was not overtly
analysed. I imagine, though, it would have been very nice to
have a guardian angel in David Epston!
Another second worthy candidate is Milan Colic’s ‘Kanna’s
lucid dreams and the use of narrative practices to explore
their meaning’ (2007). Here Milan describes two things, at
least. First, new understandings, encouraging a young women
aged 15 he was working with to make her own interpretation
of her dreams: ‘... external meanings do not usually provide
opportunities to explore one’s own understandings of
experiences’ (p. 21). Second, new actions and responses,
helping her recruit the positive characters in her dreams (and
in her life) into a ‘Team’ to help them reduce the negative
elements in her dreams and her life:
Later, Kanna was able to take up similar skills in her own
dreams to great effect. In this way, rather than being
passively subjected to nightmares, Kanna was able to
interrupt these nightmares, and change both their content
and effects, through her own approach ... (p. 22)
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Colic describes using a diverse array of narrative skills to this
purpose and, as early as 2007, pioneeringly recommends and
provides narrative therapy approaches to dream analysis and
dream work different from classic approaches.
A third worthy candidate is by David Newman in ‘“Rescuing
the said from the saying of it”: Living documentation in
narrative therapy’ (2008). David described compiling and
sharing documents of people’s skills and knowledge on
how to respond to nightmares, both when awake and also
especially in the dream. These archives include ways to
reduce nightmares and alter them: ‘I try to intervene in my
dreams especially at the point where it is most frightening’
(Phillip, in Newman, 2008, p. 31). On hearing about Phillip’s
approach, Graham said, ‘I think that running from the man in
my dreams makes the man bigger. Now I am going to try and
confront him in my dreams’ (Newman, 2008, p. 31).
Are there more narrative approaches? The above is just an
apologetically Australian and New Zealand-centric sample.
There are probably many others already described. In
narrative approaches, we consider people as having expertise
on and in their own life; we aim to have their knowledges
and contributions and efforts acknowledged and promoted.
What the person does – their initiatives/responses for their
own behalf and benefit – will be highlighted, not just what
happens to them and its effects (Denborough, 2008; White,
2004, 2005; Yuen, 2009). Therefore, any narrative approach
to dream work and analysis would hopefully (like Colic and
Newman’s articles) incorporate these ethics.
Narrative therapy’s 1990s’ personal
agency and 2000s’ responses to
trau ma concepts
In narrative work, especially with trauma, we acknowledge
people’s responses to their predicaments. We believe people
are never totally passive to trauma. They always think
something, do something, to help themselves get through
(White, 2004, 2005). These responses can be building blocks
for alternative positions to give voice to one’s experience, to
develop subordinate stories of the self that become preferred
stories of the self. They could be thought of as examples of
‘personal agency’. Personal agency is often mentioned in
early narrative days (see White, 1991, p. 37), but I believe
was not so well defined in the narrative literature.
Back in 1991, Michael White acknowledged as an influence
Kenneth Burke who wrote A grammar of motives in 1945.
Burke (1969) originated what came to be known as the
‘dramatistic pentad’: scene, act, agent, agency and purpose.
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White included a long quote from Burke, of which I include
part of, in which Burke provides a useful definition of ‘agency’;
... any complete statement about motives will offer
some kind of answer to these five questions: what was
done (act), when or where is was done (scene), who
did it (agent), how he [sic] did it (agency), and why
(purpose) … you must indicate what person or kind
of person (agent) performed the act, what means and
instruments he [sic] used (agency). (Burke, quoted in
White, 1991, p. 33)
Later in the same 1991 article, White first developed this
notion of ‘agency’ into his notion of ‘personal agency’:
... assist in establishing for persons, a sense of
‘agency’. This sense is derived from the experience
of escaping ‘passengerhood’ in life, and from the
sense of being able play an active role in the shaping
of one’s own life ‒ of possessing the capacity to
influence developments in one’s life according to
one’s purposes and to the extent of bringing about
preferred outcomes. This sense of personal agency is
established … (p. 38)
Concepts of ‘agency’ (and ‘personal agency’, ‘human agency’,
‘sense of agency’) are also described in many other fields,
such as philosophy, sociology, and branches of psychology.
These may or may not have influenced White’s formulations,
in addition to Burke.
White revisited the idea of agency in 2005:
... children’s sense of personal agency. This is a sense
of self that is associated with the perception that one
is able to have some effect on the shape of one’s own
life; a sense that one is able to intervene in one’s own
life as an agent of what one gives value to and as an
agent of one’s own intentions, and a sense that the
world is at least minimally responsive to the fact of
one’s existence. (White, 2005, p. 14)
Thus ‘agency’ can be understood as having, or at least
the sense of having, some influence in one’s own life,
including I also infer, having influence in the writing of
one’s preferred identity and story. In all this, I am most
drawn to Burke’s comments about agency as means and
instruments, as it sounds so practical. Therefore, to me,
personal agency means, in large part, having the tools to
do what one wishes, and, of course, if you have the tools,
you also need to know how to, have the skill to, and be
allowed to use them too.
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We don’t need to use the ‘personal agency’ term particularly,
but it does have appeal for me. The important narrative
concepts covered by the 1990s’ term ‘personal agency’ are
also equally or better covered in the 2000s’ narrative concepts
like the focus on intentions, the landscape of action in the
re-authoring map, and the focus on approaches to trauma.
I refer you to the more familiar texts on them (White, 2003,
2004, 2005).
The beginning of another narrative
therapy response to drea ms?
So, back to 2011, when I was teaching and coordinating
a narrative graduate certificate course, Ange, a student
in the course, reported she was working with a young girl
who told Ange she was upset at losing her grandfather in
one of Australia’s terrible bush fires. Ange said she did her
best to ‘doubly listen’ (White, 2004; Yuen, 2009). In Ange’s
words, something like, ‘listening to hear both her story and
her responses ‒ as well as signs of her values, intentions,
knowledges and skills, that her responses may contain’.
When the young girl started to talk about an upsetting dream,
Ange said she decided to continue and extended the process
of asking and listening about the girl’s responses into the
discussion about what happened in the dream.
My recollection of Ange’s recollection of the discussion they
had is something like:
Ange: You dreamt that someone was trying to poison
you. Do you remember what you did in your dream?
Young girl: I ran away. When I woke up, I told my big
sister.
Ange told me that the conversation then drifted to other
areas the young girl held important and Ange was not able
to expand the process, but I would still say that Ange had
formulated a new fledgling technique, that of asking people
about their responses and initiatives they (deliberately/
intentionally/consciously) do to help themselves in their
dreams. A narrative practitioner may be ready to acknowledge
the ‘smart idea’ and action in the waking world (telling a
trusted big sister), but this also invites us to not overlook the
smart idea and action in the dream world – running away
from great danger. This reminding us, as with the narrative
responses to trauma in the waking world (Denborough 2008;
White 2004, 2005; Yuen 2009), that we are never totally
passive to what traumas happen to us in dreams either.
So if a dream is enjoyable that is just great. Perhaps we can
work with clients to relish and cherish it. But if a dream a
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client reports to us is full of worries, is scary, or is otherwise
bad or even nightmarish to a person, we can continue to ask
about the trouble in the dream and its effects (perhaps with
externalising conversations), but we can also ask about and
focus (sometimes even in preference to an enquiry about
effects?) how people in their dream respond, what they do
to endure and get through these dream hard times, and
we can honour these self-protecting efforts. (Denborough,
2008, p. 20). As with tough waking times, initially it may be
understandably hard for a person to see any responses
or actions they did themselves in their tough dreaming
times, so gentle and sensitive narrative questions may
help the ‘revelation’ of the person’s skills and associated
knowledge. Note, the main focus here is especially on what
they deliberately do – that is, with intention and conscious
purpose, not possible unconscious purpose. Thus to reiterate,
this alternative way of looking at dreams may also provide an
alternative supply of what messages of knowledge people can
get from dreams. It invites, instead of looking (just) for what
the elements of a dream apart from the person can teach the
person, to look at what the person in the dream is teaching
themselves.
Still to come
What might be the next steps in developing more narrative
therapy approaches to dreams; what is still to come? I think
it will require great ideas contributed by diverse narrative
practitioners and supporting others. Though one important
focus for narrative dream work is on helping reduce problem
dreams in the future, including identifying new ideas and
proposals for future action, another important focus, as
Ange demonstrated, is on ‘mining’ problem dreams that
have already occurred for their ‘silver lining’, such as unique
outcomes, initiatives, and responses (White, 2007). Some
suggestions follow.
For problem drea ms
If a dream was a problem for a person because of an overt
fear or danger in the dream, or because of pervasive worry,
or because of a persistent uncomfortable or annoying or
distressing state (like trying to find something but can’t),
then the focus on unique outcomes and agency/intention/
responses could be expanded. Maps of narrative practice
could be employed (White 2007). For example, some steps
could be to notice more unique outcomes (especially with
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agency/initiative) by the dreamer: ‘Can I ask what else you
did, or even just thought to yourself in the dream, to escape
or protect yourself from or just to get through the dangers
you were dealing with?’ Then to perhaps further explore if
and how these may fit with the dreamers’ values, purposes,
intentions:‘What does it say to you about what you believe is
important that you tried so hard to find safety in the dream?’
Perhaps we could recruit these discoveries from the dream
to thicken any alternate preferred story of the person, any
preferred identity claims, they are working on in the waking
world as well: ‘What does it suggest or tell you about yourself
that you never stopped trying to find a way away from the
fears in the dream?’ We might perhaps even use outsider-
witness questions and responses in the waking world to
richly describe and thicken the agency of the dreamer in their
dreams. For example, if a family member is present, to ask
them the four-step outsider-witness questions about their
responses to hearing of the dreamer’s self-protecting efforts
(White, 2007).
I suspect ‘narrative dream analysis’ will be of use when, like
trauma work, a person reports a dream, feels traumatised by
it, and may find value in rediscovering a sense of themselves
with agency and responsiveness that is overshadowed by
the memory and experience of the dream troubles. It is not
just experts and expert knowledge that can deliberately or
accidentally delegate people to passive positions in life;
the experience of trauma (awake or in dreams) can and
often does that to people too. Rediscovering the sense of
themselves as a person intentionally responding either in
thought or deed – or both – against the dream trauma and its
effects can provide a different and or restored sense of self.
For pleasant drea ms
As above, if a dream is enjoyable, is that not just great?
As above, perhaps the options are to relish, cherish, and
celebrate it. Though I am sure we can come up with a few
narrative approach techniques to thicken and enrich that joyful
process too.
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Ange Scuderi
to the ideas in this piece.
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