Stanislav Raevsky: «Everything that happens in a dream is incredibly important»

I often ask clients when we work with dreams: who does the dream character remind you of?

There is an anecdote on this subject. In the morning, the psychoanalyst gets a call:

— Oh, I’m so terrified, I need you to urgently accept me.

The psychoanalyst just had a free hour. An anxious patient comes to him:

— I dreamed that I was coming to you for a session, and you had your face in front, and my mother’s face in the back. I woke up terrified, had a Coca-Cola breakfast, and here I am with you.

Psychoanalyst:

— Coca Cola? And you call it breakfast?

Freud believed that the face of a mother or father is hidden behind the mask of any character from a dream. We will find the mother everywhere — in any relationship, in looks and even in the way of thinking. This is our first relationship and everything else grows out of it. Including our desires. If what we want does not become a reality in life, it is realized in a dream. I believe that this is how most dreams are arranged: in them we satisfy our desires.

But it’s not just about that. The «day dream» of our life is exactly the same dream. I am walking down the street or doing something at work, and I have unconscious or conscious desires inside me, and I am always looking for how to satisfy them.

There was such a great experiment in which the movement of the eyes was investigated. The subjects gathered indoors, at a corporate party, they were filmed and their eye movements were tracked. What part of the body did everyone look at the most? That’s right, on the ass. By the way, both men and women.

More often than not, we fail to realize our desires. Therefore, desire, the fantasy that accompanies it, and the impossibility of realization lie at the basis of any suffering. And even when we get what we want, we also suffer, because reality almost never corresponds to what we imagined for ourselves.

If I want to satisfy my desire at the expense of someone else, I am doomed to suffer. I demand from him to become what exists inside me, a mother or a father. I make it the mirror of my desires. As a living individual, he does not exist for me.

How to get out of this trap? Understand that you can find happiness in desire itself. I have a desire and I need to do something with it. What can I do with it? Turn inward, start exploring. Observe myself during the appearance of desire — how I experience it. But first of all, I must understand: how I feel is only about me. The other is not here.

Now imagine that you are sleeping. Moreover, you sleep all the time, and everything that happens around you is your dreams. You went out into the street, you go down to the subway — you sleep. Left the house, came to work — sleep. It seems to us that everything that happens in a dream does not matter. In fact, the opposite is true: everyone who falls into the focus of your attention becomes incredibly important. He is in your dream — it means that for some reason he appeared there.

Here we are walking down the street and thinking: “People are nasty, they don’t pay attention, they are not interesting, they are not important.” And if I walk, thinking that this is a dream, everyone becomes interesting to me: “What is this grandmother doing here? Unclear. Maybe she knows the secret of my happiness? And who is here?”

Realizing that the world around us is also, in a sense, our dream, we begin to relate more easily to what hurts us. We stop shifting the blame for our emotions on others, on circumstances, because we ourselves made them the culprits of our suffering. Our feelings and memories are always a little tweaked from the inside — we imagine what we see, we direct it.

And in a dream, we can enter into a dialogue with the objects that are there. We can ask them questions, learn something from them. Jung considered all dream objects as parts of our psyche. In fact, these are our subpersonalities. They can become guides, sources of discovery.

The American psychotherapist Arnold Mindell believed that the unconscious speaks to us not only in dreams, but also at the level of subtle peripheral visions. Feel where your body is imperceptibly moving. Give yourself a side view. Try to see a person who, somewhere on the periphery, attracts your attention.

We do this exercise in class. You approach the person who caught your attention and ask him, «What are you doing in my dream?» This person should answer the first thing that comes to mind. Once you get an answer, you can think about it for a long time. And most importantly, since we are sleeping, such an unplanned meeting can pull us out of the dream matrix.

Jung believed that only by coming to an agreement with our inner character, we can understand other people. Conversely, if we do not perceive others as important characters in our dream called «life», then we will never wake up. We will remain in the fog of our own complexes and instead of dialogue we will act them out again and again, using others as mirrors of our desires.

Therefore, get in touch with images, internal or external. Talk to them. You can do it mentally. Choose any object or person near you, ask him (silently, to yourself): «What are you doing in my dream now?» Get an answer. Continue the dialogue: the person or object will respond to you with something unexpected, and you will respond to him. This dialogue can be continued until its energy runs out.

The purpose of this exercise is to wake up from the undulating nature of the experience. In a dream, memories are like waves that constantly sway us, and we ourselves need to become the ocean of these experiences, become the material from which the waves are made. Or a mirror in which they are reflected.

And by the way, a great answer to the question of what you are doing in my dream: «I love you.»

The material was prepared on the basis of a master class by Stanislav Raevsky at the conference «Psychology: the challenges of our time.»