Living with dreams deepens our point of view

For his blog with The Huffington Post, Thomas Moore writes "A Dreamer's Life" today. Moore shares,

"I have been a psychotherapist for well over thirty years. I work in the style of depth psychology — Freud, Jung, Hillman. They all take dreams seriously, but they hesitate to come up with definitive interpretations of a dream, especially Hillman. I am closest to him, and I, too, worry about easy and conclusive interpretations.

I treat a dream like a painting. Would I look at a painting, figure out its meaning, and then pack it away? Hardly. I might live with a painting all my life, and that's the way I deal with dreams. I look at them now and then but never reduce them to a meaning."

He offers two guidelines for approaching dreams:
- See how the dreamer's resists what is happening in the dream;
- Jung's technique of amplification: "... comparing a dream image to one you know from art, literature, religion or mythology."

Moore writes, "I'm at the point now in my work that I can't deal with a person's life problems unless I hear at least one dream. The dream reveals things that neither the person nor I can see without it. The dream is like an x-ray showing underlying patterns and characters."

He talks about this in an interview reported on Barque under the headline, "Dreams may be seen as x-rays to the soul's needs".