Healing & Wholing through Somatic Dreamwork
Michael Ebbinghaus • November 28, 2022
The Royal Relationship to the Unconscious
Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. Before Freud, initiated indigenous peoples looked to dreams to tell them what their eyes could not see. They were appreciated as messages from the beyond, a source of incredible and intangible wisdom; gifts from the gods.
Today, very few of us have any appreciation for our dreams. They are never discussed in schools, oftentimes written off as purely random signals from REM sleep. Their imagery seems amiss to us, and due to our emphasis on the material aspects of our experience, dreams seem to make little sense. Even if we remember them, they seem to be confused about the basic laws of reality.
Or, perhaps, is it the other way around?
Carl Jung is famous for saying “He who looks outwards, dreams. He who looks inward, awakens.” There is a great deal of talk about awakening and dreaming in religious and spiritual circles. Awakening is glorified as rising out of the web of illusion, maya, the matrix, casting off the fluffy dream and coming into direct contact with reality. But when we start to investigate the fabric that dreams and consciousness are a part of, what precisely does it mean to dream and to be awake?
What are dreams, exactly? Where do they come from?
What do we know for sure about dreams? We know that we have them, and we begin to remember them as soon as we are able to remember. They are just as vivid and complex in childhood as they are in adulthood. Many of you no doubt remember certain dreams from your childhood that contain a certain mystique – perhaps they have always stuck with you but you don't know why. If you are unaccustomed to dreaming now, look to these dreams to begin to see the great wisdom at work and reignite your dream engine.
"Dreams present the working of your mind as such, unclouded by personal taste, predilection, and biases of your ego."
Why Should We Pay Attention to Our Dreams?
There are three dreams that I remember vividly prior to starting therapy at 24, at which point my dream life exploded. The dreams that I remember from this first half of my life, from ages 3-14, detailed the work I would have to do to heal, and what my mission was in the early part of my adulthood.
There are, of course, multiple interpretations. The beauty of dreams is their symbolic and timeless nature. As we move forward, new messages and synchronicities will emerge from the world of dreams, both those in our past and those lying in wait behind some unforeseeable corner. The very nature of symbols is their ability to serve as vertices of fractal meaning, a fancy way to say living. But this is our very nature, to aggrandize the mundane! The interconnected web of meaning becomes viscerally apparent the more one pays attention to their dreams, as well as the many mysterious tendrils of life flowing through all vectors of the Kosmos.
This is one way to look at dreams, as something that shows us where our work is. In terms of what we call “shadow work” these days, dreamwork is the whole banana wagon. I think this is a useful, although limited, perspective of what dreams are. Yes, they show us where our blind spots are.
Go underneath.
How is it that they do this?
Dreams present the working of your mind as such, unclouded by personal taste, predilection, and biases of your ego. Your dream presents Truths to you, the Truth of how it is that you live, and the self-perpetuating nature of both your personal and our collective problems. It is your mind freed from the constraints of your ego, showing you the constraints the ego puts upon it. Here the repressive barrier has fallen asleep! All elements of the unconscious are welcome on this ethereal stage.
"[Dreaming] is not just a creation of the mind, its perpetual wanderings and closures – it is also the force of evolution and consciousness as we know it."
The store of knowledge and perspective that comes with deepening into our dream state is incredible. Dreams are woven by the same wisdom which remembers the dreams that you have; that wisdom is thine and thou. To establish a relationship to your dreams is to establish connection with a part of yourself that is grand and transcendent. It gives the unconscious a voice, precisely because it is done through the spirit of play.
Buddhist Interpretations of Dreams & Dream Yoga
Dreams sit at a different level of consciousness. Because they are in the unconscious, they manifest some form of our habitual tendencies and our deep-laid schemas. This is why the Buddhists do not concern themselves much with the content of dreams – they are simply the ways in which you fell out of knowledge with yourself, articulated
– and they are transformed through expanding awareness beyond the limited sense of self into union with the entire Kosmos. On the contemplative path, this entails deepening of awareness. One result of this is greater subject permanence – i.e. a subjective awareness is maintained into and beyond the dreaming state into deep dreamless sleep. It is learning to identify with the Witness.
When one “awakens” in the dream, one becomes master of the dream state, able to travel through many realms in the course of the night, accessing great wisdom and deepening one’s practice as an individual. Here all activities may be pursued without constraint, but not without ramification. What we pursue in the great freedom of the lucid dream landscape will have an impact on our waking awareness, something we should use to our full advantage.
When working with dreams, the lines between dreaming and living, asleep and awake start to blur. We are dreaming all the time. It is a more fundamental layer of our psyche, one that is mythologically oriented; it is in a different order of time and space. Dreams contain our personal myths we live out day-to-day, as well as the keys to our healing and integration. Our personal wholeness, fragmented in trauma, is restored, and our suprapersonal wholeness, the potential of who we could be, is expanded.
The Practice of Somatic Dreamwork
Dreams give you keys, but we must know how to use the technology of our body to work with them. The people, figures, animals, sentient beings, landscapes, even houses, when encountered in the dreamscape, are not random apparitions. They arise from energies that are part of the psyche as such. Our relationship to them: the degree to which we acknowledge them, our conscious attitudes towards them, how we have welcomed or disowned them, will influence how they appear. It is our nastiest nightmares that are in most need of love. Grand callings from the Self may appear transcendent or frightening, depending on our level of preparation and internal state.
I utilize several methods of working with dreams. The first is very akin to classic interpretation, particularly within the Jungian tradition, where dream figures are interpreted as fragmented aspects of the client’s personality, such as shadow, anima/animus, etc., and exploring what archetypal themes are present so as to know the client’s mythological trajectory, drawing upon our knowledge of patterns to navigate towards preferable outcomes. Our experience, after all, does tend to follow certain trends and motifs, and recognizing the well-trodden paths can help us to change from a tragic to heroic direction. The appearance of certain animals, characters, settings, and storylines - all symbols - can be valuable messages to the dreamer.
"Dreams give you keys, but we must know how to use the technology of our body to work with them."
Left on its own, interpretation misses a vital opportunity to come into direct relationship with dreams, a dynamic in sore need of reversal. When we take the role of the scientist or “objective observer” of our dreams, we inflict our traumas of abandonment and intimacy-inhibition, and miss fruitful opportunities for deep talks, great laughs, and recognition of the utter grandiosity, mediocrity, and absurdity of it all! It is why my other method of working with dreams is directly relational, and we do this through bioenergetics and active imagination, a process I refer to as Somatic Dreamwork.
Any autonomous entity encountered within the dreamscape can be found somewhere in the body, so there is much in common that this particular practice shares with bioenergetics. One need not have dreamt to engage in this type of work, but merely look to the presence of body signs. A body sign can be anything from a nausea that arises after an uncomfortable situation, a chronic pain – particularly those which involve chronic muscular tension – a strange feeling in your big toe – really it can be anything! They are signs of an unconscious energy wishing to be made conscious - the very reason for which they are now haranguing you.
But the landscape of the unconscious includes far more than these disowned archetypal elements, for within that same realm hidden beneath all the muck we did not want is the golden majesty we would sacrifice everything to attain. This is the Golden Shadow, the mysterious heights of our own potential. These can be felt through the body just as well, so body signs are both pains and blisses!
There are five principal channels
that body signs work through are:
- Physical sensation (tingling, warmth, cold, nausea, pain, tightness, etc.)
- Movement/locomotion
- Sound/breath
- Words/thoughts
- Visions/images
It is through working through these various channels that body signs, and the dream figures that lead us to them, may be worked with.
The relational process of dreamwork – what I refer to as somatic dreamwork – is an amalgam between Carl Jung’s active imagination and bioenergetics. I also wish to thank Arnold Mindell and Bill Plotkin for their relational style, whose foundations uphold the structure of my own work. As we said before, this process can occur independently from dreams – we need only recognize the body sign. But dream figures lead us to very particular energies and particular complexes or subpersonalities. Cut off psychic energies take personified forms – they are personality fragments that turn into fragmented personalities, i.e. personalities that are cut off from the love of our awareness as well as the balance from other aspects of the personality (this also makes our own psychic organization, in some ways, unstable, or off balance).
When you have an encounter with a dream entity, whether it is a house or building, creature, or person, call that entity into your awareness. See it as it was witnessed in the dream. Close down the eyes, breathe deeply, fully, and slowly. Enter the space of sleep without falling asleep. Breathe into the image. What are you feeling now in relationship to this figure? What sensations arise in the body? Breathe into these. Start to shift them through the other channels. What is this particular figure asking for? What do they embody? Mimic any movement they made, or speak to yourself as they spoke to you. Allow their presence into your body – this is the work of the alchemists. Conscious and unconscious are coming together, the disparate opposites finding colluded truth and connection.
Through engaging the various channels and having a multi-dimensional conversation with the energies that present themselves in the form of dream figures and body signs, we integrate into a larger whole. We claim broader portions of our identity: personal, ancestral, organismal, planetary, and Kosmic, which bring with them more and more capacity for energy and creation.
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What is Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy? Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is a modality that uses low dose ketamine alongside talk therapy to access non-ordinary states of consciousness, helping clients process trauma, depression, and anxiety in a new and deeper way. One of the most common complaints about traditional psychotherapy is that it can take a very long time for unconscious material to surface, even after a solid relationship has formed with your therapist. While there are techniques we utilize in our practice that do not require substances (e.g. dreamwork, sentence completion, automatic writing/drawing, etc.), the introduction of intentional medicine work can reliably shift one into an altered state of consciousness, catalyzing access to unconscious material. After a brief introductory period, you will take ketamine under supervision from your therapist either in-office or virtually in the comfort of your own home. The therapist will guide you to take your own journey as well as direct you towards areas that might benefit from exploration in an alternate perspective. Learn more What is Ketamine? Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic acting primarily on the glutamate neurotransmitter system. This differentiates it from the traditional psychedelics like LSD and psychedelic mushrooms which are much more prominent in the serotonin system. Ketamine increases neural plasticity, meaning that the brain becomes more flexible to change, open to new insights and behaviors. Ketamine has been used for over 50 years as a surgical anesthetic. It has no impact on the respiratory system, making it one of the most safe and effective medicines available. It is classified as a WHO top 10 essential medicine, and it is so safe that it is still the anesthetic of choice for children. It is a schedule III medication approved for off-label use in assisted psychotherapy, meaning a healthcare professional must be supervising in some capacity. Screening is essential, see below for more information. How KAP Works One of the things we like to stress is that the medicine is taking you to a place within yourself. It is not the ketamine "doing" anything other than relaxing your emotional defenses and allowing for exploration of consciousness. That said, you will feel a degree of relaxation in your body as well as your mind, which allows things which we keep buried to come up to the surface. By shifting into an alternate state of consciousness, we are able to sublimate many of the barriers we have in place that remain opaque to us. Oftentimes simply allowing this material to surface creates greater harmony, and you ma find yourself saying "Oh - this is what I've been afraid of for so long? It's not so big and scary after all." This is not always the case, of course. The nature of what is hidden can also be very painful, which is why the presence of the therapist as well as the therapeutic relationship is imperative when first working with alternate states of consciousness and healing trauma. What Does KAP Treat? Ketamine's claim to fame comes from its potent and immediate anti-depressive effect . While this requires lifestyle change and further exploration - greatly benefitted by depth psychotherapy - this can be incredibly helpful to those experiencing treatment resistant depression. It does this primarily through breaking up rigid neural networks (enhanced neuroplasticity), limiting one's ability to ruminate. Ketamine for depression can be powerful, indeed. In a meta-analysis of over 2,500 patients, it was found that 45% of people had significant drops in clinical depressions inventories, with 30% in remission. The benefits were often sustained at 6-month follow up. Ketamine-assisted therapy can be helpful for those who experience post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD . The clinical evidence here is quite strong, with multiple meta-analyses and an open label study showing durable and significant reductions in PTSD symptoms in as many as 69% of respondents and up to six-months' follow up. Ketamine for trauma is widely studied and efficacious. Anxiety is also significantly reduced after brief KAP treatments. In a glimpse, ketamine can treat: Treatment-resistant depression PTSD and trauma-related symptoms Anxiety and existential distress Addiction and maladaptive coping Spiritual exploration or life transitions What Does Treatment Look Like At Ebb & Flow Depth Psychotherapy, we believe in the importance of a strong therapeutic relationship to help sustain the positive effects from ketamine treatment. To this end, prior to any medicine session, there are 6-8 preparation sessions (this can be reduced to 2-4 if you are already working with another therapist). From there, we will conduct two initial dosing sessions with an integration session in between each. We would then conduct another 6-8 dosing sessions, also with an integration session in between each. Our Approach During each session, you will be gently guided into your body utilizing a simple meditation or, if preferred, ambient music. We utilize sublingual lozenges, tablets which will be dissolved and swished in the mouth for 10-12 minutes, then spit out. This offers a psycholytic approach rather than a psychedelic approach. 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Through the experience and through the journey you've taken thus far, which includes your triumphs and your traumas, we will expand not only on who you are but who you are meant to be. Your exuberant and mature presence is sorely needed in this world, and it requires reconciliation of our darker nature and highest aspirations. Who is KAP for? Ask yourself now: "Am I in a place where I am ready for deep self-exploration?" "Am I open to the idea of letting go of things which both pain and comfort me?" "Can I remain off of substances and away from process addictions (such as pornography, over-eating/bingeing and purging, sex, etc.) for at least three days?" You may not be ready for KAP if: Are experiencing active psychosis or mania Have untreated Bipolar I or II disorder Have a personal or family history of schizophrenia Are currently struggling with active substance dependence If you are in a grounded place and ready to make shifts in your life, KAP may offer the support you've been looking for. Ketamine Therapy In Austin, TX - How to Get Started Contact me today for your free consultation to see if ketamine assisted depth psychotherapy might be right for you. Myself and the fine clinicians over at Journey Clinical are ready to help you find deeper meaning in life and be the change in the world you wish to see. We conduct ketamine-assisted therapy in Austin, Texas as well as virtually all over the state. Reach out to us today!
