Showing posts with label Margaret Bowater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Margaret Bowater. Show all posts

Healing the Nightmare. Freeing the Soul. A Practical Guide to Dreamwork by Margaret Bowater (2016)

, 10 Feb 2019

If you have never read a book about nightmares and want to start with one that is written in lay language, simple to understand, enjoyable to read, and with a good selection of nightmares, this is your book.

The first part of the book, Groundwork, the conclusion chapter, and some of the bulleted items of advice presented at the end of each chapter are the most useful items of advice you'll find in the book. The Further Reading selection and some of the information collected from secondary sources referred to throughout the book is excellent; the footnotes are really professional, and linked back and forth, nothing I take for granted.
The collection of dreams used throughout the book is really good and show well how trauma appears in dreams and how dreamwork can heal the psyche and the soul wounds. The book is organized around different specific traumatic experiences that generate bad dreams or nightmares. Thus, we find examples of:
> War veterans, after-surgery, work-related stress, and natural disasters dreams.
> Children nightmares related to bullying, sexual abuse, domestic violence of hospitalization.
> Nightmares resulting from physical and mental illnesses.
> Nightmares related to spiritual issues like, for example, loss of meaning, loss of love, religious crisis, encounters with the evil, spiritual emergence, spiritual invasion and spiritual healing.
> Psychic nightmares like telepathic and telesomatic dreams, precognitive warning dreams, clairvoyance, past-life and prophetic dreams. 
> Dreams related to psychological death and dreams that appear before dying. 


REALLY USEFUL TIPS
One of the main takes of the book for the lay reader is how beneficial dreamwork is for people who suffer from nightmares and bad dreams, and how transformational it can be.
Some of the things I found more useful and practical are the following:
> The seven-step model to start working with a dream: 1. Ask the dreamer to tell the dream and sketch it. 2. Notice the setting. 3. Identify what the ‘I-figure’ of the dream is feeling and doing. 4. Ask how this fits with the dreamer’s life context at the time. 5. Get the dreamer's associations with dream elements. 6. Does the dream story need a better ending? 7. Consider possible meanings. To which an eight can be added: choose a nightmare and imagine a new ending for it.
> What to do if a child shows trauma reactions: 1. Calm the child down and reassure them of your protection. 2. Encourage the child to tell you the nightmare in detail and to draw it. Don't minimize the feelings involved. Help them to create a different ending that  supports the child's self-esteem. 3. Take seriously repeating nightmares in which the child’s body is invaded and listen to the child without making any suggestion. If the child’s behavior is seriously disturbed, consult a child psychotherapist.

> The five stages of healing process that appear in series of nightmares: 1. Self-protection. 2. Acknowledgement. 3. Effects. 4. Growth and understanding. 5. Renegotiation.
> The method to work with our shadow in dreamwork.
> The 'Martian Interview', which is a kind of gestalt technique.
CORE MESSAGES OF THE BOOK
> Dreams in general and nightmares in particular have all a beneficial function for the psyche if they are dealt with appropriately.
> All dreams present a similar format, except for the fact that the storyline is interrupted at the heated point in nightmares.
> Series of nightmares, when working on them, through dreamwork, tend to show a favourable positive progression, until the core fear or issue is faced and resolved, and then the nightmares also stop. However, those series of nightmares that are persistently or increasingly disturbing need of psychological or medical attention.
> Children having nightmares need to be listened to, and attention given to their dreams to see what is creating stress in their waking life. Never disregard a child's dream or tell them that it is only a dream.
  

DOWNSIDES
Bowater has great experience working with traumatic dreams and nightmares; however, her voice  is muffled by herself and she appears more like a dream compiler than an independent strong voice. It is a pity because she could have provided us with more practical tools to explore nightmares and rely more on her own experiential work as dream-worker. Unfortunately, some of the most interesting information used in the book comes not from direct experience but from secondary sources.
The chapter on psychic dreams barely has any nightmare in it except for those associated to the past-life section. 

Some of the items of advice Bowater gives are too generic or too common sense to be of help or something you expect to find in a book written by an experienced dream practitioner. Some of the self-help items mentioned at the end of each chapter can be easily found on the web.
I would have loved a bit of more detail about how to work with dreams, more specifically directed to people starting as dream practitioners, and a bit of more personal reflections derived from Bowater's own experience and less references to other people's work.
Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven, which Bowater mentions in her book, has been highly criticized as untruthful or scientifically questionable, and labelled a con by many people.

EXTRA
Some of the dreams are illustrated, and the illustrations are really fun and cute.However, the quality of reproduction is not good on Kindle for Android or in Kindle for PC.

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