Showing posts with label dreamwork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreamwork. Show all posts

A Little Course in Dreams by Robert Bosnak (1998)

, 14 Nov 2018

I had read many books on dreamwork before I came to read this book, enticed by a talk given by Bosnak himself.

This is a little wonder of a book,  little as in introductory, not as in simple or irrelevant. The book has the right balance of depth and practicality, and it is a terrific initial guide for people wanting to become dream practitioners or for those who want to work with their own dreams on their own or in groups.

Bosnak gives simple but very effective exercises to favour dream recall in general, to recall specific dream objects and spaces, to create a memory storage room, explore the awakening space, and write/record your dreams. The case studies chosen to show his system or working with dreams are really wow -- interesting, intriguing and enlightening, so exemplary of what dreamwork is all about, the magic that brings to the awaken life, the  psychological emotional and spiritual depths it takes you, and the juice you can get from even the most 'normal' dream. Some of the things Bosnak says about the nature and essence of dreams are really  mind blowing, and one closes the book wanting to listen to him more, read him more, and wishing that the book had been less little and more more big.

Bosnak is a Jungian analyst so you can't get  the Jungian out of him (nor would want to), as this is, precisely, what makes his approach to dreams so profound. Also, Bosnak is the father of Embodied Imagination, so he speaks of it as this was the daily bread on a tradie's table. He makes a terrific effort to put things in every-day language with minimum jargon and makes  difficult concepts accessible to the general public.

On the down side, lay readers, those with no knowledge of Jungian stuff, or not familiar with his system, might find some things difficult to understand because some concepts are just sketched out and would need of more space to be properly explained. I found that this was the case with the chapter on psychological alchemy in dreams, which is very good, but too  short for the average reader to understand the specific way that some of the associations related to the three main alchemical elements link; that was my case, at least.

I found the chapter on image amplification the weakest in the book, not well developed or round enough to be successfully used by a person with no previous experience in image amplification. Exercise 10 on exploring the world of imagery using the main three alchemical elements isn't clear enough to me, either.

Active imagination is something easy to grasp for people who are mostly visual, like me. However, many people aren't visual at all, are more audible or kinetic, so I wonder how do those people approach active imagination.

The book was written in the late 1980s, so unless you really nuts about audio-recorders, you can easily use your smartphone voice recorder easily or use one of the many applications that allow you to record, write and explore your dreams.

Overall a wonderful read, with a great insight, tools and tips to start dreamworking the wow way. 

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Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life by Stephen LaBerge (2009)

, 10 Oct 2016

This is a short how-to book on lucid dreaming by Stephen LaBerge PhD, a Stanford researcher and one of the fathers of the field. 

Generally speaking, this is an acceptable introduction to lucid dreaming if this is first time you approach lucid dreaming or dreamwork in general, as it is written in a very simple English, with very clear how-to techniques to remember dreams, to facilitate lucid dreaming, to deal with nightmares (face you demons!) and a bit of introduction about the importance of dreamwork and the virtues and the uses of lucid dreaming.

The e-book comes with a series of audio mp3 recordings downloadable from the editorial house's website (as mentioned at the beginning of the book). I found the recordings quite good. The narrator has a wonderful calm voice, which is great to induce relaxation, but also a clear way of explaining things. Probably, they are good enough on their own and quite the core of what the book says. 

I didn't know about Lucid Dreaming Inducing Devices (LDIDs) like the NovaDreamer and the DreamLight LDID, which are mentioned in this book as they are developed by LaBerger's team in his Lucidity Institute in Hawaii. For obvious reasons, he doesn't mention others, which can be found, reviewed and linked here.

This is not a book as it has just 89 pages filled with too many records of dreams, too many unnecessary quotes, quite a lot of unnecessary verbal weed, plus the notes and bio. The core of the "book" is about 40 pages, not more! Besides, the bibliography is really old, the most modern book referenced in the book is from 1997.

RENDERING FOR KINDLE
The conversion to e-book was obviously done without the least care and not proofread. There are too many items misspelled to list them here. It will suffice to say that dot is used at times instead of comma, words that should be capitalized after a period are consistently written in lower case, Dr appears as dr a few times, and the surname Dement (funny enough, the surname of a psychiatrist mentioned in the book) is written in lower case at least two times. If you pay me, I will edit the book for you, dear editor...

MY RECOMMENDATION
If this is your first approach to dreamwork and the first book you find, it will certainly help you with the basics. However, if you really want to delve in all the nitty-gritty of lucid dreaming, especially in the scientific research on dreaming you need to read LaBerge's traditional book, written 20+ years ago or so, or Robert Waggoner's because the introduction on the subject in this condensed book is really full of platitudes and generalizations. Otherwise, you can visit LaBerge's institute of research Lucidity, where a lot of free material is provided to the general public.

NOTE
It has been years since I have lucid dreamed, which happened spontaneously while I was a teen. I have been doing archetypal dreamwork for a few years now but not lucid dreaming, so I bought this book to use lucid dreaming for problem solving. I haven't gotten any result as yet, but as LaBerge says that it can take up to a month of constant self-training, I will wait and see and add a PS. Wish me luck :)

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The Beginner's Guide to Dream Interpretation by Clarissa Pinkola Estes (2003)

, 5 Oct 2014

This review is for the audible version of the book.

The author offers a simple, effective and enjoyable Jungian psychoanalytical approach to dream interpretation, written (and told) in a very simple terms, straightforward, perfect for beginners.

You will learn some techniques to recall your dreams and to stop your nightmares, a basic approach to interpreting your own dreams, you will learn several varieties of extraordinary dreams you can have in your life time, and 13 universal recurrent dreams and their meaning.

The audible book lasts about 1.15 hours. The author is also the narrator of the book, and she has a very mellow voice, so she will make you sleep in a second :O. Seriously, a bit of more energy in the narration, would have made the book much more enjoyable, and it is especially important with audible books.

Very enjoyable and certainly one book I would recommend to friends to start with dreamwork.

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