Circle Support for Dreams
9/2/26
SGTI had an insightful conversation with Keren Vishny about dreams as lived and relational experiences. The recording captures the first 20 minutes of the teaching around engaging with dreams as a relationship with the dream itself, rather than “approaching them as problems to solve or meanings to extract”.
After Keren’s explanation, she provided instructions on how we could provide circle support for an attendee’s dream. The following is a transcript of the explanation. We experienced the circle support as another model for group spiritual direction/companionship.
Keren also wrote an article on Substack entitled An Invitation to Work with Dreams and gave us permission to link it here.
Transcript Begins:
When we work with people with dreams we want to respect the interiority and the mystery of each person. We do not need to know exactly what the other person is thinking. We can be in resonance by being. (This comes from the body workworld of zero balancing.) We can be at interface, which means we’re very aware of where our psyche, our bubble ends and where the other’s begins. And we meet each other at interface, we don’t blend, we don’t pull away. We want to just be present to another’s experience without having to know what they’e thinking.
In our culture,
we talk about empathy as seeing things through someone else’s eyes, and there is a place for that. But there’s also a place for walking with the person and being next to them without necessarily being in the other person’s head. And that becomes very important because we want to be responding from our own capacity.
One of the interesting things about dreams is that we bring together in it all of our waking assumptions and beliefs. You’ve had this in waking life where you’ve looked at an email when you’re in a difficult mood. You’ve had a bad day and it looks one way when you read it, and you think, “Oh, this person, they’re being unreasonable.”
Later, you go back and look at the same email after some rest and you think, “No, they didn’t intend any slight.” We have different moods that are like weather. One of the best ways that we can help another is not to get sucked into someone else’s weather.
I’m going to work with this volunteer about going back into the dream. Here is the process: I’m going to invite them to speak their dream slowly in present tense. And then I’m going to invite them to tell the same dream again slowly in present tense. Meanwhile, all of us are going to imagine that we are accompanying them into the dream, walking next to them, not through their eyes, through our own eyes,
Because so many dream themes resonate with so many of us, each of us gets something out of the experience of walking in another’s dream without having to say, “If it were my dream…” because it’s not our dream.
After the two times speaking the dream, I will speak the dream back to make sure that we’re clear about what happened.
The next stage is to ask clarifying questions. Not about how you feel, but what was that person like? Can you tell me again what they did? Or did you happen to see the time of day or the or the room? What was the environment like?
Questions that clarify the details of image. And by image, I don’t just mean “vision,” I mean any of the senses. It could be something heard, smelled, touched...
We’ll do that so that we’ve basically landed back in the dream. Then, I might invite them to say if there is there one portion of this dream that they’d like to explore a little more deeply. And then we’ll go into that portion and slow it down and just notice what rises as they are in the encounter of that part of the dream. Then we’ll find a good place to stop where it feels comfortable for you to bring closure.
In other settings, we might, as a group, ask them questions. Afterwards, we might all share our responses to the experience of the dream for us personally, not in terms of analyzing the person or the dream. (End Transcript)
