
Stanley Keleman
Founder & Director
Private Appointments
Consultations
Seminars - Lectures
510-845-8373
skeleman@aol.com
Center for Energetic Studies
Center Press
2045 Francisco Street
Berkeley, California 94709
510-845-8373
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Dreams and the Body
Working somatically with people reveals the interconnection
of dream and embodiment. Dreams are important because they are direct
statements of our deep somatic reality and they demand attention
from the awake brain to continue the body's emotional growth. For
me, they are connected to the stages of our bodied life.
I became interested in somatic work and dreams when I began to notice
a relationship between working physically and an increase in my
dreaming life. I noticed a similar relationship with clients and
their dreams. For example, working with assertion, increasing feeling
in the legs, or having a sense of one's body disassociated from
feelings easily brought dreams of no support, of falling, or of
striding confidently. How the body dreams itself is a way the therapy
can take direction. Confronting a change in age, having a different
body, being someone else could evoke working with being softer or
more assertive.
Dreaming presents us with how the somatic self is rehearsing and
getting ready to appear. Dreams are the soma's interiority seeking
embodiment, our inside reality using the language of society embedded
in non-societal time and space. The underformed and undersomatized
body has a hunger for more body and it announces this in the dream.
To work somatically with a dream is to feel the characters in the
dream as desires or emotions seeking to be embodied in the awake
reality.
Jorge Borges, the Argentinean writer, tells a story about a man
who wished to have a son. The man began his creation by dreaming
him part by part over a period of many nights. When he was finished,
he prayed to the god of fire to animate the son he had dreamed.
The story ends when the dreamer discovers that he, like his creation,
is also a creation of some dreamer.
Borges' tale offers insight into the role of dreams in the body's
image-making process. Dreams make images and sequence them in a
narrative form. The dream process connects the body we are with
the one we are becoming. Dreams are part of the body's way of maintaining
the ongoing relationship between the inherited body and its deep
brain and the personal body of the cortex of the new brain. Dreams,
then, are a part of the reality of the life of the body.
Dreams display what is becoming but not yet fully realized. As the
body grows and farms its somatic identity, it speaks to itself in
many languages. One is the dream. The body as process is always
imaging and dreaming of its next shape and how to incarnate. Borges,
the dreamer, represents all of us dreaming of the body we are and
the body we will be.
His story also tells us about inner experience, how dream and awake
states are two sides of the bodying process. Dreaming, and our ability
to access dreaming, demonstrates the relationship we have to ourselves.
Thus we learn about both the difference and similarity of the night
self and the day self, how desire and image are linked.
There is a continuity between body process and dream image. The
unconscious body appeals to the cortex for its images of itself.
The awake brain appeals to its own body to animate its images. Borges'
dreamer, who wants a companion, writes not only about a literal
offspring but an inner brother/son. His theme parallels both the
Christian story of resurrection-God sends his son-and the Golem
story of the Hebrews, the making of a human-like creature. The theme
of self-generation of oneself from oneself also is part of complexity
theory, the most recent thinking about evolution.
These stories share a common theme the relationship between the
brain's emotional and reflex centers and the more awake and volitional
cortex. The brain makes an image of the body and then asks the body
to animate it. Borges' story deepens the theme of human participation
in the formation of the shapes of our existence from youth to full
adulthood to maturity and then old age.
We can learn from dreams because we can reorganize meaning and association
as well as influence somatic-emotional structure. Dreams have an
emotional matrix that dream characters, or objects, are embedded
in. Although we try to decode dream images and representations,
we do not learn to experience them as an inner environment and to
see them as expressions of a bodily state. Dreams are part of the
mystery of somatic wisdom, the process of the soma's becoming self-aware,
of having a subjectivity. As the body grows its subjectivity, the
cortex forms images and motoric expressions to match. As the body
dreams, it uses the soma's cortical imaging, or futurizing, to influence
its way to be present.
Two aspects of our body' s process, the inherited and the socially
experienced, organize and form an intermediate subjective realm.
This complex relationship forms a life shape of its own, influencing
the outside and the inside shape. Our bodied life is its own subject,
and the experiencing of its experience makes it a personal experience.
Our body is the subject of its own living, the source and reference
for living. The body as a process has an essential relationship
with itself. Dream is being intimate with oneself.
Dream images are snapshots of the unbroken, but non-linear, continuum
of body shapes, expressions, feelings, and gestures. The inherited
body's deep brain continually tattoos its image on the brain's receptive
and dynamic cortex. The brain functions like its close relative,
the skin, in that it, too, receives and absorbs the body's patterns.
The body's pulses, of which the dream is one, deepen the relationship
of the body to itself by osmosis and volitional influences, thus
shaping personal identity.
The dream is somatic activity, speaking about itself as it prepares
for the awake world. The instinctual body and personal, social somatic
shapes talk to each other. Some people dream of the wild man or
woman even as they live as proper social citizen. Each self influences
the midbrain the cortex in an inner dialogue. The body is an excitable,
contractile continuum that is responsive and able to shift its shape
Dreams, too, are like the heart, continually shifting shape, a pulsation
from stable to less stable, and back to stable again. These cellular
pulses deepen the range of tissue metabolism and emotional expression.
The dream, which is organized from the pulsation of the body, helps
give the soma a personal structure and sense of presence.
The method of working with a dream is to connect it more fully to
its own source, the body. In this approach, the focus is on somatic
experience rather than meaning and interpretation. Dreams are about
organizing how we use our bodies to be in the world and how we inhabit
the body we live. We use dreams to grow a somatic reality and a
complex subjectivity that embraces multiple realities.
In working with the dream somatically, I ask people to tell their
dreams forward and backward in order to experience a non-linear
reality. By going back and forth between different somatic shapes
in a slow and controlled way, we engage the cortex and brainstem
muscle patterns. We begin to be intimate with how we experience
the given body and body images in the brain. This approach generates
feelings and memories associated with the growth of our personal
body.
Working with the dream, slowing down its sequences and freeze-framing
the characters-the body's expressions and gestures-vivifies feeling
and imagination. Telling the dream forward and backward intensifies
the characters and establishes the relationship of the different
bodies. The relationship aspect of our interior and exterior somatic
shapes brings a subjective aspect to our bodily life.
The somatic work with the dream brings the process of bodying into
the daily world of work, love, and relationships.
The practical application of this practice has five steps
Step 1: Recollecting the dream, in language and in the experiences
of body or brain.
Step 2: Intensifying the somatic characters of the dream, making
their structure and expressions more manifest by a process of neuromuscular
intensity and differentiation.
Step 3: Using the cortical and volitional function to influence
the disassembling of the characters' somatic structure. Steps 2
and 3 provide an experience central to all somatic processes, to
organize and disorganize sequences of behavior.
Step 4: The soma learns to contain what has been made available
from dreaming, the steady flux of feelings and form that reassemble,
that begin to incubate a subjectivity.
Step 5: We re-body, give form to feeling, embody our somatic and
personal identity.
Dreams give a subjectivity to our soma's existence. Working somatically
gives the soma both a narrative and a process by which it grows
its own destiny: to be born, to be present, to die. The significance
of this realization mirrors our conception of the immortal.
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