Continuing the Dream

Most dreams stop before they reach the end: You are being chased but wake up before you are caught. You are flying through the air and never land. You see a pair of beautiful earrings, but wake up before you find out if you can afford them. Complete dreams that come to a story-book ending are rare and special.

One effective way of working with a dream is, while awake, to continue your dream and take the ''story'' beyond the place where it stopped. That will affect the next dream and allow it to go further along in its story.

An example:

I dreamed there was knock on the door and I knew it was my mother wanting to know how I was doing.

You ''continue'' the dream by considering questions about what would happen next. "What do I want to tell my mother about how I am doing?" "Is there anything I don't want to tell her?" "Is there something I would like to say to her?" "Do I want her help?" On the other hand, perhaps you have a highly confrontational relationship with your mother, in that case the question might be "Should I even let her in my house?" The answers to these kinds of questions are the key to working with the dream.

Continuing the dream is effective because so often the dream raises tensions without dealing with them. By imagining favorable outcomes, you prepare the dreamer for the next dream.

Continuing the nightmare:

This method is perfect for dealing with nightmares. The idea for the movie, ''The Terminator'' came from a dream of the director, James Cameron. During a difficult period editing his first movie, "Piranha II," he apparently had a nightmare about an unstoppable robot coming to kill a woman. The terror woke him up. That became the high point of the first Terminator movie. At that point, the audience relives the fear that disaster is inevitable until Linda Hamilton, seconds away from certain death, finds a surprise move to terminate Arnold Schwarzenegger and save humanity. Basically Cameron was continuing the dream.

Whenever a dream wakes you up – in other words when the situation was so distressing that it was functional to get out immediately - it is especially beneficial to continue the dream. With all your waking, creative faculties at your disposal, you move the story along, as Cameron did so brilliantly.

Recurring Dreams:

I dreamed I was in a restaurant and the waiter spilled the soup over me. Everyone stared at me and I felt utterly humiliated.

This event had happened to the dreamer in waking life when she was a young woman. She had dreamed it many times since then. We found dozens of ways to continue the dream. She broke the plate over his head. She screamed at him. She went around the restaurant knocking over everyone's soup. She complained to the manager. A court awarded her $1,234,567 for pain and suffering. Not all of these are very functional but they all move the dream story along. In the next dream the waiter merely knocked over a glass of water over and everyone noticed him.

You only have to move the story along:

You don't have to create a full fledged film script out of your dream. All you need to do in your waking work is to imagine what could happen next. That prepares your dream self for the next dream.

I dream that there are some exotic purple mice that I am looking after. I accidentally leave the cage door open and they escape. They are hiding in the walls.

What can happen next? In the logic of the dream, she was responsible for these mice and could not undo what had happened. As a continuation, she decided to leave out food for the mice, hoping they will survive in their new home. This moves the dream story along and the next dream will likely tell her more about the problem.

When a dream is already complete:

Some dreams are complete. By my standards that's an important milestone.

I dream that a gang of thugs come into town. A complete stranger goes up to them and orders them to leave. They take off. He does it through the sheer power of his personality.

There is nothing to continue. In fact this dream was the culmination of many dreams in which there were conflicts with other men. (With this dream, the task for the waking self is to learn to take on the personality of the "complete" stranger who has such authority.)

''Completion dreams'' are special. A problem or tension arose in the dream and was resolved within the logic of the dream. It is this resolution that you are looking for when the waking-you continues the dream.

The method in a nutshell:

Review your dream and pay particular attention to what is happening as the dream stops and you wake up. In your imagination, go back to that moment and "continue" the dream so that the action progresses in a way that is favorable to you. You are playfully extending the dream. That work powerfully helps to shape future dreams. Dreaming is too wonderful to save only for your nights.

Best wishes