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The Art of Dreaming: Creative Tools for Dream Work

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Psychologist and author Jill Mellick offers much more than a dream interpretation book in The Art of Dreaming: Tools for Creative Dreamwork. Conventional interpretation relies on words to describe dream imagery, and often the words are terribly inadequate. Dr. Mellick says "we can express dreams in the art form the best suits them, in the art form whose structure is most akin to their innate structure."

She then fully describes more than 50 ways to explore dreams, including painting, dance, sculpture, drawing, poetry, music, or any combination of these. She explains several techniques for letting go of expectations and allowing the dream to guide the dreamer to the best form of expression.

Dr. Mellick also recognizes that many people don't have lots of time for working on their dreams. For those with little time for reflection, she provides a chapter titled "Expressive Dream Work in Five Minutes." A companion chapter offers techniques for those who have as much as ten minutes a day for dream work.

Not all dreams are pleasant. She offers help also to those haunted by nightmares, including how to make a healing mandala. She also discusses dreams in which a particular action or image is repeated.

Although most of us prefer to work alone with our dreams, some people find it beneficial to form a dream work group. Dr. Mellick provides guidelines for establishing a group and ensuring that it's beneficial to all participants.

One fascinating exercise asks people to imagine life events as a dream. The events can be ordinary activities. She says that doing this offers a new perspective that can be helpful in understanding our lives.

"The Art of Dreaming is an excellent resource and practical manual that inspires and amplifies self-discovery and understanding of the rich spiritual treasure and guidance that dreams provide."

This wonderful book of tools combines dream work with the expressive arts. Jill Mellick lightly introduces the reader to Jungian theory and invites us to explore further if desired. An understanding of Jung is unnecessary, however, to use the exercises in the book - only a wish to further explore one's dreams, and a willingness to branch out from the traditional linear narrative form of conveying dream experiences. Our clients need not be artists to use the expressive arts suggested here - just willing. The expressive arts suggested in this book range from writing, drawing, collage, mask making and movement, to ritual and dramatization. This book is well organized and easy to read. For example, icons are given next to each exercise indicating which of the expressive modalities are involved for quick reference.
Mellick shows us that there are numerous ways to approach working with dreams. We can learn to be flexible and listen to what is needed to work with a particular dream. She invites us to see our dream lives as another world to be explored, and to use innovative approaches which draw from the traditional. Traditional approaches, seen as doing, include analyzing, hypothesizing, understanding, and applying to life, whereas innovative approaches, seen as being, include nourishing, imagining, inquiring, and connecting.
Practical guidance is given for creating a space for this work. The "four phases of expressive dream work" help the reader to go into the dream world, and to return safely to everyday life. These phases are "an intentional departure from ordinary awareness", "an inner journey into the imagination", "a return to ordinary awareness", and "a reflection on the journey" (p. 25). I would guess that many of these exercises can be adapted to clients who need extra assistance from their therapists to be able to to enter and return from the realm of dreams and imagination.
The author urges us to keep a dream journal, to carefully record our observances, and to set aside a protected space where we can view our expressive dream work over time. When we are able to sit with a piece, a deeper relationship can evolve. Also, at times the work will lead us to dream the dream further. For example, what might happened next in the dream? What associations can we make to the dream material?
The bulk of the exercises are included in two broad sections, categorized by how much time one has to do the dream work. Very practical for busy lives, the first set of exercises can be done in five minutes, the second set in ten to fifteen minutes. Included are special considerations and exercises for both nightmares and dreams in a series.
This book can be used by individual clients as well as by groups. Some clients might prefer to work on their own and share later with their therapists. Others might prefer to do the exercises in their therapist's office. The author provides guidelines for creating an expressive dream group. I appreciate how she gives detailed suggestions for creating healthy boundaries and an atmosphere of exploration and witness rather than interpretation and judgment. I highly recommend this book for any therapist who is interested in working with clients using dreams, the expressive arts, or Jungian theory.

In this work, Jill Mellick takes us into the foreign culture of dreams, using as a guide map the exploratory power of the arts. In her introduction, Mellick compares exploring the world of dreams to exploring a culture different from our own. We proceed, she cautions, with a combination of respect, honor, curiosity, and many tools to guide us into the new territory.

These tools are the expressive arts and the variety of approaches that Mellick offers. With over sixty 5- to 15-minute exploration exercises, Mellick suggests ways to work with dreams, dream fragments, nightmares, dream figures and animals, and to explore dreams in groups. She organizes the book by ways of approaching dreams, with section titles such as "capture essence and hunches," "become the dream image," or "make a poem out of a challenging dream." She includes margin markers for the different types of expressive arts used, for easy access to specific techniques. The material is much the same as in her previous work, The Natural Artistry of Dreams (Mellick, 1996), but is presented in a more condensed and accessible form.

In The Art of Dreaming, Mellick offers a variety of ways to explore dreams using all of the expressive media: visual arts, movement, music, mime, drama, writing, collage, mask-making, clay, and more. Mellick makes the media amenable by using simple explanations of the techniques, and making sure that each technique can be applied in 5 to 15 minutes. Brevity makes these approaches invaluable both in the therapy office, for clinicians to use, as well as for the typically busy lay person. At the same time, there is nothing "simple" about the creative suggestions that Mellick gives. Both the novice and the experienced art therapist will find new ideas and techniques in this work. For instance, each new dream example and each new method introduces nuances that were not present in other examples.

By making her writing simple and directly addressing the reader in the second person, Mellick makes this complex material easy to understand and to use. She uses lists to present ideas, gives concrete suggestions, gives specific examples, and uses accessible language. On the other hand, she does not reduce the material, but allows the complexity to come through, both in the spaciousness and subtlety of her sentences, and the variety of ways in which she approaches the material.

Mellick offers, as she says, not techniques for dream interpretation, but ways to ask questions of the dreams. Her goal, in this book, is to help us open up our ways of working with our dreams, to free ourselves of our traditional ways of looking at them. As Mellick writes:
We need to let our dreams paint themselves, dance themselves, sculpt themselves, begin at the end and end at the beginning, spiral in on themselves, meander without climax or major turning point. Perhaps, then, when we can treat content and structure as indivisible, we can truly begin to appreciate the elegant sagacity of the dream. (p. 14).
Mellick uses this approach, too, to the expressive arts themselves: we are given a plethora of methods, but no prescriptions. The result is nothing less than creativity itself.

Can I give this book more than five stars?!!! This book is FULL of the most incredibly creative ideas for working with your dreams. Ways that many of us would never think of on our own!
Example: Make a dream mandala. Now I can't draw very well, but recently I had a dream in which gestures I made were very important. So I gave it a try and the way the mandala turned out gave me another perspective on the dream!

Some more way-cool ideas from the book: If you have a dream that feels incomplete, complete by adding to it! Make a sculpture of your dream! Get a stone and paint something on it that symbolizes your dream!

These are just a few of the ideas.

And the icing on the cake,(at least for me)I've discovered the secret to remembering your dreams. Pay attention to them! It's as simple as that. The more attention you pay to your dreams the more you will remember them!

I now spend the last half hour before I go to bed preparing for dreams by working with Ms. Mellick's excellent book and I'm remembering my dreams on a consistent basis.

This book is not very long, but it's packed full with valuable information. Obviously, I reccomend this book to everyone. Aren't dreams fascinating?

The nature of a creative or artistic process is of the same nature as our dreams; they are essentially non-linear and organic. When our dreams give inspiration and form to artistic expression then the dream is no longer limited to an existence within the boundaries of our sleeping life or mental processes. Mellick offers ways to record one's dreams that go beyond simply writing them down or verbally processing them. What is so wonderful about her suggestions is that within them I have a wide range of methods that I may use to creatively relate to my dreams. Not only does she demystify the process of dream work and analysis, but also perhaps more importantly she provides ways to bring one's dream life into waking life, through modes of creative expression such as drawing, painting, writing, movement etc. For example, I have really appreciated learning about energy drawings, something that I can do in just a minute or two in the morning. In just that brief time I can not only record a dream, but give it a form through which it can continue to inform me.

This book has opened up to me a whole new way of relating to my dreams. It outlines and describes very simple yet deeply effective methods of using creative practices to awaken a more dynamic and tangible relationship with my dream life. The processes and methods described in Mellick's book are diverse and functional to a degree that I can recommend this book to anyone, regardless of his or her personal sense of artistic ability. In other words, you don't have to consider yourself an "artist" in order to find this book accessible and insightful.

This book is a jewel box. What a relief to find a book of dream work that encourages one to explore, expand, and appreciate the dream itself, rather than squeeze it down to fit one single theory or crummier yet,to interpret it. Mellick acknowledges while theories can be helpful, anyone else's opinion is secondary to your own. It's your dream and yours alone.
Mellick opens up dreams, as one might a box of paints, and presents a series of brief lessons, ways to work with inner material that are rich, fruitful and ultimately nourishing.
Her premise is that since dreams do not come to us in strings of words, why should we limit working with them to writing and talking. "We can express dreams in the art form that best suits them." (p. 13). The core of the book presents several dozen different art forms, taking from five to fifteen minutes (including a number that make use of words) that can take the most mundane seeming dream and uncover many layers of meaning within it.
By taking her suggestion to treat dreams as visits to another culture, one far more varied and flexible than our waking reality, she makes all dreams, even nightmares, worth exploring. Mellick says (and shows to be true) that "the dream is often the companion of the soul," (p. 18). She would have us settle for nothing less.
I highly recommend this book if you are open to merging your own creativity, no matter if it is embryonic or fully developed, with your nightly visits to the dream garden that grows inside your heart.

It similair to the Artist's Way, but for dreamers. It has gotten me out of the rut I've been in for years, which is writing out my dream, relating it to events in the past three days, interpreting the symbols and message of the dream. This is a valuable method, but dreams are much more fluid than that. This book offers many tools to use in dreamwork. It tells you how to work with dreams without taking them apart and how to keep a healthy perspective on dreaming in general. I am very glad that I got this book. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in what their dreams mean.

As an artist and writer, I am impressed and excited by this book. Mellick presents a multitude of creative means to go within your dreams in the physical world using imagination and reflection. Even if you do not consider yourself "artsy-craftsy" or creative, at least one of these methods will work for you. Mellick also includes a chapters on "Expressive Dream Work" in five, ten or fifteen minutes, making this type of dream work even more enticing and practical. Mellick's ideas can help you apply dream insight to your life by becoming actively involved with your dreams.

I am many times myself. In my life and in my dreams. I lacked direction until I found Mellick's dream book. Here, at last, I found direction, place and space. 'The Art of Dreaming' has helped me negotiate a productive pathway through my dreams and their possible positive applications. As a teacher of 25 years' experience, working with adolescents in a personal exploration context (in the visual arts) i have found "The Art of Dreaming" to be a wonderful source of inspiration. Vicki Park

I highly recommend "The Art of Dreaming." Jill Mellick makes Jungian concepts very clear. Also, with her focus on innovative and nourishing ways of being with our dreams she offers many ways to partake of your own inner art.