The collective art of dreaming: social dreaming arrives in Liguria | Changing Liguria

Savona – Raise your hand if you have never woken up in the morning thinking about what the images and dialogues you dreamed about last night meant. “By remembering our dreams we can have access to unaware parts of ourselves”: but how many of us remember the dreams we have and pay the right attention to them? I spoke about it in recent days with Dr. Marcella Maria Spirito, psychologist and psychotherapist, certified transactional analyst, originally from Genoa who has been living in Castelbianco (SV) for a few years. And this is exactly where I meet her to let me tell you about his work and activities on dreaming which takes you around Liguria and not only.

THE FUNCTION OF DREAMS

As Dr. Spirito explains to me «human beings have always given significant importance to dreams: in ancient times we would meet in a circle in the morning to tell each other the dreams we had during the night. In fact, it was believed that the messages hidden within them were of relevance to the person who made them, but they also communicated useful messages for the entire community, being not individual but collective acts¹».

The psychotherapist Spirito tells me that she has always remembered every morning the dreams she has during the night and precisely since this conscious internal dialogue gives rise to his passion for the dream world and the supporting function it can have in our lives. Spirito, after obtaining the title of psychotherapist, she then specialized, among other things, in the use of dreams in psychotherapy through a master’s degree.

But not only that: Marcella Maria Spirito has specific training in psychotraumatology and psychotherapy of psychotraumatic disorders. It is therefore no coincidence that it is she, together with her colleague doctor Olga Tartarelli, to complement her work as a psychotherapist and researcher in the scientific field, a study and support work to understand and fully experience one’s dream world.

But what function do dreams have in our life? «Dreams is a field still under study. Thanks to some research we know that 95% of dreams are about human interactions, mostly conflictual², but we also know that dreams have different functions: one of these is precisely that of being curative, that is, of functioning as a problem solving action of the mind. Sometimes, for example, dreams are used to re-elaborate emotions experienced during the day.”

«For example, it happens that you feel anger towards someone, but you are not able to express it or you cannot or do not want to do so. It is possible for such anger to express itself and emerge during one of the nocturnal dreams to resolve and end an emotional process that has begun». However, it is essential to be able to give the right space to our dreams, without giving them a pre-packaged meaning and label at all costs.

NIGHTMARES: DREAMS NOT DREAMS

However, this would not apply in the case of nightmares: «They are always dreams, but a bit particular. During therapy we always pay particular attention to how we work with nightmares, because the latter provide us with an important clue that should not be underestimated, namely that the person in question she was unable to process and overcome a situation, an experience and this is communicated through anguish, fear and terror».

So if we have not been able to process a certain emotion, a sensation, a situation on our own, it re-emerges through the nightmare. What some therapeutics, including Spirito, propose is try to recover memories of the nightmare and end the dream in a different waythat is, creating a positive ending ourselves.

INTERPRETING DREAMS

The meaning we give to our dreams changes depending on the person who dreams and the precise moment of life they are living. «Having said this however – adds Spirito – there are archetypes that are part of the collective imagination and to which we all refer, regardless of where we live. In fact, some studies tell us that some dreams are common in all cultures and remain the same over time even if the societies they belong to change significantly over time.”

So regardless of socioeconomic and cultural context, there are dreams that repeat themselves for everyone. Some of them are for example the falling of teeth or a slip from the stairs of the protagonist of the dream or even moving through different means of transportsuch as planes or cars or dreaming of deceased friends and relatives.

The Tansational Analysis and Performat Method approach, also used by Dr. Spirito, requires that it is not the therapist who provides a meaning to the dream, but the exact opposite, that is help the person in a process of co-construction and elaboration to understand the meaning specific at that particular moment. As? She retraces the dream, telling it over and over again, using the present tense, to be able to enter into it.

«Often the dreams that people bring us at the beginning of a therapy journey together are very different from those that take us towards the end. In some cases their dreams anticipate their recoverythat is, through the dream they see themselves in a different position from the previous one, which is very similar to the future one that they will then choose to take”.

REMEMBER DREAMS: YES, BUT HOW?

Unfortunately, not all of us are like Dr. Spirito and we don’t remember the dreams we had in the morning, or at least not always. There are people who claim to never remember them, others who do so sporadically. Science is sure of one thing³: we all dream, even if we don’t remember it. But we also know that whether or not we remember the dreams we have depends a lot on the moment in which we awaken⁴In fact, if we wake up in the NREM phase (deep sleep) it is more difficult for us to remember our dreams than if we wake up in the REM phase.

But how is it possible to remember one’s dreams when this does not happen in a natural and spontaneous way? Practicing to do this is not a given and some techniques can help, such as always keeping a notebook and a pen on the bedside table so you can write them down as soon as you wake up or sharing them with other people can be a start of a path of self-understanding.

SOCIAL DREAMING

Marcella, together with Olga Tartarelli, organizes collective social dreaming meetings – whose creator is Lawrence -, in which she shares with people some techniques for remembering dreams and being able to interpret them, but above all where she invites people to bring and share the dreams they have had with the other participants. «Being able to tell and share what you dream is an important first step towards self-understanding and comparison with the dream experiences of others. These events that we organize, both in person and online, have the goal of helping people remember their dreams and know that there is important information there for themselves, who can learn to listen and understand.”

To register for the event scheduled in Castelbianco on April 27th click here.

Note:
1 Rotondo, A., & Bertolini, G. (2008). Social dreaming in terrenuove. Notebooks on Psychology, Transactional Analysis and Human Sciences, 50.
2 McNamara P. (2019). The neuroscience of sleep and dreams. Cambridge University Press.
3Herlin, B., Leu-Semenescu, S., Chaumereuil, C., & Arnulf, I. (2015). Evidence that non-dreamers do dream: A REM sleep behavior disorder model. Journal of Sleep Research, 24(6), 602-609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.12323
4 Dement, W.C., & Kleitman, N. (1957), The Relation of the Eye movements during sleep to dream activity: an objective method for the study of dreaming. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53(5), 339-346. https://doi.org/1