Reviewer: 颖 曾
Hello
My contention
is that to be able to
understand our own dreams
and the wisdom to pay close attention to what we’re
dreaming is just as important to
education today as science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics.
Notice that I don’t say, ” Just as important as creativity.”
The longer I’ve worked with dreams,
the more impossible it is for me
to separate dreams from creativity.
The dreams we dream at night are raw
specimens of the creative mind we all
have the moment the on creative part of
us goes to sleep and we start to dream.
What gives rise to our dreams and our
creativity is the same thing that gives
rise to enlightenment, our truthfulness,
our authenticity – any number of things like that,
the real real deeper values in being a human being
And so, for today I would redefine creativity
not just as the ability to discover
ourselves and invent new things but as
the ability to innovate and gain
self-knowledge in ways
that produce a better world,
a fairer world, an earth that is more sustainable,
a planet that will be good
for our children and not just for us.
When we look at the dream we wake up with in the morning,
it doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t seem logical.
This is because dreams arise
from a part of ourselves
that is so superior to us
and know so much more.
We don’t understand this language. Our dreams,
our own dreams, speak the language of Jesus,
Buddha, Shakespeare, Einstein.
The pictures in our dreams
are metaphors.
The metaphor is the language of our creative mastery.
What’s happened in these recent times is that
we’ve turned our back on that.
And when we do that
we fall into the service of that
cunning rogue the emissary
Yes, Nietzsche’s Master/Emissary paradigm
that has been made famous by
Iain McGilchrist to explain the relationship
between the left and right hemispheres
of the divided brain – it fits perfectly the
relationship between our waking mind and our dreams.
The mind we have when we
dream is far superior to the mind we
have when we’re awake.
But what we do today is we focus on the small mind and turn our back
on the larger one.
The perspective of the two minds is different.
The dream looks at reality
like a little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale,
“The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
He sees the naked emperor strutting down the street.
Our waking mind looks at reality
like all the other people along the street in that story.
They’re all talking about how beautiful the emperor’s garments are.
We, when we’re awake, are not quite so honest.
Our dreams are perfectly honest.
I want to give an example of this from my own life.
When I was in my 30s I was a scientist
but I was far more interested
more and more in reading –
reading novels, reading books.
And it occurred to me I might write a novel.
And so I didn’t want to spend my life doing something
that had begun to bore me,
begun to make me feel like I was a sterile person.
So, I left my career. I cashed in on my money.
I took my money and I tried to write a novel.
What I discovered
is that I didn’t have any creativity,
and if I wrote a sentence, my sentences had no feeling.
I couldn’t write a sentence with feeling.
Well, I figured everybody has to have feeling and everybody has to have creativity.
I’d been reading a bunch of books.
Some of them were books about dreams.
So, I thought, well, I’m going to write down my dreams.
I’ll work with my dreams. I’ll analyze my dreams, I’ll see what the deal is.
So I bought more books on dreams.
I wrote down my dreams every morning.
I went to my other room, sat at the desk,
and analyzed them morning after morning after morning.
I could never make any sense of them.
They were very complicated.
Then I got ahold of a book that talked about the dream series.
I’d never heard about that.
A dream series is a dream, a long series of dreams,
where it’s like a TV serial where you have the individual episodes –
or a long novel like War and Peace with many little chapters.
And so each dream is only one chapter and carries the story forward a little bit.
So I thought, well, this is it.
I’m going to go through my journals and catalog them and I’ll find a dream series.
Then if I start analyzing one part of the dream I’ll understand the other part. This will work for me.
And so I did that. And I found i came up with a
dream series with 60 some repetitions
The same dream came back 60 some times
Now, the funny thing is that I didn’t notice it.
I didn’t notice that the same dream kept coming back.
I’d write it down, and I’d go to my desk,
and I’d analyze my dreams, and I never analyzed that dream.
Now, the only thing I can figure was,
“Well, why would I analyze a dream like that?”
In the dream, every single dream,
I was back at my father’s house in Miami, Florida.
My father arrived, and I was in a hurry to get out of there.
And so to me,
what’s there to understand?
The meaning is right on the surface.
The last place in the world I would want to go
is my father’s place in Miami.
I never wanted to go back there.
After high school I ran away from home,
caught a bus up north.
For 17 years I never had any contact with him,
never returned.
I hated the man.
So then I wonder, “Well why am I having this dream?”
“Why does the dream keep putting me back there?”
So I started working with the dream.
The way you work with the dream – you get an image,
and you associate to it,
and you associate to the association until you
hit upon something that happened in real life.
Then you line up all these episodes –
and this is the narrative.
This is the narrative, “Me.”
This is what my father did to me,
why I hated him – the same old story I knew.
But then I found an image that didn’t go in that direction.
It went in a different direction.
It sort of made me uneasy.
So I went to a different part of the dream
and I found another image like that.
It made me even more uneasy.
And all of a sudden, at that moment,
I knew what the dream meant.
And there was a shriek cutting through the night.
And it came out of me.
My chest was heaving.
I was a scientist. I was never an emotional person.
And I started sobbing.
I had mistaken hurt for hate.
My father had hurt me.
But I loved him and I forgave him.
Within a week I was on an airplane down to Miami.
I went to my father’s place.
We had a reconciliation.
It was wonderful for him. It was wonderful for me.
When I came back to New York
I figured, now I have somewhere to go home to for Christmas.
Two weeks later I got a phone call in the middle of the night
My father had a heart attack. He was dead.
How does the dream know?
A dream keeps coming back over sixty times.
“Go to Miami!” “Go to Miami.”
And I’m so stupid, and the dream’s so smart.
Well I got very interested,
more interested than in writing,
and I opened up my apartment one night a week
to what I called the free Dream Community.
People would assemble from all over New York and that area.
We’d work with dreams.
After doing this some weeks or months we all realized,
this is very important what’s happening here.
So we started putting out a newsletter to promote
the spread of these dream communities
all over the world.
We sent newsletters all over the United States,
all across the world.
Another dream community started up in New Jersey,
another one in Brooklyn.
People were starting to talk about a dream movement.
There’s a dream movement happening.
And then it went in a direction that I didn’t like.
It wasn’t a direction
that I wanted to go in.
Broken hearted I dropped away and I became isolated.
And Montague Ullman …
I became isolated but not before I had attracted the attention of Montague Ullman.
He came down to my apartment.
He took me out to lunch and he said,
“Bill, you were right. What you tried to do was right.”
And he wanted me to start again and do this work.
I said, “No way.”
I’d had enough of trying to change the world.
So he invited me up to his training session.
He had a training session for a group.
He had developed a group approach to dreams
that ordinary people could use –
people like me who had no background in
psychology or so whatsoever.
It was a very simple process. It was fun.
I went up to his leadership training workshop
and he kept inviting me.
For some twenty-five years I kept going up there.
I think I was the longest person who went to those.
He always wanted me to start up
my grassroots work again.
I didn’t want to.
Then my wife got an academic position in Taiwan.
We came here. I followed her.
And, thanks to her help,
we established the Ullman
dream group as a course at the university here.
And we started training other university professors
how to do this course themselves.
You don’t have to be an expert to do this.
Anyone can do this. It’s a creative approach.
Now, you might ask,
“Well, what can you learn from dreams?”
Because, at least in the way I teach the course,
there are no quizzes, there are no exams,
there is no final exam, I have no reading assignments,
I assign no papers.
Everything the students learn,
they learn from their own dreams.
So, what can you learn from dreams?
Well, it turns out,
what you can learn from dreams
is probably what it is most important to know today.
Now the standard idea of dreams is that we have this …
…little tiny…
The conscious mind is like a little tiny spotlight on the stage,
the unconscious mind is vast.
It’s not just the whole stage. Maybe the whole campus.
It’s really huge.
And it sees things we don’t even see, all the time,
and it assembles these,
brings them forward, producing dreams.
It always has new insights.
We’re relatively stupid. It knows a lot.
Montague Ullman went further than that.
He found, from a lifetime of working with thousands and thousands of people’s dreams
He found
that every dream that someone really figured out,
it seemed that they had touched down into a part of themselves so pure,
so true, so unpolluted that he called it “Our incorruptible core of being.”
Now, recently a neuroscientist who studies Buddhist meditation,
and also practices Buddhist meditation, has come up with a term,
“Our basic human goodness.”
I think these are about the same thing.
In fact, the idea is as old as culture itself.
From ancient Egypt, to ancient India, to ancient Tibet, to ancient China, to Japan
– all across the East –
the lotus flower is a metaphor for the sacred aspect of the human mind.
You always see the Buddha sitting on a lotus flower.
The lotus flower grows in a dirty pond –
stinky, polluted water, yucky.
And the lotus flower grows up through that with its bud,
and then comes above the water.
Then it opens the flower and the flower is perfectly pure.
There’s not a speck of dirt or mud.
It’s perfectly pure and beautiful.
That’s the metaphor in these Eastern religions for the enlightened mind.
What Montague Ullman’s approach to dreams does,
it has enabled ordinary people to touch in to that aspect of themselves.
If we’re going to make a world that works,
that’s not burning itself out, flooding all the cities, etc.,
we need to touch in to that part of ourselves so that what we do is not more destructive than constructive.
A student came in with a dream she was a murderer.
As soon as we started working with the dream
it turned out that her passion was journalism.
She wanted to tell the truth about Taiwan.
Of course, her parents and her friends said,
“You can’t make any money doing that! Go for business.”
So she changed and she went into business.
All of a sudden, she lost all her interest in learning,
in studying.
She just stayed in bed.
The dream told her the person she’d murdered was herself, her real self.
She went back into journalism.
This idea of the incorruptible core of being,
this idea of the lotus flower,
these are sort of flowery ideas.
That’s not the kind of idea a neuroscientist would accept.
But I think there’s a way to explain it that a neuroscientist would understand.
Neuroscience used to think the brain was hard wired,
so if you have damage because of
a car accident or a stroke, that’s it.
You’re finished.
You’ll have a paralyzed part all your life.
But certain neuroscientists developed these apparatuses and procedures
that found there often is a part in the brain that’s not damaged.
The signals of that part are being flooded out by the damaged part, all the noise.
If they could just increase
the signal in the undamaged part,
then the brain could use that healthy part as a portal of entry and get information to the brain.
Once the brain can take in the true information it will start
it will start doing the right thing.
And actually, they could make people move their arm again.
Montague Ullman’s process with dreams is exactly the same.
What the dream does is that it brings up
a part of us that hasn’t been corrupted by the world,
that hasn’t been ruined by betrayal, or a bad experience, or this or that.
And so…
this can change the person all of a sudden.
The person connects with this incorruptible core of being, this pure part that works,
and everything takes care of itself.
The problems iron out.
And,
this is the way the group process with dreams actually works.
And, if you ask, what is it then that dreams have that we need today?
Well, what it is,
is that they can find the part of us
that’s most vibrantly alive and true.
And they can bring this forward
so that we can use it to change our life and the way we do our work.
Thank you very much
Hello
My contention
is that to be able to
understand our own dreams
and the wisdom to pay close attention to what we’re
dreaming is just as important to
education today as science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics.
Notice that I don’t say, ” Just as important as creativity.”
The longer I’ve worked with dreams,
the more impossible it is for me
to separate dreams from creativity.
The dreams we dream at night are raw
specimens of the creative mind we all
have the moment the on creative part of
us goes to sleep and we start to dream.
What gives rise to our dreams and our
creativity is the same thing that gives
rise to enlightenment, our truthfulness,
our authenticity – any number of things like that,
the real real deeper values in being a human being
And so, for today I would redefine creativity
not just as the ability to discover
ourselves and invent new things but as
the ability to innovate and gain
self-knowledge in ways
that produce a better world,
a fairer world, an earth that is more sustainable,
a planet that will be good
for our children and not just for us.
When we look at the dream we wake up with in the morning,
it doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t seem logical.
This is because dreams arise
from a part of ourselves
that is so superior to us
and know so much more.
We don’t understand this language. Our dreams,
our own dreams, speak the language of Jesus,
Buddha, Shakespeare, Einstein.
The pictures in our dreams
are metaphors.
The metaphor is the language of our creative mastery.
What’s happened in these recent times is that
we’ve turned our back on that.
And when we do that
we fall into the service of that
cunning rogue the emissary
Yes, Nietzsche’s Master/Emissary paradigm
that has been made famous by
Iain McGilchrist to explain the relationship
between the left and right hemispheres
of the divided brain – it fits perfectly the
relationship between our waking mind and our dreams.
The mind we have when we
dream is far superior to the mind we
have when we’re awake.
But what we do today is we focus on the small mind and turn our back
on the larger one.
The perspective of the two minds is different.
The dream looks at reality
like a little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale,
“The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
He sees the naked emperor strutting down the street.
Our waking mind looks at reality
like all the other people along the street in that story.
They’re all talking about how beautiful the emperor’s garments are.
We, when we’re awake, are not quite so honest.
Our dreams are perfectly honest.
I want to give an example of this from my own life.
When I was in my 30s I was a scientist
but I was far more interested
more and more in reading –
reading novels, reading books.
And it occurred to me I might write a novel.
And so I didn’t want to spend my life doing something
that had begun to bore me,
begun to make me feel like I was a sterile person.
So, I left my career. I cashed in on my money.
I took my money and I tried to write a novel.
What I discovered
is that I didn’t have any creativity,
and if I wrote a sentence, my sentences had no feeling.
I couldn’t write a sentence with feeling.
Well, I figured everybody has to have feeling and everybody has to have creativity.
I’d been reading a bunch of books.
Some of them were books about dreams.
So, I thought, well, I’m going to write down my dreams.
I’ll work with my dreams. I’ll analyze my dreams, I’ll see what the deal is.
So I bought more books on dreams.
I wrote down my dreams every morning.
I went to my other room, sat at the desk,
and analyzed them morning after morning after morning.
I could never make any sense of them.
They were very complicated.
Then I got ahold of a book that talked about the dream series.
I’d never heard about that.
A dream series is a dream, a long series of dreams,
where it’s like a TV serial where you have the individual episodes –
or a long novel like War and Peace with many little chapters.
And so each dream is only one chapter and carries the story forward a little bit.
So I thought, well, this is it.
I’m going to go through my journals and catalog them and I’ll find a dream series.
Then if I start analyzing one part of the dream I’ll understand the other part. This will work for me.
And so I did that. And I found i came up with a
dream series with 60 some repetitions
The same dream came back 60 some times
Now, the funny thing is that I didn’t notice it.
I didn’t notice that the same dream kept coming back.
I’d write it down, and I’d go to my desk,
and I’d analyze my dreams, and I never analyzed that dream.
Now, the only thing I can figure was,
“Well, why would I analyze a dream like that?”
In the dream, every single dream,
I was back at my father’s house in Miami, Florida.
My father arrived, and I was in a hurry to get out of there.
And so to me,
what’s there to understand?
The meaning is right on the surface.
The last place in the world I would want to go
is my father’s place in Miami.
I never wanted to go back there.
After high school I ran away from home,
caught a bus up north.
For 17 years I never had any contact with him,
never returned.
I hated the man.
So then I wonder, “Well why am I having this dream?”
“Why does the dream keep putting me back there?”
So I started working with the dream.
The way you work with the dream – you get an image,
and you associate to it,
and you associate to the association until you
hit upon something that happened in real life.
Then you line up all these episodes –
and this is the narrative.
This is the narrative, “Me.”
This is what my father did to me,
why I hated him – the same old story I knew.
But then I found an image that didn’t go in that direction.
It went in a different direction.
It sort of made me uneasy.
So I went to a different part of the dream
and I found another image like that.
It made me even more uneasy.
And all of a sudden, at that moment,
I knew what the dream meant.
And there was a shriek cutting through the night.
And it came out of me.
My chest was heaving.
I was a scientist. I was never an emotional person.
And I started sobbing.
I had mistaken hurt for hate.
My father had hurt me.
But I loved him and I forgave him.
Within a week I was on an airplane down to Miami.
I went to my father’s place.
We had a reconciliation.
It was wonderful for him. It was wonderful for me.
When I came back to New York
I figured, now I have somewhere to go home to for Christmas.
Two weeks later I got a phone call in the middle of the night
My father had a heart attack. He was dead.
How does the dream know?
A dream keeps coming back over sixty times.
“Go to Miami!” “Go to Miami.”
And I’m so stupid, and the dream’s so smart.
Well I got very interested,
more interested than in writing,
and I opened up my apartment one night a week
to what I called the free Dream Community.
People would assemble from all over New York and that area.
We’d work with dreams.
After doing this some weeks or months we all realized,
this is very important what’s happening here.
So we started putting out a newsletter to promote
the spread of these dream communities
all over the world.
We sent newsletters all over the United States,
all across the world.
Another dream community started up in New Jersey,
another one in Brooklyn.
People were starting to talk about a dream movement.
There’s a dream movement happening.
And then it went in a direction that I didn’t like.
It wasn’t a direction
that I wanted to go in.
Broken hearted I dropped away and I became isolated.
And Montague Ullman …
I became isolated but not before I had attracted the attention of Montague Ullman.
He came down to my apartment.
He took me out to lunch and he said,
“Bill, you were right. What you tried to do was right.”
And he wanted me to start again and do this work.
I said, “No way.”
I’d had enough of trying to change the world.
So he invited me up to his training session.
He had a training session for a group.
He had developed a group approach to dreams
that ordinary people could use –
people like me who had no background in
psychology or so whatsoever.
It was a very simple process. It was fun.
I went up to his leadership training workshop
and he kept inviting me.
For some twenty-five years I kept going up there.
I think I was the longest person who went to those.
He always wanted me to start up
my grassroots work again.
I didn’t want to.
Then my wife got an academic position in Taiwan.
We came here. I followed her.
And, thanks to her help,
we established the Ullman
dream group as a course at the university here.
And we started training other university professors
how to do this course themselves.
You don’t have to be an expert to do this.
Anyone can do this. It’s a creative approach.
Now, you might ask,
“Well, what can you learn from dreams?”
Because, at least in the way I teach the course,
there are no quizzes, there are no exams,
there is no final exam, I have no reading assignments,
I assign no papers.
Everything the students learn,
they learn from their own dreams.
So, what can you learn from dreams?
Well, it turns out,
what you can learn from dreams
is probably what it is most important to know today.
Now the standard idea of dreams is that we have this …
…little tiny…
The conscious mind is like a little tiny spotlight on the stage,
the unconscious mind is vast.
It’s not just the whole stage. Maybe the whole campus.
It’s really huge.
And it sees things we don’t even see, all the time,
and it assembles these,
brings them forward, producing dreams.
It always has new insights.
We’re relatively stupid. It knows a lot.
Montague Ullman went further than that.
He found, from a lifetime of working with thousands and thousands of people’s dreams
He found
that every dream that someone really figured out,
it seemed that they had touched down into a part of themselves so pure,
so true, so unpolluted that he called it “Our incorruptible core of being.”
Now, recently a neuroscientist who studies Buddhist meditation,
and also practices Buddhist meditation, has come up with a term,
“Our basic human goodness.”
I think these are about the same thing.
In fact, the idea is as old as culture itself.
From ancient Egypt, to ancient India, to ancient Tibet, to ancient China, to Japan
– all across the East –
the lotus flower is a metaphor for the sacred aspect of the human mind.
You always see the Buddha sitting on a lotus flower.
The lotus flower grows in a dirty pond –
stinky, polluted water, yucky.
And the lotus flower grows up through that with its bud,
and then comes above the water.
Then it opens the flower and the flower is perfectly pure.
There’s not a speck of dirt or mud.
It’s perfectly pure and beautiful.
That’s the metaphor in these Eastern religions for the enlightened mind.
What Montague Ullman’s approach to dreams does,
it has enabled ordinary people to touch in to that aspect of themselves.
If we’re going to make a world that works,
that’s not burning itself out, flooding all the cities, etc.,
we need to touch in to that part of ourselves so that what we do is not more destructive than constructive.
A student came in with a dream she was a murderer.
As soon as we started working with the dream
it turned out that her passion was journalism.
She wanted to tell the truth about Taiwan.
Of course, her parents and her friends said,
“You can’t make any money doing that! Go for business.”
So she changed and she went into business.
All of a sudden, she lost all her interest in learning,
in studying.
She just stayed in bed.
The dream told her the person she’d murdered was herself, her real self.
She went back into journalism.
This idea of the incorruptible core of being,
this idea of the lotus flower,
these are sort of flowery ideas.
That’s not the kind of idea a neuroscientist would accept.
But I think there’s a way to explain it that a neuroscientist would understand.
Neuroscience used to think the brain was hard wired,
so if you have damage because of
a car accident or a stroke, that’s it.
You’re finished.
You’ll have a paralyzed part all your life.
But certain neuroscientists developed these apparatuses and procedures
that found there often is a part in the brain that’s not damaged.
The signals of that part are being flooded out by the damaged part, all the noise.
If they could just increase
the signal in the undamaged part,
then the brain could use that healthy part as a portal of entry and get information to the brain.
Once the brain can take in the true information it will start
it will start doing the right thing.
And actually, they could make people move their arm again.
Montague Ullman’s process with dreams is exactly the same.
What the dream does is that it brings up
a part of us that hasn’t been corrupted by the world,
that hasn’t been ruined by betrayal, or a bad experience, or this or that.
And so…
this can change the person all of a sudden.
The person connects with this incorruptible core of being, this pure part that works,
and everything takes care of itself.
The problems iron out.
And,
this is the way the group process with dreams actually works.
And, if you ask, what is it then that dreams have that we need today?
Well, what it is,
is that they can find the part of us
that’s most vibrantly alive and true.
And they can bring this forward
so that we can use it to change our life and the way we do our work.
Thank you very much
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