Heavy Traffic on the Royal Road

By Anastasia Toufexis

Call it the secular equivalent of PTL. Call it New Age pillow talk. Call it dream liberation. By any name, it is attracting all kinds of new enthusiasts -- artists and academics, ministers and scientists, trained therapists and just plain folks. It borrows techniques from psychotherapy, its vocabulary from sensitivity training and its cheery, take-hold-of-your-life spirit from gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. "Once dreams belonged exclusively to oracles or psychiatrists," says Ann Sayre Wiseman of Cambridge, Mass. "Now dreams belong to the dreamer."

Welcome to the Dreamwork Movement. Across the nation, growing numbers of Americans are keeping dream diaries, recording their visions on paper, tape and computer disc. Many are joining dream-sharing groups, ranging from weekly home gatherings of a few friends on Manhattan's Upper West Side to twice- monthly meetings of the Metro D.C. Dream Community, a 150-member network. Others are visiting dream consultants. At the San Francisco Dream Center, run by two duennas of the movement, Psychologist Gayle Delaney and Psychiatrist Loma Flowers, a private 50-minute session costs $90, and a 90-minute group meeting $35 to $50. Scores of devotees showed up in Arlington, Va., for the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams. There they heard the latest scientific findings on dreams, traded visions at breakfast and acted them out after dinner. The meeting's climax: a dream ball, with participants dressed as dream characters and symbols.

Freud called dream analysis the royal road to the unconscious. Psychologist Robert Van de Castle of Charlottesville, Va., agrees. But Freud, he contends, "gave us an unfortunate legacy, equating dreams with neuroses and revealing only the gutter side of our personalities." Dreamworkers are more positive. Explains Psychoanalyst Walter Bonime of New York City: "You can discover assets in dreams as well as pathology." Indeed, declares Psychologist Marcia Rose Emery of Grand Rapids: "If we honor our dreams, they can help and guide us."

When Carol Warner, a social worker in Washington, found herself at a personal impasse, she turned to her dream journal, spending up to two hours a day for more than a year analyzing the entries. The effort, she says, gave her the confidence "to be more assertive in work, to make the split from a male friend and to start playing the stock market."

Devotees rely on a variety of methods to interpret their dreams and arrive at that stage of enlightenment known in dreamwork circles as "aha!" One popular technique is re-creating the vision as a drawing or collage. Many groups favor a method devised by Psychiatrist Montague Ullman of Ardsley, N.Y., in which one member relates a dream to the others; listeners then respond by expressing how it makes them feel. In analyzing their visions, dreamworkers often find solutions to their problems. Indeed, says San Francisco's Delaney, nighttime images are a "reflection of your own mind considering challenges that you have been working on during the day." Delaney focuses that dream power with a technique called incubation: state the problem in a sentence or question and, once abed, keep repeating the sentence as if it were a mantra.

Applied dreaming is used to elucidate matters from the mundane to the metaphysical. Jack Maguire, a writer in New York City who was nervous about visiting his stepsister in Nashville, asked for a way to establish rapport with her. He dreamed they were both in a penthouse and he gave her a white carnation from his lapel. Maguire took a flower to Nashville. "It was a perfect gesture," he says.

Others seek insight into personal problems through a dream-manipulating ability called lucid dreaming. Some sleepers are aware they are dreaming while dreaming. In such a state, they can change imagery and plots, engage in dialogue and action with feared figures -- all of which, they say, can illuminate daylight dilemmas. Unfortunately, notes Psychologist Stephen . LaBerge of Stanford University, "only 5% to 10% of the population has lucid dreams with any regularity."

For those not so gifted, LaBerge has invented plastic goggles that can, he claims, induce lucid dreaming. Sensors on the mask are triggered by rapid eye movements during sleep; they set off a pulsing red light that arouses the mask's wearer just enough to know he or she is dreaming. LaBerge hopes to market the goggles (with instruction kit) sometime this winter. Price: about $100.

As interest in dreamwork spreads, mental-health professionals are issuing a few caveats. "Armchair psychology is not harmful per se," notes Arnold Richards of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, "but it doesn't substitute for serious treatment of significant personal problems." Psychologists warn against implementing solutions based solely on dreams. Some experts fear that manipulating one's dreams could be misapplied to repress or avoid distress.

Others are less concerned. "The myth is, don't tamper with the unconscious -- it's dangerous," says Fred Olsen, who runs Dream House in San Francisco. "I believe the unconscious is more resilient." Dreamwork can, however, create anxieties. Eugene Bianchi, a professor of religion at Emory University, recalls a young man who dreamed of joining, if reluctantly at first, a classroom full of obviously high, naked revelers. The dream, explains Bianchi, was about dream sharing itself -- "a fear of exposing oneself in the dream world, of being psychologically vulnerable." The sense of being high? "Well," he explains, "there is a certain uplift in being able to share one's dreams." As they say, Aha!

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles