Have you ever noticed a connection between a disturbing body experience and a night time dream?

What if your body symptoms were not just a source of suffering, but also a doorway into the creative foundations of everyday reality?

In the 1970s, Arnold Mindell, in his work as a Jungian dream analyst, observed a meaningful connection between people’s dream symbols and their disturbing body experiences. For example, a person dreaming of knives might also suffer from a sharp stabbing pain in their neck.  Mindell followed these dream and body experiences and found new insights and healing for his clients.  He created the concept of the dreambody to get beyond the dualities of mind and body, and published his ideas in 1984 with his first book, Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self.

“The body is dreaming in its own way, similarly to the way we dream at night. That is why dreaming for me is something happening in the night and in the day, and especially in the body. We are not just ill, but can take Jung’s teleological paradigm all the way into the body, and realize that it too is creating dream-like meanings. That is why I call illness, a ‘dreambody’ experience.”

 

Arnold Mindell (2005) interviewed by R. S. Henderson.^[1]Henderson, R. S. (2005). We Must All Breathe: an Interview with Arnold Mindell, Ph.D., at 61. Quadrant, XXXV(2). Retrieved from http://www.cgjungny.org/q/p/q35n2.html

Dreambody work explores the sensory-grounded, subjective experience of dreams and body symptoms using experiential, imaginative and hands-on bodywork techniques to reveal the body’s own dreaming wisdom. Advanced training leads to the more complex areas of chronic symptoms, childhood dreams, and life myth, the unique pattern that reflects an individual’s self-development over time.

Click here to watch Pierre Morin speak about dreambody work and his book, Sickness in Health.

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