Veronica Tonay - The Creative Dreamer: Using Your Dreams to Unlock Your Creativity

1995, 2006 by Veronica Tonay

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

Celestial Arts
an imprint of Ten Speed Press
P.O. Box 7123
Berkeley, CA 94707
www.tenspeed.com

Distributed in Australia by Simon and Schuster Australia, in Canada by Ten Speed Press Canada, in New Zealand by Southern Publishers Group, in South Africa by Real Books, and in the United Kingdom and Europe by Publishers Group UK.

Illustrated by Mike Gray

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tonay, Veronica.
The creative dreamer, revised: using your dreams to unlock your creativity / By Veronica Tonay.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81486-9
1. Dreams. 2. Creative ability. I. Title.
BF1091.T66 1995
154.63dc20 95-18405

v3.1

Contents

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK my thirty undergraduate research assistants at the University of California at Santa Cruz, especially: Jennifer Barry, Jonathan Benak, Melissa Bow, Kaitlin Bowman, Sharon Corbett, Lisa Henkemeyer, Jon Reynolds, Leslie Smith, and Karen Sutton. Their tireless work coding dream series enabled me to complete some of the most time-intensive research I could have chosen and formed the foundation for this book. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the hundreds of participants in my research, who gave freely of their most personal dreams.

The work of psychologist Carl Jung and his followers, and of Drs. Calvin S. Hall and Frank Barron most inspired this book. It was born at the University of California at Berkeley, where Dr. Gerald Mendelsohn taught me to strive for perfection and accept my best, to persevere in the face of personal crisis, and to acquire a taste for caramel mints. I thank him, and other Cal mentors, Drs. Oliver John and Mac Runyan, for supporting me as a creative psychologist who dreams. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, I thank Dr. William Domhoff for encouraging my work with dreams. I am also grateful to my brother, Joe, and late parents, who engendered in me a commitment to the truth, to compassion, and to helping others.

After the first printing of The Creative Dreamer, many readers wrote to me to let me know how the book helped them to acknowledge and express their creativity, and even, in some cases, to change their lives. I am honored by those notes and grateful to readers for sharing their thoughts, experiences, and dreams with me. I can be reached through my website, www.drtonay.com, and I will respond if you write!

Many psychotherapy clients, students, and dream group participants revealed their inner lives to me over the past ten years by sharing their dreams and giving me permission to discuss them here. Their brave vulnerability in doing so was a gift, and I thank them.

My own, small creative community is a solace and a gentle spur. Rewriting this book, I am again reminded of how important each individual person can be in the life of someone who creates. Thank you, my friends! Over the past ten years, I lost Frank Barron and Kay Kelly, two nourishing, magical, and wise friends. Giving voice to my own creative spirit during times of loss and change led new worlds to present themselves. Steven is one of those worlds, giving of himself by standing with me, holding my candle in the dark, making me laugh, and reminding me of who I am.

Finally, I want to thank Lily, my kind, lovely, and brilliant editor, for her encouragement and sage advice. I am grateful to her and to everyone at Celestial Arts for enthusiastically giving me the opportunity to reach out again.

Without all of these people, this book wouldnt be. Thank you all.

Preface

I AM ONE WHO IS captivated by dreams. How did I get here, writing these words you are now reading? When I was nineteen and still shivering from adolescence, I decided to seek therapy. I was in college, majoring in dance, which represented freedom and life to me, when I contracted chronic tendonitis in my knee. I was forced to give up dancing. With hardly a pause and no display of grief, I decided to become an English literature teacher, giving up my ideas of becoming a dancer for something more practical.

My new psychologist listened thoughtfully to my tale. She asked about what kind of dreams I had been having. I had always wondered what part of myself dreams came from and what, if anything, they meant for me to know. I had kept a dream journal since I was thirteen, the age at which most girls (including me) turn inward and outward simultaneously, often ripping ourselves nearly in half in the process, before mending the rip to scar and grow again.

I stared back at her, surprised to realize: I havent remembered a dream in ages.

She nodded, slowly. That makes sense.

It didnt to me.

You have lost your dreams, she said.

So began the path of my sometimes shaggy education. As a psychologist (who could resist such a provocative and mysterious initiation? I abandoned literature at once!), I have heard or read some 25,000 dreams from people all over the world, people of various ages and life experiences and backgrounds. This book is based in part on research I performed, using about 3,000 dreams from more than 200 generous people, for my masters and doctoral degrees at the University of California at Berkeley: research attempting to connect dreaming with personality and, more specifically, with creativity. The Creative Dreamer is also enriched by the dreams and experiences of my many students at the University of California, my dream group and workshop participants, and my psychotherapy clients, whose contributions I honor and am deeply grateful for.

I blend many perspectives in my work with dreams. Not every dream lends itself to interpretation, and not all dreams can be interpreted from a single point of view. The first part of this book also relies upon the original work of psychologists Calvin S. Hall and Robert Van de Castle, who developed a method for researching the content of dreams. They found that dreams reflect our waking-life conceptions of the world, our society, and ourselves.

In my own work researching dreams, I found that most theories of dreaming (including the neurobiological explanations of dreams) can be integrated. In the first part of The Creative Dreamer, I incorporated the dream models of Jung, Freud, Hall, Perls, and Boss to the extent that their theories have been supported by research. The first part of the book will most interest those who like numbers, facts, and categories.