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Have you ever dreamed about someone you know?
Dreams are a mix of the strange and the familiar. While sometimes in nighttime dreams we interact with people we’ve never met before, often we find that we know the people we see and speak to while asleep. Is there something for us to learn in these interactions?
Perhaps surprisingly, the material in our night dreams and even daydreams offer unexpected ways to improve our existing, waking relationships. With a little reflection, they can help us expand our self-awareness and provide insights about the ways we interact with others. Here are three tools for using our nighttime dreams and daydreaming to improve our relationships.
Relationship Tool #1: Dreams Hold Other Perspectives
Challenges are inevitable in any relationship. However, when we encounter relationship roadblocks, we usually retreat to our most familiar scripts, seeing the other person through a narrow lens. When we’re angry at a spouse, for example, it may seem impossible to remember them as the person we fell in love with; a flare-up with our boss and we forget what a chance they took on us early in our career. Yet our nighttime dreams can help return us to a more expanded view.
While we dream about people we know in waking time, rarely do the familiar faces in our dreams behave exactly as we would expect them to in waking life. The staid, strict mother is suddenly carefree; the couch-surfing, irresponsible brother-in-law now owns a modern, upscale house. Waking up, we have the possibility to curiously reflect on the differences. We can ask ourselves whether there is something more or different to the person than the way we’ve been viewing them in waking time.
Often the difference between a person in our dreams and the way we perceive them in waking life puts the new perspectives into motion without much effort. From time to time, though, we might even get something more direct. For example, once I dreamed of a work colleague who, in waking life, was critical of new ideas, making discussions difficult. In the dream, the same person knocked on my door and, when I opened it, said, “I’m not such a bad egg, after all.”
In the dream, I simply listened, then shut the door. But in the morning, reflecting on the dream, I asked myself whether there was something I was missing. The next time a prickly work conversation arose I decided to be curious instead of closed off. I noticed that underlying the criticisms of new ideas was a respect for process and stability. I appreciated such a point of view, and my own prickliness eased as a result, shifting our dialogues.
Relationship Tool #2: Imagining How the Other Person Feels
Most impasses begin with our own hurt feelings. To move out of that, we have to bring in other perspectives, including that of the other person.
Daydreaming utilizes the same default network of neural processing that operates in our night dreams. We think about this cognitive powerhouse as the seat of the imagination, but we also use it to evaluate sociomoral scenarios. For example, we use it to reflect on an event and the different ways that it could have played out, or to consider how other people may have felt about our actions.
If you think about it, it takes imagination to step into someone else’s shoes and sense how they might feel. Likewise, it takes creativity to come up with solutions for moving out of conflict and back to communication. Imagining the same event from the other person’s point of view, and finding new ways of seeing the situation, helps us move beyond impasses and back to dialogue.
Relationship Tool #3: “They” Are Me
One approach to understanding dreams is to view each of the aspects of a dream as an aspect of the dreamer. In other words, the people we think of as being separate others are in fact reflecting a part of our own self.
What better way to engender compassion than to remember our own multiple facets, including the occasional less-favorable qualities and traits we tend to assign to others. Peering into the mirror of our dreams, we can consider, for example, our own moments of acting staid and rigid, shirking responsibility, or being a bad egg.
We all have moments that could use a little tweaking, and recognizing that can open a door to renewed conversation. At the same time, the myriad perspectives in our dreams remind us that whatever our current facet, it is merely one of many aspects, and others are available. Knowing that helps us to shift into a more positive aspect of ourselves.
Dreams and our imagination offer a library of feelings, solutions, perspectives, and experiences that we can draw on to recognize more about ourselves and our relationships. We can get along better with others, and in the world, simply by looking within at this treasure trove that our own mind generates for us on a nightly basis, or that we sink into in our daydreaming. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn from people you meet (and know) when you close your eyes.
