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To group, life is but a dream
Friday, August 14, 1998 By Beatrice Paul Hirschl
Think of your dreams as a wake-up call, not to barge into your sleep but to enhance your life.
That's what members of the Dream Workshop do.
Consider Ed Wirth's dream about fellow workshop member Chris Hoke of Forest Hills.
"I hadn't seen Chris in a long time," said Wirth, a Lawrenceville resident. "One night I dreamed about her, something about rose bushes. Then she showed up at a meeting and said she'd been busy planting rose bushes, her first time at that. Our group is always in contact, even when we're not together."
Such connections are frequent, said Cynthia Pearson of Point Breeze, who began the dream workshop three years ago.
"They're events of what (psychologist/psychiatrist) Carl Jung called 'synchronicity.' 'Meaningful coincidence' is the shortest definition. But the workshop is not intended as therapy. It's a kind of nonthreatening public forum about personal growth and the fun of sharing our dreams."
Pearson calls herself a dream evangelist whose "Golly, wow!" wonderment at class members' comments belie her many years spent chronicling and teaching dream awareness.
"I'm convinced that dream life is just as valid as waking life," she said, "if you pay attention."
Gina Sestak of Squirrel Hill would agree. Her dream led off a recent meeting of the group at Friends Meeting House in Oakland. Meetings usually open with someone briefly summarizing a dream, followed by others' takes on what it might mean.
Sestak told the group how she had dreamed recently about attending a party where the bowls were too small to hold the abundance of fruit served. Among the suggested meanings:
"If this were my dream, I'd think life is a banquet, but you have to set priorities," one group member said.
"I'd think it was a prescriptive dream, that maybe I require more fruit in my diet," another offered.
The ongoing workshop has drawn a small but steady corps that includes lawyers, artists, writers and a botanist. Newcomers are welcome, Pearson said.
"But I can see why some are uneasy. One woman listened carefully but never returned. She seemed blown away."
Most sessions include exchanges on "lucid" dreaming, in which the dreamer watches from the wings, so to speak, as his dream is played out. According to Jung, Pearson said, everyone is director, actor and audience of his dreams. Members also express dreams through art, like the vivid drawing by Janet McCall of heart surgery. The South Side woman dreamed she was undergoing the surgery.
Always eager to track the unknown, Pearson entered the world of dream exploration years ago by starting a dream journal. Ultimately, the high-tech beckoned. At last year's conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams, an international organization of psychologists, researchers and writers, Pearson reported that she had set up a database of about 600 of her dreams, logged from over a six-year period.
Today, Pearson said she was thrilled that the association is beginning to recognize people such as her who record and study dreams as an important source of research. With the 100th anniversary of Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" coming up in 2000, the time is right for noting "grass-roots dream work," she said.
During meetings, Pearson encourages members to keep a pad and pencil next to their beds to chronicle dreams immediately after waking. She also advocates "incubating" dreams -- telling yourself at bedtime, "I will dream tonight."
Elizabeth Jeffries of Penn Hills calls the class "a vehicle for healthy, balanced introspection."
"Self-knowledge is a positive thing," she said.
Chris Hoke agreed.
"I've gained so much insight here, and there's a wonderful level of trust," Hoke said.
A recent visitor was Edith Flom Schneider of Oakland, mother of member Stephanie Flom of Highland Park.
"We were walking one day when Mom pointed at this building and said, 'That's an interesting-looking place. Have you been there?'
"Well, how do you tell your mother, yes, for a dream workshop?
"But I told her, and here she is."
The Dream Workshop meets periodically at the Friends Meeting House, 4836 Ellsworth Ave., Oakland. First classes are free; others are $6 per session. For meeting dates or more information, call 412-241-7885.
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