Lisa Marchiano – Dream Wise

Air Date - 28 May 2025

Is there a Dreammaker “who visits each night with gifts of wisdom?” How may dreamwork assist us on the path of healing and growth? My guest this week on Destination Unlimited, Lisa Marchiano, says dreamwork assists us on the path of becoming whole (what Carl Jung called individuation). Lisa and her Jungian Analyst colleagues, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, host the popular podcast, This Jungian Life.

Her website is https://lisamarchiano.com/ and she joins me this week to share her path and book, co-authored with Stewart and Lee, Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
My name is Victor Furman. Some call me the Voice.
I've always been fascinated with human nature, spirituality, science and
the crossroads at which they meet. Join me now and
we will explore these topics and so much more with
fascinating guests, authors and experts who will guide us to

(00:28):
Destination unlimited. Is there a dream maker who visits us
each night with gifts of wisdom? How may dream work
assist us on the path of healing and growth? My
guest this week on Destination Unlimited, Lisa Marciano, says dream

(00:51):
work assists us on the path of becoming whole, what
Carl Young referred to as individuation. Lisa and her Young
Analyst colleagues Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee host the popular
podcast This Young in Life. Her website is Lisamarciano dot com,
and she joins me this week to share her path

(01:12):
and book co authored with Stuart and Lee, dream Wise,
Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams. Please join me in
welcoming to Destination Unlimited, Lisa Marciano. Welcome, Lisa, Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's great to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Lisa. Please share with us your path and how you
chose Youngian analysis as your practice.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well, I don't know that I chose it. I think
it chose me. I think a lot of people that
come to Young's work do feel a deep draw to
it and maybe even what we might call a calling.
So I was actually in graduate school studying international relations,
but I was twenty eight years old. I was at
that time of life that you know. Astrology refers to

(01:58):
it as a sodern return, and psychologists call it the
age thirty transition, where I think a lot of things
were coming into focus for me, and I went through
a difficult passage. A relationship failed. I wasn't really sure
about my path, and at that time, I came across
a book that, well, it sort of followed me from

(02:20):
place to place. I kept on not buying it because
I thought, well, I'm in graduate school, I have four
hundred pages of reading this week. I can't buy a book.
But then I kept on coming across it until even
I recognized that that probably meant I needed to buy it.
So I did, and I brought it home to my
apartment and I started reading it, and I realized it
was as signed copy by the author, who was a

(02:41):
union analyst named Linda Leonard, who has become a kind
of mentor and friend. And the book was so remarkable.
It was a book about relationships from a union perspective,
and it really introduced me to Young's ideas in this
really wonderful way. And it didn't take away my suffer
but it did change my relationship with my suffering. And

(03:04):
by the time I was into reading it, not only
was I feeling somewhat less acutely distressed, but I also
started to think, well, this is really interesting. Maybe I
would like to do that someday. And it took me
a number of years to get around to pursuing it,
but that was the beginning.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
What is the foundation of Jungian analysis and how does
it differ from other forms?

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, Jung was a colleague and contemporary of Freud. Freud
was a little older, but the two men were both prominent,
and they did collaborate and work together for a while.
And in the beginning, Jung was kind of a follower,
i would say, of Freud's new method of psychoanalysis, which

(03:50):
of course took really seriously what was going on in
the unconscious, but also was very interested in what had
happened in childhood that might be face, might be shaping
the present, and of course Freud had these ideas about
the role of sexuality. So the Twoman collaborated for about
seven years, but Jung's theories started to diverge. He didn't

(04:14):
feel that sexuality was the only important motivation, as Freud
tended to do, and he also was interested not only
in what had happened in the past in a person's life,
but where the psyche wanted to go. So a big
difference between Young and Freud is that Freud saw the
unconscious as the repository for things that had been forgotten

(04:36):
or maybe repressed, or maybe just never made it beyond
the threshold of consciousness. Well, Jung thought it was all
of those things. But he also thought that the unconscious
could be generative, that the unconscious was creative, that the
unconscious could produce images, emotions, new attitudes, ideas that would

(04:59):
lead us in a new direction that consciousness couldn't even
begin to imagine.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Before we discuss dream wise, please tell us about your book,
The Vital Spark, Reclaim your outlaw energies and find your
feminine fire. What inspired this book and what message do
you offer women?

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Well, you know, the book's inspiration actually came from a
podcast episode that we recorded. I have a podcast called
This Union Life, and we did a podcast called Fierce
Female Initiations. And while recording that podcast, I realized I
just had one fairy tale after another about the process

(05:42):
of female initiation. And by the time the podcast was done,
I literally thought to myself, well, that's a book. And
so it just sort of arose in a sense, I
think very organically from work I've done on myself, as
well as work that I've accompanied women on, and you know,

(06:02):
in a way, it's really all about reclaiming what is
sometimes called shadow. Shadow was, of course Yung's formulation. Now
the idea of shadow has really entered the popular culture,
but it was originally Jung's idea. And what Jung tells
us is that there are aspects of the personality that

(06:23):
we leave undeveloped, that maybe we kind of push off
to the side, or we kind of exile because we've
learned that they're not appreciated or valued in our culture
or by our family, let's say. And this is a
necessary process. Everyone goes through it. It's not a bad
thing to have a shadow, but what is often true

(06:45):
is that those aspects of ourselves that we've relegated to
shadow can be the source of new energy and enlivenment,
especially in midlife. So it's a book about reclaiming qualities
that you, as a woman, may not have let yourself develop.

(07:06):
Now this doesn't apply to all women, but the majority
of us tend to be accommodating and agreeable and likable,
and so what do we do with those other qualities?
So I identify these seven qualities disagreeableness, shrewdness, trickster desire, sexuality, rage, authority,

(07:30):
and ruthlessness, and using fairy tales, personal experiences and clients,
stories and dreams, I explore what happens if we develop
a new relationship with some of these qualities. Can we
integrate them and then they become capacities that we have,
So we, for example, have the capacity to exercise authority.

(07:54):
It doesn't mean we're going to go around doing it
all the time, but it means that when it's appropriate,
and of course that takes discernment to know when it's appropriate,
we can step into that and then we're stronger, we're fuller,
we are more of the person we were meant to be.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
An important message in light of recent cultural and political developments.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yes, I think so absolutely.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
You had touched upon fairy tale groups and your bio
shares that you facilitate these groups. What are they for
and what may be learned from fairy tales?

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Well, I love fairy tales. Fairy Tales are part of
what really connected me with union work, because unions we
really value archetypal materials, myths, fairy tales, religious images, these
ancient kind of primal stories that speak to the very

(08:50):
essence of what it means to be human. And fairy
tales are of course universal. They occur in all cultures,
and many tales have van across cultures, so there's sort
of like a Cinderella in nearly every culture that we know.
It may be very, very different, but the bones are
the same. So fairy tales are beautiful, and they contain

(09:11):
this kind of distillation of human wisdom that really comes
from the deepest strata I think of ourselves. So fairy
tales are a big part in most of the books
that I've written, The Vital Spark and also my book Motherhood.
I use fairy tales to show these kind of fundamental

(09:32):
psychological and relational patterns, and fairy tales are a beautiful
way in but also also instructive. They're full of wisdom.
So I also have an online fairy tale group for women,
and we explore a different tale every month. So some
fairy tales really are specifically about a woman's journey, some

(09:55):
more speak to a man's journey. And obviously, in this
fairy tale group that I run, I pick fairy tales
that are focused on a woman's experience, the kinds of
things that we might face. And we have a lovely
group of women there, and as the month progresses, we
discuss the fairy tale applying it to our own lives.

(10:19):
So that's where the magic really happens is when you
can say, you know, where in me has it happened
that I've lost contact with my brothers? For example, this
month we're looking at the Beautiful Grim's fairy tale of
the Six Swans, and the heroine of the tale loses
her six brothers when they get turned into swans, And

(10:41):
what does that mean symbolically or psychologically? And has that
ever happened to me in some way? So that's the
kind of work that we do in Spinning Straw.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Do you have a favorite fairy tale?

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Well, I do I have one that I just I mean,
I have many that I love. It's hard. It's hard
to answer that because I can get so enthusiastic about
several of them. But I would say that my favorite
fairy tale is the Russian tale of Vastlysa the Beautiful,
And somehow whenever I write anything, vast Lisa the Beautiful

(11:17):
winds up in it. It's just such a deeply magical,
wise profound tale with some wonderfully colorful imagery, and I
have loved it since childhood.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Do all the fairy tales that you folks talk about
have happy endings?

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Most do. Now. I have included some fairy tales in
my books that don't, But for the most part, fairy
tales do have happy endings because they are ultimately about
the process of individuation or about the process of growing
more whole.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
Absolutely, Please tell us about your collaborators in dream Wise,
Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, and your podcast The Young
in Life.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
So deb and Joseph and I all went through Union
training together, which is a wonderfully rich but also arduous experience.
We were in training together for the better part of
a decade, so we got to know each other really well,
and we were united by a sense of common purpose
as we struggled through the program together and helped each

(12:28):
other get through it. And of course we were relieved
when we graduated and we were each you know, certified
union analysts, but we missed having a project together, and
so in twenty eighteen, we decided to experiment by starting
a podcast. It's called This Union Life, and it began

(12:50):
in April of twenty eighteen, so just a little over
seven years ago. And it's a weekly podcast where we
take just any number of themes and explore it through
a union lens in just kind of a casual conversation.
And then at the end, we always interpret a listener's dream,

(13:11):
so anyone can submit their dream to the podcast for
possible discussion on the podcast, and we spent about the
past the last fifteen to twenty minutes of every episode
discussing a dream.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Dream Wise starts with a beautiful quote from young Would
you share that with us?

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Yes, this is a really beautiful quote. The dream is
a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret
recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which
was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and
which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego

(13:51):
consciousness extends.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Beautiful, Thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, I love that idea of the dream as a
little hidden door. And so dream Wise is the book
that we wrote together, the three of us on dream
Interpretation from a Union Lens.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
And what inspired that book.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Well, we have an online self paced course called dream School,
and we had created this course back in twenty twenty
and many, you know, several thousand people have been through
the course, and it just occurred to me that it
would be a wonderful thing to include that material in

(14:33):
a book. I'll tell you what really inspired me working
on the book is that I love dreams, and I
work with dreams every day, my own and other peoples,
and I feel like there's so much wisdom in them.
But dreams are really hard. It's really hard to learn

(14:54):
how to work with dreams, and it's especially difficult to
learn how to work with your own dream So, you know,
I wake up for my dreams and I may feel
pretty confident working on other people's dreams, but my own
dreams I just feel oftentimes very very perplexed. So we
really wanted with dream wise to make it as explicit

(15:18):
as possible. You know, I sometimes laugh that we're trying
to systematize something that really isn't systematizable. But I think
we've done a pretty decent job of making dreamwork kind
of as clear and accessible as it can be, so
that anyone, with the help of dream wise could begin

(15:40):
to work with their dreams symbolically.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
And how is it different from other books on dreams?

Speaker 2 (15:47):
So there are many wonderful books on dreams. There are,
of course, many dream dictionaries, and I'm not a big
fan of dream dictionaries.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
These are the kinds of books that tell you, oh,
you know, if you dream about a hose, it means
that you're going to trip that day or something. I
just made that up. But dream dictionaries tend to have
a very kind of concrete understanding of the dream images,
and they don't take into account the fact that, you know,
a different image might mean something very different to me

(16:18):
than it does to you. I have my own personal
experience with that thing. I have my associations and my
life experience, so no one can tell me what a
particular image in one of my dreams means. It's an
individual thing. Now, there are some beautiful union books about

(16:42):
dream interpretation. There's in classics. I think dream Wise adds
to that canon because again, it's it's very explicit it
really it does offer kind of a basic grounding in theory,
but it takes it beyond that to help you really
apply it. And one of the ways that we've done

(17:04):
that is through the addition of what we've called the keys.
So throughout dream Wise there are sixty nine keys, and
they are really little prompts that help you apply the
theory to your dream. So you can go to dream
wise and look at the keys and just ask yourself

(17:26):
the question does this apply to my dream? And you
can try it on. Doesn't always work. There're sixty nine
of them. Not all of them are going to apply
to every dream, but usually if you try a handful
of them, you'll find that, or at least I find
that the meaning begins to open. The thing is that
our dreams come from the unconscious, and they come from

(17:50):
the unconscious to tell us something that we are conscious
personality doesn't yet fully understand. The dream always carries with
it new information that we either don't know, or sometimes
we don't want to know. We're defended against it in
some sense, and that explains why it's so difficult to

(18:14):
understand our own dreams. It's really like asking us to
turn our head around and see our back. It's the
thing the dream carries, the message that is very alien
to ego consciousness, but it's important because it's a different perspective.
It may not be that the dream brings the absolute

(18:36):
correct perspective, but it certainly brings a different perspective, and
that can be so valuable, especially if we're feeling stuck.
You know, there's there's another quote in here from Young
that I really like that i'd like to share, if
that's okay. He says, in each of us, there is

(18:58):
another whom we do not know. He speaks to us
in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us
from how we see ourselves. And this is so important.
There's another in us who can who has a totally
different perspective, and who can help us get unstuck. You know,

(19:21):
ego consciousness can be very one sided, so we can
get stuck. You know, we feel like our life doesn't
have any energy, Like we're not sure what we're doing,
Like we're not sure what the juice is. We don't
know how to move forward in our personal or professional lives.
You know, if we could think our way out of it,

(19:43):
we already would have. And that's where dreams come in,
because they bring in this new perspective from this other within,
and that's the value of working with dreams. But it
is also what can make it difficult, because we're straining
to hear something thing that is pretty different from what
we're already thinking.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
My guest is Lisa Marciano. Her book is called dream Wise,
Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams. Lisa, please share with
our listeners where they can get the books and also
find out more about your podcast and your work.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Sure well, our podcast is this Unionlife dot com and
that's j U N G I A N this Union
Life dot com. You can find out about our podcast
and lots of our programs there. And my author website
is Lisamarciano dot com. You can find out about all

(20:39):
of my books there, including dream Wise, and you can
also find out more about my women's fairytale group Spinningstraw
dot com.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
And we'll be back with more of Lisa after these
words on the Own Times Radio network.

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(21:16):
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Speaker 1 (23:50):
Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week Lisa Marciano
her book dream Wise, Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams. Lisa,
what are some of the benefits of learning to work
with our dreams.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, dreams are beautiful and they're mysterious, and so even
just from that standpoint, it's a wonderful thing to welcome
them into our lives. You know, most of us go
through our days and we have a list of things
to do, and we have to be so concrete and
on task, and yet here's this moment of mystery when

(24:28):
we wake up in the morning and we contemplate these
very strange images that we could never have come up
with with our conscious mind. So they're beautiful. That's the
first thing. The other thing is that dreams introduce us
to the inner companion. So a minute ago, I was
sharing Young's quote about how there is another within who

(24:50):
speaks to us in dreams, and this is remarkable and
it's true. And when you work with dreams, you begin
to develop a relationship with us other within that inner companion,
and you really do learn that you're not alone, that
there is another perspective inside of you, who cares about you,

(25:11):
who wants the best for you, who is always watching
out for you and giving you a nudge do a
little bit more of this, do a little bit less
of that, and helping you grow towards wholeness.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
I had I've been having vivid dreams, lucid dreams for many,
many years, and I had one a few months ago
that when I awoke, I was in tears from May
I share it with you?

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (25:37):
I love that My dream was is that I was
enrolled in an angel academy and there was this huge
temple and we walked inside and it was shaped in
a U. Eighteen tables shaped in a U, and we
were instructed to go from table to table make eye
contact with the angelic being at each of these tables,
and when they nodded their head move on to the

(25:59):
next and we made this complete circuit of the eighteen tables,
and then we were instructed to go back to the
main table and make eye contact with the main angel there.
And at that point we were given two things. We
were given our angelic name and our angelic assignment. The
name that I was given was Avil, which translated from

(26:19):
Hebrew means God as my father. And my assignment was
to be an angel to other angels. Now I haven't
know what this was about, but I would welcome your feedback.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Well, I mean, that is truly a remarkable dream. That's
what we might call a big dream. And you know,
dreams always relate to what's going on in our lives.
And of course I don't know anything about your life,
so I don't have any associations or any contexts. But
I will just say that this seems to be a

(26:53):
momentous dream of great import In some sense, it's introducing
you to your destiny, which my guess is that you've
you already know something about your destiny, but perhaps this
was confirming it. I mean, it's it's interesting that it's
almost a sort of an image of kind of angel
speed dating. But but I love this image of making

(27:17):
eye contact, and I wonder if you could tell me
did you have that experience of making eye contact with
each angel? Yes, that must have been very, very profound
and full of numinosity and.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
Awe, absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
It was a real confrontation, I would say, with what
Yung called the self, the guiding center of the personality,
and it is the self that keeps our destiny and
introduces us to it sometimes through dreams. Sometimes that's where
we learn the nature of our, of our of our

(27:55):
of our purpose here. And that was indeed given to
you in a very explain way. And I would wonder too,
since it was angels, it does make me wonder if
the dream was hinting at, you know, an issue around mortality,
you know, if it was providing insight or comfort perhaps

(28:15):
around that issue.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
What this meant to me is I have been I'm
an ordained interfaith minister, among other things, and for many,
many years I've been assisting and providing guidance and compassion
to my sisters and brothers who are interfaith ministers and
others that have come across my path. And I recognize
that this was basically confirming that I'm doing what I'm

(28:38):
supposed to do in this life.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, so you must have woken up deeply grateful and
also with a real sense of clarity.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Absolutely, And that's why I was in tears, because it
was a revelation to me, was something that I knew already,
but it sort of confirmed everything that I had experienced.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Well, you knew it at a different level, right, do
it at a different level, and it was Yeah, it
sounds so so profound.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah. I know from my personal experience that if I
have a dream that I want to remember, I keep
a notepad next to my bed and journal the dream
as soon as I wake up, which included this one.
What would you offer to someone who says they can't
remember their dreams.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, that's a question that we get asked a lot,
and we actually have a whole appendix in the book
about how to remember your dreams. So there are many
many tips that we offer. The main one is the
one that you just shared. Get yourself a notebook, get
yourself up, you know, a pen, do it with intention,

(29:43):
I think. So I chose a special notebook for myself
and a special pen. My pen has a little red
light on it at the tip so that I can
write even in the dark, but you know whatever sort
of speaks to you, and then write down whatever you
can when you wake up in the morning, even if
it's just a little fragment. The more that you engage

(30:04):
with your dreams, the more you write them down, the
more that you are likely to remember them. There are
other techniques. For example, you can visualize yourself recalling your
dreams in the morning. You can tell yourself you're going
to recall your dreams. You can try taking some supplements,
so vitamin B six, I believe, is the supplement that

(30:27):
can help you remember your dreams, and there's more information
about that in the book.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
Are all dreams meaningful?

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Well? I think so. I think all dreams are meaningful.
I know that not everyone agrees with me, but I
think all dreams come to us and the interest of
healing and wholeness.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
I'm going to share one from someone else that allowed
me to share this. I'm not going to mention the
person's name, but this person had a dream that they
were climbing the staircase and the staircase would go to
the next level. They kept climbing the staircase and it
went on forever and ever and ever, continually climbing with
no resolution of exit. What would you say about that?

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Well, the first thing is I would be really curious
about the feelings in the dream, the feelings in the
dream and also the feeling upon awakening. And one of
the things about dream Wise that I'm very proud of
is we have an entire chapter on emotions and dreams
and what they mean and how to work with them.
Emotions are such an important part of a dream, and

(31:31):
as far as I know, no one has ever written
extensively on it. So that is a really special thing
about our book. Do you happen to know how this
dream was experienced?

Speaker 1 (31:42):
It was experienced with frustration? Yeah, so, I.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Mean the two possibilities would have been frustration, and the
other possibility would be just a sense of sort of,
you know, a kind of calm acceptance of moving forward
and again not knowing anything about the person or his
or her psychology or the circumstances of this person's life.

(32:08):
I would say that, you know, climbing climbing stairs with
no end in sight. You know, it's a little it's
a little bit like a task from a Greek myths.
You know, where where there's there's no sense of resolution,
And the fact that the person felt frustrated tells me
that that's kind of a dominant part of the image.

(32:30):
I mean, on the one hand, it is an image
of ascension. The person is going up, and that of
course could be kind of taken positively, but the fact
that it's a negative feeling tells me, oh, maybe not
so much. You know. One thing about climbing and dreams,
for example, is that although it's it's certainly good to

(32:53):
be rising, also sometimes climbing means we're getting away from
our chick basement. You know, we might be getting too
far up in our head, and that might be part
of the reason why the person was just climbing and
climbing with no end insight. Because you know, our thinking function,
our kind of cognitive abilities, that sort of wonderful neo

(33:17):
cortex that we evolved is really terrific. I mean, we
wouldn't be human without it. But we can sometimes get
so lost in our psychic attic in our head upstairs
that we really lose contact with the instincts, and that
can create a feeling of emptiness and lifelessness.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
And if I share with you that this person had
a great frustration and dissatisfaction in their career. Would that
make help? Would that help?

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah? Sure? I mean you know, yes, you know that
my comments were general, but certainly, you know, perhaps the
person was striving endlessly and you know, couldn't couldn't seem
to get where they wanted to go. Now, I will
say this that dreams usually tell us something that we

(34:06):
don't already know. Or as with your dream, like you said,
you knew it, but you kind of understood it in
a different way after you had the dream. So if
the person woke up from this dream and said, oh,
that's about my frustrations at work, I'd say, well, I
think the dream probably was trying. Yes, maybe, but I
think the dream is probably trying to give you a
slightly different perspective on it. And then it might be

(34:27):
interesting to know what is going on at work? What
were the particulars of the staircase? Were there any details?
And you know, does it resonate that perhaps you've been
approaching work with kind of too much of a either
like a task orientation, like a sort of drudgery like oh,
I've just got to climb another flight of stairs, or

(34:48):
even what I alluded to before, that there's a lot
of thinking going on and where are your instincts?

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Absolutely, how do you address nightmares or band should they
be attention to, paid attention to, or ignored.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, I think that a nightmare is really just any
dream that's fearful, and we do talk a little bit
about nightmares. I think nightmares are kind of the psyche's
way of really trying to get our attention. It's like,
you know, the dreammaker sends us dreams when we're off course,
and if we're a little off course, we might have

(35:26):
a kind of small dream. But if we're a lot
off course, the dream maker is going to be kind
of shouting at us. And that is a nightmare. And
by the way, the dream maker does sometimes us send
us dreams to sort of confirm something, and that's your
dream is a good example of that. But those are
a little unusual. You should have the dream maker showing

(35:47):
up to tell us something that we need to pay
attention to, and nightmares are really a strong statement of that.
So I think it's especially important to pay attention to nightmares.
And it's no wonder that we tend to remember them.
They usually really make an impression on us. So the
nightmare doesn't come to encourage you to be afraid of something.

(36:10):
It wants you to wake up and pay attention.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
What is what Jung referred to as animus anima and
how does it arise in our dream worlds?

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, the anonymous or aima is an archetype that Jung
postulated was part of our psyches. So Jung said that
every man has an inner aspect of himself that is feminine,
and he gave it the Latin word aima, which means soul.
And he said that every woman has a masculine part

(36:42):
of her and he called that the anonymous. So technically,
in Yungian formulation, men have an anima and women have
an anymous and it may show up in your dreams
as an opposite sex figure. Now, anything that I say
about dreams, by the way, there are no absolutes. It's

(37:02):
not that this is always what it looks like. It's
not that every opposite sex figure is going to be
an anoma or anonymous. There are no hard and fast
rules in dream interpretation. We try to give you, in
dream wise, just a place to start. And so if
you have an opposite sex figure in a dream, you
might start by wondering if it's an image of onoma

(37:24):
or anymous. And what this can mean is that the
onoma or anymous shows up to show you your unrealized potential.
So it would be a part of you, but it
would feel something, It would feel pretty alien, often in
a very entrancing inviting way. So you might have a

(37:47):
dream about a lover, for example. Sometimes the anoma or
anymous can show up in its negative form, and that
can be quite frightening, But that has a purpose too.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
And what are some of the other archetypes that manifest
in our dreams?

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Well, you might you might find the shadow, and you
also might find images of the self, the guiding center
of the personality. And you capitalize the s when you
use the word self. And in a sense, all dreams
come from the self. But sometimes we have dreams that

(38:27):
are incredibly numinous where it's almost as if the self
makes an appearance. And I think that your dream does that,
you know, with that kind of that central angel or
even the eighteen other angels who are who are maybe
aspects of that guiding center of the personality.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
What is the practice of active imagination?

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Active imagination was Young's technique for dreaming the dream onward.
It was essentially a direct encounter with the unconscious that's
initiated by consciousness. We have a whole chapter on active
imagination in the book. Active imagination is a helpful technique
on its own, but it can be especially useful when

(39:12):
working with a dream. If you have a dream that
has a perplexing image that you don't understand. Let's say
that I don't know it's a strange animal shows up
in your dream, and you've worked with it, you don't
know what to make of it. You could try active imagination.
So close your eyes, turn off your phone, get about

(39:32):
half an hour when you're not going to be bothered,
and then let yourself kind of enter a light hypnogogic state.
So take a few deep breaths, go inward, check in
with your body, and then see if you can kind
of call up the image of this strange animal and
sit with it and just wait patiently until it begins

(39:56):
to move or speak, and invariably will, and then you
can engage it. You can ask it questions and see
what it answers. And when you're done, you should always
journal about it so that you capture it Sometimes it
really opens up the experience of the dream and kind
of makes clear what's happening. Sometimes it's just some more

(40:20):
adjunctive material that gives you more to speculate about as
you're working with the dream. And sometimes it's just a
deep feeling experience that kind of extends that the extends
the experience of the dream.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
My guest is Lisa Martiano her book dream Wise, Unlocking
the Meaning of Your Dreams. We'll be back with more
after these words on the Olden Times Radio Network.

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Speaker 1 (44:35):
Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week Lisa Marciano
her book dream Wise, Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams. Lisa,
what is the practice of active imagination, Young's signature technique
for psychological healing and growth.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
So, in active imagination, we really want to meet the
unconscious where it is, but we start from our conscious standpoint,
and instead of it coming to us at night in
our dreams, we kind of go to it. So we
invited in. We find an image, perhaps it's an image
from a dream. So that's why we included a chapter

(45:15):
in active imagination in dream Wise, because it can be
helpful in working with dreams. And you let the image
begin to move on its own and speak to you.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Now you touched upon this in our last segment, How
does dream work assist us on the path of becoming whole?
What Jung called individuation.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Jung's major idea was that over the course of a lifetime,
we are growing into the person we were meant to be,
and he called this individuation. Jung was one of the
only theorists that was really interested in development beyond childhood. So,

(45:57):
you know, Freud and a lot of other early psychoanalysts
focused on what happened in childhood and kind of said
that that sets the stage for everything that comes after. Ericson, Eric, Erickson,
and Young were kind of standouts, and then they said, well,
wait a minute, what about all the growth and development
that happens later in life as well. Jung said that

(46:21):
we spend the first half of life roughly developing an ego,
getting out in the world, establishing a career, finding a relationship,
maybe having a family, but that at some point we
begin to kind of turn inward, and we get curious
about other things that maybe got pushed aside while we

(46:41):
were doing this. And this is often called the second
half of life and can be characterized by kind of
a midlife crisis. But this process of turning inward is
an important part of individuation. It's an important part of
picking up those aspects of ourselves that we may have left,

(47:02):
you know, unacknowledged, undeveloped, you know, just kind of glowing
coals on the sore room floor. Young refers to them
at some point. You know, they never really took fire,
but they've still got some glow in them. And if
we if we can find them and pick them up
and maybe blow on them, they'll get new life and

(47:25):
then we'll be enlivened by that content. So the aim
of individuation is not perfection. It's wholeness. It's finding those
parts of ourselves that we haven't yet paid attention to.
And I would say that every dream at its essence
is nudging us continually toward individuation. It's reminding us of

(47:49):
the aspects of ourselves that we've forgotten or have never
paid attention to. It's letting us know where we're out
of balance. It's bringing into consciousness that which has been
spurned or set aside.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Why is it that some people find dreams nonsensical and
difficult to understand?

Speaker 2 (48:11):
I think most of us find them difficult and nonsensical.
I certainly do, as I said before, especially when working
with my own dreams. And I think this is because
the dream maker, the other within, the inner companion, doesn't
have access to directive thought and kind of straightforward language

(48:32):
the way our conscious mind does, so it has to
speak in the language of image and metaphor and symbol.
You know, Freud felt that dreams were a disguise, but
Young said, no, the dream is not a disguise. The
dream is not trying to trick you. The dream is
the best possible the best possible expression of something that's

(48:58):
known in the psyche at that time. But it just
may be a bit of a puzzle. And that's why
we have to learn the language of dream interpretation.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
What would you share with those who don't pay attention
to their dreams.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Well, it's certainly not my role to tell anyone what
they should or shouldn't do. And if dreams are just
not interesting to you, then there you go. But if
you have any curiosity about your dreams, if you've ever
awakened from a dream and felt moved, if you've ever

(49:34):
been tickled by one of these images that occurs to
you as you're sleeping, then I think that it is
well worth your effort to explore it a little bit further.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
Ancient cultures felt that dreams could help predict the future.
Can dreams let us know what's going to happen?

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Some dreams are indeed precognitive. There are some remarkable examples
of precognitive dreams that have been documented. And of course
most of us have had, or many of us, I
should say, have had an experience or two that certainly
felt really uncanny, or perhaps a dream alerted us to

(50:16):
something that was going to happen in a strange way.
But most of the time dreams point us toward the
future in a rather more ordinary way. It is certainly
true that dreams can let us know what might be coming,
but usually this is a kind of sigh capability that's

(50:39):
finding expression through a dreams, but rather just an artifact
of the reality that the unconsciousnes is constantly collecting all
kinds of information that consciously you know, it's too much.
We couldn't possibly pay attention to it all. But it
goes into the unconsciousness incredibly good at reading patterns. There's

(51:03):
all of this information for it to take account of,
and then it can kind of spit out a basically
kind of a prediction based on patterns, and you don't
actually likened it to a weather forecast. So the meteorologist
takes a look at what's going on, says, hey, there's
a high pressure system over here in a low pressure

(51:23):
system over there, and that means there might be rain
next week. And in some sense, that's what our dreams
are doing. So dreams can often provide a warning. There's
a dream in the book where someone who was kind
of beginning to contemplate having an affair or dreamt that

(51:45):
she was driving a car at night. She started driving
across a long, winding bridge and there was absolutely no light.
So in the dream, it became apparent to her that
she was running a real risk of driving off the bridge.

(52:05):
That was a real warning that she needed to stop.
She needed to just kind of view where she was
and not make any movement for the time being, and
that's what she did.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Do you have another example of a pre cognitive dream.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Well again, I wouldn't say that that one was pre cognitive.
Pre cognitive, you know, I can tell you a little
bit about an example of a pre cognitive dream. These
are these eerie dreams that are difficult to explain, that
really seemed to kind of come from the realm of magic,
if you will. And so one of those is was

(52:44):
documented in nineteen sixty six an Aberfan in South Wales.
There was a slide of coal waste that inundated this
small mining town and it covered the school and it
killed more than one hundred children. So the psychiatrist John

(53:05):
Barker arrived in Aberfan later that same day and was
told the story of a ten year old ten year
old girl named errol May Jones, and she had a
dream before the tragedy. So she woke up and she said,
I went to school and this was her dream. I
went to school and there was no school there. Something

(53:27):
black had come down all over it. And little errol
May told her mother that dream in the morning, and
then she went to school and was killed and died
in the accident. So that's a rather remarkable example. And
Jung himself had a dream of meeting a gigantic wolfhound

(53:49):
in his dream and knew that the wild huntsman had
commanded it to carry away a human soul. And in
the morning he awoke and found out that his mother
had passed away. So these things certainly do happen, but
a lot of times our dreams just kind of come
to warn us. There's another another dream in the book,
similar circumstance. A woman was getting very involved emotionally with

(54:13):
another person outside of her marriage, and nothing had happened yet,
but there was a lot of intensity to it, and
she had this dream that she bought a new house,
but when she moved into the house, the house was
falling apart and kind of kind of went from bad
to worse, And that dream really kind of woke her up.
She she woke up in the morning, she thought, you know,

(54:34):
I think I need to think about this more. I
think I need to think about what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Absolutely. What would you like your readers to take away
from dream wise?

Speaker 2 (54:44):
I would like for readers to be inspired by their dreams.
I would like for them to be in love with
the process of dream work and to know that they
have a tool that they can carry forward in Life.
You know, I love our keys because they're portable, they're usable,
you can pull them out, and when you have a

(55:04):
dream and you're stuck on it, you can you can
use the keys to help understand it. And I want
people to know that dream work is doable and that
they can have that relationship with the inner other, the
inner companion, the dream maker.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
My guest Lisa Marciano, her book dream Wise, Unlocking the
Meaning of Your Dreams. Lisa, one more time, please share
with our listeners where they can get your books and
find out more about you and all your work.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Sure well, you can find out more about dream Wise
and about my podcast This Union Life by going to
This Unionlife dot com and that is spelled j U
n G I A N This Union Life. My author
website is Lisamarciano dot com and you can find out
about all of my books there, including dream Wise, The

(55:56):
Vital Spark, and Motherhood. And you can also find out
about my online women's fairy tale group called Spinning Straw.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Lisa, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
this fascinating information about our dreams. Thank you and thank
you for joining us on Destination Unlimited. I'm Victor the
Voice Ferman have a wonderful week.