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The process of remembering and briefly recording your dreams will
take only a few minutes each night. But the "analysis" of a series of
dreams, especially since it ideally might involve free association, active
imagination, "becoming the thing or person," intensive journal
dialogue (method # 3), or repeated discussions with friends as well as
careful review of your psychosocial history and current situation, will
take two to three hours each week for several weeks.
It requires less time to gain some control over your dreams and try
to get them to be less stressful and/or more therapeutic. Still a couple
of months are required for the Cartwright techniques.
Common problems
You have to be quite motivated to endure the unpleasantness and
inconvenience of awaking the middle of the night and making detailed
notes about your dreams. Besides, the payoff for dream analysis in
terms of insight and behavior change is weeks or months later, if at
all, so it is hard to sustain your interest in this method. On the other
hand, some people find their dreams fascinating and well worth the
time.
If some wish or emotion is really painful to admit, it will be quite
easy for your censor, even while analyzing dreams, to lead your
conscious mind away from the threatening awareness. Dreams may
give us a peek at some aspect of our unconscious but that is no
guarantee that we will explore those motives in great depth. That is
why one should pay attention to the signs of resistance mentioned
above (e.g. getting bored, forgetting to think about your dreams,
quickly concluding a dream or an interpretation is unimportant and so
on).
Effectiveness, advantages and dangers
Interpretation of dreams illustrates humans trying to understand
themselves for thousands of years without objectively assessing the
validity or usefulness of dreams. There are thousands, probably
millions, of testimonials about dreams prophesying the future or
supplying answers to personal problems. In contrast, there is no
research comparing the adjustment of dream analyzers vs. non-
analyzers or dream book readers vs. non-readers. (Cartwright did find
that people who participated in dream research were more likely to
stay in therapy and get more out of therapy.) Authorities, like dream
interpreters, prefer to pretend they already know the truth and don't
need to empirically investigate their hunches. It would be relatively
easy to compute the accuracy of dreamed prophesies of actual events
in life, and to compare them with the awake, rational predictions made
in a similar area by the same person and/or by matched persons. But,
it is hard to assess the validity and utility of insight into unconscious
motives. How do we know what the symbols mean? How do we
measure unconscious motives? How do we know if a dream
interpretation is the truth? Obviously, we can't know for certain, but
