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Have you ever noticed when you look for a piece of jewelry that your necklace chains have twisted and knotted in the most astonishing ways? That your jewelry box must have fairies and sprites who dance at night kicking and frolicking so that all of your pieces become intertwined and it takes a monumental effort to get them disconnected one from the other? I rather think of this as an example of “the movement toward connection.” This movement toward connection is like evolution—a force in nature––that allows organisms to differentiate and adapt to environments. In days long ago, we formed tribes or clans, exhibiting a primal, ancient pattern of human behavior––like wolves, Canadian geese, whales and schools of fish. We tend to congregate, to cluster. Dreams show evidence of the same tendency for people to cluster. In dream groups, one will notice several rather unexplainable manifestations: the tendency for dreams to be strikingly similar, the issues of the members of group to be congruent and for one dream to have meaning for the whole group––the tribal dream, I have termed it. This can be specific, or happen over time, or on-going, depending how long one wants to observe these things. Once a dream group member of mine dreamed the location and contents of another member’s lost purse. Another dream inspired a different member to return to painting canvases. Some sessions will be entirely about the mother complex and all of the dreams combine to form a “dream stew” that each member tastes and is nourished by. These occurrences don’t only happen in my dream groups, but in nearly every dream group about which I have heard. We have a tribal unconscious, which resides between our personal and collective unconscious. This is the territory where we intersect and overlap—where synchronicity occurs and other amazing phenomena are noticed. Somewhere underneath our personal selves is a connection to particular people—not all people––that is why you may know when your child is upset at college, or a friend is about to call. Through love (and hate) we connect in the deeper layers of the unconscious. And somehow our unconscious knows when we have encountered a tribal relative—it seems like some people we meet, immediately feel like old friends, or maybe in some way, we already know them. Somehow they are flavored like us or have the same melody or our souls touch and know… This is one of the gifts of working with dreams in a group setting. It allows us to make new relatives and open to a dimension that is nothing short of phenomenal.
Next issue: “How to start a dream group?”
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The Tribal Dream