Juan Antonio Varela: «Every interpretation always leads to a complex»

We spend a good part of our lives sleeping, and of all these hours that we spend in apparent disconnection from reality, a significant percentage of that time is dedicated to dreaming. That is, to be aware, but in a different way than that which characterizes the waking state.

But dreams do not have to be seen as a simple curiosity that affects the subjectivity of each one and little else. They can also be seen as an area with potential for psychological intervention. He will talk about it in this interview the psychologist Juan Antonio Varela.

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Interview with Juan Antonio Varela: work with dreams in psychotherapy

Juan Antonio Varela Raby is a psychologist consulting in the city of Providencia, Chile, from where he treats adult patients and adolescents. In this interview he tells us about the dream world and its implications in therapy.

What is the relationship between dreams and mental health?

The relationship that exists, from my perspective as a clinical psychologist, is that for mental health the world of dreams offers a great possibility of being existentially complete.

Accepting the reality of the dream world and integrating it into daily life allows us to become aware and connect with the deepest needs coming from the unconscious, it helps to amplify and understand the meaning of unfinished situations or issues in life, allows knowing and accepting rejected aspects of the personality, helps to resolve conflicts creatively, making better decisions for daily life and discovering archetypal symbols and images that can guide self-discovery and the process of individuation ...

Considering that lucid dreaming does exist, does the dream world have potential as a "training ground"?

I think that the potential that dreams have can be much more than a training ground. I am of the idea that in school teaching the use of dreams should be included as educational resources to learn to consider them from an early age, especially when it is in the childhood, where the symbolic occurs with great spontaneity.

I believe that researching and developing integral growth in the student that creatively involves the contents of the other subjects would be promoted. The act of dreaming can have multiple implications in classrooms, with no good or bad answers, but pure phenomenology.

It would be an excellent tool for esteem and respect for the individuality of the other. The dream content of each child could be used in their classes in literature, art, mathematics, philosophy, science, physical education, theater, etc.

For example: writing a dream would allow access to training in a more direct and experiential way for the student, knowing skills that they have and not that they have not discovered or skills that they do not have and long for develop. Learning to improve their writing skills, expanding the use of concepts and vocabulary to narrate the dream, would generate a material that can be used later to draw, in addition to being able to be analyzed and represented in a scene of theater.

Beyond the experience of a lucid dream, the richness of the dream world provides relevant material to integrate the unconscious content in people's consciousness.

How can you work from psychotherapy from dreams?

There are different ways to work dreams in psychotherapy; I personally adhere to the techniques developed by psychiatrists Carl Gustav Jung and Frederick Fritz Perls.

From analytical psychology, Jung was a great dream analyst, and he is credited with having analyzed more than 80,000 in his life, systematizing each one of them in a serious and profound way. Dream analysis was his method of work, being the royal road to the unconscious.

Dream interpretation offers both patient and therapist a new point of view for psychotherapy; the most important thing is that co-interpretation, that is, that it be built and elaborated between the patient and the therapist.

The meaning and final meaning of the dream interpretation should make sense primarily to the patient and not to the analyst, the therapist should be humble with his theoretical associations. Jung said that there is no method, but there must be a need for maximum openness.

Jungian psychology has systematized the following practical steps to work a dream in psychotherapy. In the first place, reconstruction of the context: what the dreamer is experiencing in their existence (main concerns); the dream is written describing everything dreamed.

Then a chain of associations is described in words, amplifying the symbols that were chosen from the writing of the dream.

Finally, the dream series is followed: every interpretation always leads to a complex, so you have to bypass the dream, looking for a meaning without losing sight of the dream.

Fritz Perls, for his part, proposes a way of working with dreams from various more experiential techniques, assuming that dreams are part of the existence of human beings; life also unfolds and occurs in the dream world. Perls takes from psychodrama some techniques to personify the contents and symbols that arise in dreams, where the patient is asked to narrate his dream in the first person and present tense.

In this way, a series of experiences and meanings are unleashed to the patient in his psychotherapy, which would help to resolve their pending conflicts, managing to make closures of these gestalt in the organism psychic.

Do anxiety and stress problems have a clear expression in the things that the person dreams about?

They can have a clear rendering; in that case we would be facing a reductive function of sleep, where obvious facts about the dreamer regarding their symptoms are shown. Anxiety and stress can also arise in prospective dreams, which is what the life we ​​are leading would show and where we are going to go.

It is also good to remember that there are traumatic or reactive dreams, in which the nightmares they show the dreamer difficult situations over and over again.

Is it essential to know how the human brain works to understand dreams?

From a psychotherapeutic perspective, where the relevant thing is to analyze the content of the dream in its context, it is not essential look for reasons in neurophysiological functioning, since it is an activity with an exploratory purpose and of self-discovery.

To date science has not been able to explain or affirm whether the unconscious and consciousness exist in any specific area of ​​the brain; It has been possible to describe the areas that are activated with the REM phase or paradoxical sleep (brain stem, thalamic nucleus, limbic and hippocampal area), where the most sleep is achieved. deep and with a relaxed muscle tone, presenting rapid eye movements, observing a decrease in activity in the frontal, parietal and occipital areas of the brain.

It is in this state of deep sleep that we can access the unconscious content and dream.

What are the topics about dream research that you think will make the most progress in the next few years?

Personally, I find that it would be very interesting if more research were carried out where the phenomenological and neurobiological have a more convergent dialogue regarding dreams in infants.

Dreams are less investigated in children, there is not much general consensus about their psychological course and the function they have at the neurobiological level. I think that cognitive and emotional experiences should be studied more at this stage to generate a greater connection and significance with the symbolic from an early age.