Greg Wright:
Welcome to NASW Social Work Talks. I'm your host Greg Wright. You might not know it, but you spend a lot of time dreaming. According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average person has 46 dreams a night. What do dreams mean? And can they be a part of social work practice?
Today we are talking with NASW member, Dr. Arthur Strock. Dr. Strock is author of the book Live By Your Dreams. Welcome to the Social Work Talks, Dr. Strock.
Arthur Strock:
Well, thank you for inviting me. Believe me, it's an honor.
Greg Wright:
Thank you.
Arthur Strock:
Especially because there's nothing I'd rather talk about than dreams and especially with social workers. Because dreams, they represent the entire person and our field is known especially for taking care of our clients in a way that deals with the entire person.
Greg Wright:
First off the bat, what exactly is a dream?
Arthur Strock:
The first thing that pops into my mind, it's a mental movie. My goodness, we can go to sleep and we have these mental movies. A lot of people go to sleep and they dream because they just want entertainment. Well, the dream is so much more than entertainment.
Arthur Strock:
A dream is really a production that comes most of the time from our inner self that carries a message. And it's not just a message; it's a message with guidance. I can say even more than simply guidance, it is good guidance. So we might even say it's guidance from the heart.
Greg Wright:
So in effect, a dream is your subconscious mind trying to tell you something or is it a premonition?
Arthur Strock:
Ah, well, now. When we get into talking about the unconscious, then we get into theory. I would say offhand, yes, most dreams come from the unconscious, while at the same time knowing that there are different levels of the unconscious, you see.
Let me put it this way. Some dreams, they seem to come right from what we've been dealing with in the course of the day consciously. If we have been thinking about a person, we may see that person in the dream. We may get information about the person. We may get information about our relationship with the person.
It comes from what's preoccupying our mind. If we're emotionally upset about something, the emotions will be reflected in the dream. Certainly anxiety is a most frequent emotion we get in dreams.
But more than that, dreams, I think in some way come often from the physical body. That's something most of us in the mental health field don't think about so much. But we're holistic as individuals.
We're whole people. So when we talk about our mind, when we talk about the emotions, our physical being affects our emotions. Our emotions affect our physical beams. Sometimes we'll get information that's directly applicable to what we need to be considering regarding our health, the health of our physical bodies.
Greg Wright:
I was wondering if you could give us an example of that.
Arthur Strock:
I would prefer to give you my own dream. It'll be easier to answer questions about it. So one evening I had a dream that I was having a physical examination in the doctor's office. After the physical examination was completed, the nurse confidentially said to me, "Arthur, if you get a kidney stone, ultrasound is the treatment of choice."
At that point I woke up. Well, I jotted down that dream. I didn't think a whole lot about it. But a month later I had the telltale sign of a kidney stone. Anybody who's had kidney stones, you know that pain. I immediately recalled my dream and began calls to doctors offices, urologists, so that I could get some treatment.
The treatment that had been recommended, of course, the doctors didn't have the ultrasound equipment in their offices at that point. Making things worse for me, I did not have health insurance. Okay, what am I going to do? So I requested a dream that would be helpful, that would tell me, okay, plan A isn't working. Can you give me a plan B?
So sure enough, it came through. Here I was outdoors, and in the ground had been dug a big pit. It was muddy, and in that pit was a bottle. In that bottle was something I knew was important. In fact, in the dream, I knew that my job was to reach in, pick out the bottle and see what the label said.
I did that and it was labeled Castor Oil. This dream really shows how other people other than the dreamer are not necessarily people who can interpret a dream, because I don't know if you would have any association to castor oil with kidney stones.
Greg Wright:
No, not at all.
Arthur Strock:
Well, I don't think most of the people I would ask that question, it's almost like a trick question. But you see, I knew about holistic health and I knew about castor oil packs. Castor oil packs are pieces of wool flannel saturated with castor oil placed on the abdomen, over which put a heating pad. You do that for an hour, an hour and a half.
I'd never seen it recommended for a kidney stone. But hey, dreams are experiments. We have to take action on the dreams. We have to see by taking action if we have gotten the interpretation correct.
So that night, lying in bed with my castor oil pack on and do you know, I could feel the movement of that stone just a little bit. So I gave it another castor oil pack the next night. It seemed to help with the discomfort. Over the course of time, I just a few oil packs, I traced the passage of that kidney stone. It saved me a whole lot of money.
Greg Wright:
Most people though, wake up and you don't actually remember what you dreamt. So is there a way to make yourself remember what you had dreamt the night before?
Arthur Strock:
I believe that key word here is "intention." It's wonderful how our inner being responds to an honest intention. So in order to get a dream and recall the dream, we can start a dream journal and put a comment to our unconscious, if you will: Okay, self. Okay, dreams. Okay, unconscious. Okay, God." Whatever works for you.
My intention is to remember the dream, wake up in the morning and write it down. We write it down, because the dreams disappear so quickly. If in addition, we write to ourselves, "I'm going to do something about the dream," that will improve the chances of recall.
Greg Wright:
What do dreams have to do with social work practice? In other words, how can a social worker use this to help a client?
Arthur Strock:
They can just be, number one, open to dreams. My first recommendation for social workers would be just get comfortable talking about dreams. Because in our society, we don't generally talk about dreams. Get comfortable with it.
Now, I want to put in a plug for my barbershop, this family-owned barber shop run by a brother and sister team. The other day I said, "Jerry, I'm going to have a podcast on dreams." And they immediately told about how a friend of the family told him about a dream where his mother was relaying the information that her husband had a health problem.
Well, Jerry said to me, "My dad has a minor health problem, but it didn't mean anything." But this friend of the family said it was important. He talked to his dad, he got him to the doctor. And wouldn't you know, in a couple of days he was having almost immediate surgery. The results of the surgery cleared up the problem and that would not have happened without a dream.
Greg Wright:
Yeah. So when you are talking to a client or a person about a dream, does it make it easier for them to open up about other issues going on in their lives?
Arthur Strock:
I believe it does. If we take an interest in a person's dreams, it shows a very important interest, a deep interest. That can set the stage, because in my experience, they can hardly wait to share dreams.
In fact, I was collecting dreams for my book and there was a woman and I said, "I'm writing a book on dreams. Do you have a dream that you could share with me?" Well, she looked at me and she said, "Thank you so much. I was hoping somebody would ask me today."
Greg Wright:
I was wondering how you first got interested in the field of dreams.
Arthur Strock:
For years as an adult and as a child, I could only remember two of my dreams my entire life. I had occasion to go to a weekend workshop, multi-disciplinary. I was paired up with a person who, as it turned out, was an avid dreamer. She was very outspoken, and she believed in dreams to the point where before the first day at this weekend, she would say, "Arthur, you have to follow your dreams. You have to ... "
Well, I told her my story and she says, "No, don't worry about it. All you've got to do is put a pencil and paper next to your bed and tell yourself you're going to dream and write them down in the morning." Well, I did it, and the next morning I did get a dream, and the dream was symbolic for my practice, my social work career, if you will.
Symbolically, well, there were two men in the dream and each represented something, an approach to, in this case, social work. One was a traditional type of person. The other was what we used to call New Age.
The question for me was: Okay, Arthur, are you going to go traditional routes or are you going to go the route less traveled by and work with your dreams? Well, I picked dreams, because I was fascinated that I could recall after a lifetime of not recalling. Not only that, that there was information in the dream that was very valuable and that I could take action on.
That was the beginning, but it was so fascinating to me that I just a that a hold of every source I could to learn about dreams. I learned how to program my dreams along the way. It's not complicated.
There is a procedure that we don't have time to go into in detail here, but basically it's asking your dreams to give you answers to problems. So I got into that and when I found that out, then I was well on the road to moving from just a personal interest in dreams to the professional interest in dreams.
Greg Wright:
How do you determine the meaning of dreams? Is it by intuition or some other way?
Arthur Strock:
First of all, I've got to say that the dreamer is the best person to determine the meaning. Oftentimes when people say, and it's usually the first question that comes to me, "Ah, what's this dream mean?" The implication is that you've got to go to an expert.
Well, the role of the expert, the role of the clinical social worker, the role of any social workers working with people who share dreams is to have a fund of information. A foundation of knowledge about dreams so that they can ask pertinent questions, not leading questions. Real questions about the dreams that allow the person to get that intuitive or emotional "Aha, I've got it," kind of response.
Now, if they say something like, "Oh, yeah. I think it means such and such," well, they don't quite have the meaning. The true test of whether or not the interpretation was correct was if the person applies some of this wonderful dream guidance and it turns out to work in their favor. Then they know that they got the meaning correctly.
In doing so, they've added information about their own dream style to their personal repertoire, which is going to make successive dreams easier to find the meaning for. When we get asked, "What does this dream mean?" as a first question, that really isn't the first question.
Because the first question is: What have you been preoccupied with? What has been upsetting? What have you been thinking about? What event has occurred recently that you're concerned about? What is the problem right now that you're working on?
All of those contribute to dream material and getting the answers to that as people work with their dreams. This is so important. It's self-empowering and isn't that what we want to do for our family members, our children, ourselves and, of course, our clients?
Greg Wright:
I was wondering if you have a response at all to folks who think this is all like magical and a mumble-jumble thing. I mean, is there research at all out there backing this up?
Arthur Strock:
Thank you for asking, because for years I have asked my colleagues, "Hey, how come you don't do more with dreams?" They gave me all sorts of reasons. But one of my colleagues that I respected the most for speaking clearly and concisely, she said, "Arthur, I don't have at my fingertips enough research on dreams to be able to trust it."
So research, well, that's simple: the International Association for the Study of Dreams' professional journal, Dreaming. In every issue there are marvelous research articles about dreams, theory, application, you name it. There is another publication of great interest. It includes articles by researchers, the Dream Network Journal.
Greg Wright:
Great.
Arthur Strock:
If I could mention my own book Live By Your Dreams. Because we learn by stories, sometimes the research we can get bogged down in. My book Live By Your Dreams includes stories along with my commentaries of dreams that gathered from people in my daily life. It's an easy, comfortable way to use a social work approach. You can get to that very easily. Just go to arthurstrock.com and the link will take them right to Amazon where they could buy the book.
Greg Wright:
All of that information will be in our resources under our podcast episode, so that will all be there. I don't really remember my dreams a lot, but now I plan to keep a notepad by the bed. So thank you so much, Dr. Strock.
Arthur Strock:
Believe me, Greg. It was my pleasure. Thank you.
Greg Wright:
Bye bye, now.
Arthur Strock:
Bye bye, now.
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