Everyone from Sandra Oh to Kirsten Dunst are fans of dream work. Stylist’s Hannah Keegan sees what all the fuss is about.
UK Stylist, Hannah Keegan March 2022
If you have even a fleeting interest in Hollywood gossip, you’ll likely have heard rumblings of a mysterious practice called ‘dream work’ of late. Back in 2019, Sandra Oh first raised eyebrows when she thanked a coach named Kim Gillingham and her community of “fellow creative dreamers” accepting her SAG award for Killing Eve. More recently, Kirsten Dunst claimed both she and her husband are fans, working with a different practitioner. While director Jane Campion enlisted Gillingham’s help in the pre-production stages of The Power Of The Dog to assist in conjuring the script’s emotional forces through dream exploration. Campion called it the “most amazing work [she’s] ever done”. Gillingham has also appeared in the credits for movies such as Pieces Of A Woman starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf’s 2019 hit Honey Boy.
The more I looked into dream work, the more it seemed like a whole lot of the entertainment industry was into it.
And so I was intrigued to try it for myself. I got in touch with New York-based dream work practitioner Cara Liguori and arranged a session. Cara practises something called natural dreamwork, which claims it can be used to “actualise self-healing” and “break the spell of outdated conditioning”. I asked to focus on reigniting a sense of creativity, which I learnt was not an unusual request. Her clients are mostly artistic types – actors, writers and directors who she works with over long periods of time during weekly or biweekly sessions.
One dream can remain the subject of many sessions until they reach an ‘a-ha’ moment of breakthrough and understanding, building week-on-week. The point, she explains, is to explore “the archetypes, images and encounters you dream [which are there to] guide you through portals of feeling, illuminate your habits and teach you to heal old wounds”. I was enthralled.
That said, having listened to Sandra Oh describe the work as being close to “religion”; a practice which involves a “constant peeling of the onion” that is “very demanding” in a video for Time magazine, I was also a little trepidatious. How intense was this going to be?
As part of the prep for the session, Cara asked me to write a dream log of the ones I wanted to work with, written in present tense as though I was still inside them. I decided to go with a recent dream I’d remembered and an old recurring one that had always baffled me.
When we connect over Zoom one evening, Cara is a warm, calming presence. A former dancer and somatic movement instructor, she got into this work several years ago after meeting a psychoanalyst at a body work training session who was trying to spread the word. “I was dreaming a lot during this time, so I was interested. After having a session with her things started to click for me and I found myself reaching out to her asking to train in it.”
She’s keen to hear about my past relationship to dreams, too; have I wondered about them before? I tell her I’ve ended up down Google rabbit holes looking for a dream’s “meaning” after one has stuck with me but mostly felt disheartened when the explanations don’t connect with me. I learn this is because dream work is really more about deciphering the emotions and imagery a dream brings up, rather than looking for a literal translation. Cara thinks of the source behind a dream as a “dream director” (you might think of it as the unconscious).
As woo-woo as it sounds, attempts to understand dreams in this way are as old as the human race itself. Ancient Egyptians thought dreams were messages from the gods; the Greeks believed they were prophecies. Much of the theory behind dream work rests on Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work on the subject, set out in the late 19th century, and Freud was similarly interested in them.
Cara begins by asking me to read out my dream log, written in the first person, present tense, and attempt to drop back into the emotions it brought up at the time; to try to relive it. She refers to herself playfully as a “dream detective” during this part of the session, hunting out clues and meanings in the often nonsensical sequence of events that dreams are.
Lots of questions ensue and we work together to figure out the times I’ve felt similarly to the way the dream made me feel and what the symbols I’m presented with might mean. At certain points, she asks me to close my eyes and drop further into it; she reads out my dream log and I replay it in my mind until I’m there again. It feels meditative and, at times, unsettling. I’m asked to relive a nightmare with one of my logs and look for logic in it.
Interestingly, though, the two dreams I’ve brought to the session (one comedic in its absurdity, the other just plain horrible) begin to present overlapping themes and patterns. While this feels profound to me, Cara tells me it’s fairly standard. Our unconscious minds tend to be preoccupied by one theme (a fear of failure, for example, or a need for control) until we overcome it. Homework following the session involves simply noticing when the feeling I experienced in the dream arises in my daily life without judging it.
“I think dreams there to teach us something,” Cara says. “The more reverence you give them, the more you remember them. And there are beautiful, full-circle dreams to be had too.” A week on from my session, I’m still finding myself reaching for a notebook when I wake up.