The document discusses how dreams can help process powerful emotions and heal from trauma or crisis. It notes that after a trauma, dreams often embody feelings of fear, helplessness, and guilt through images and storylines. Over time, dreams reveal opportunities for healing and integration as the mind connects the past trauma to the present. The dreaming process helps regulate moods and adapt to stressors. The document advocates using dreamwork, such as drawing dreams and sharing feelings, to help children process emotions after an earthquake in Japan. It emphasizes focusing on strengths rather than just deficits when providing mental health support.

1. The Healing Power
of Dreams
Nightmares
After a Crisis
Sheila McNellis
Asato, MA, EIC, ©2011

2. Cross-Cultural Issues
Relationships Communication
Vs Tasks Style
Emotional Perception
Expression Of Time

3. Relationships Before Tasks – Connect Fist
•Listen, eat and play together before “helping”
•Find out what the people you are serving want and need first
•Let them know what you have to offer and be flexible
•Build on mutual strengths

4. Do Dreams Matter?
What does your experience tell you?

5. Dreaming & Emotion
 Dreaming is a highly emotional state of consciousness
 In the absence of dreaming, emotions become disorganized

6. Dreams Embody Powerful Emotions
“When there is a clear-cut powerful emotion present such as fear, vulnerability, or
guilt, dreams find a context, a way to picture it.”
- Ernest Hartmann

7. Dreams Spread Emotional Intensity
•“Calming the storm” for mood regulation throughout the nets of the mind

8. Dreams Integrate
Broad connections made between past and present experiences
 Integration of memories and learning

9. Dreams Heal
 To heal is to become whole
 Not to cure or fix
 The root of health is healing
Dreams help us become whole

10. Function of Dreaming
Dreaming cross-connects or
weaves in new material, which
helps us adapt to future
trauma, stress, and the
problems of life.
- Ernest Hartmann

11. What is Trauma?
A deeply distressing or disturbing experience that causes disruption
Any event or element that overwhelms a person‟s ability to fully cope and feel safe
Physical injury

12. After Trauma
Typical Dream Progression
 Fear, terror
 A house is burning and no one can get out.
 A gang of evil men, Nazis maybe, are chasing me. I can‟t get away.
 A huge monster is coming at me.
 Helplessness, vulnerability
 I dreamt about children, dolls – dolls and babies all drowning.
 He skinned me and threw me into a heap with my sisters.
 There was a small, hurt animal lying in the road.
 Guilt, shame
 A shell heads for us and blows up, but I can‟t tell whether it‟s me or my
buddy Jack who is blown up.
 I let my children play by themselves and they get run over by a car.

13. Overwhelming Emotion
Key emotions become embodied in dream images
“I am overwhelmed”

14. Feelings of Helplessness & Vulnerability
“I can‟t stop, the brakes don‟t work”
“I‟m lost and don‟t know where I am going”

15. Survivor Guilt
„Why did I survive when everyone else died?‟

16. Memories of Past Traumas Triggered
Dreams make connections between previous traumas and current events

17. Opportunities for Healing Emerge
Dreams bring up unresolved issues that we are now able to cope with

18. Connecting Present with Past
Trauma creates new opportunities for healing and integration of past with present

19. Stages of Healing – Gaining Mastery
Dreams reveal healing process and show us what is ready for attention today

20. For More Information
Sheila McNellis Asato – monkeybridgearts.com
International Association for the Study of Dreams – asdreams.org

21. Working with Dreams
Dreamwork in Japan after the earthquake

22. Hokubu Elementary School

23. Hoshi Sensei
My son‟s first grade teacher

24. Start with Feelings
in the Body
Angry, Happy, Sad and Afraid

25. Make Feeling Lines
Allow the emotions to lead the body while making marks

26. Draw a Recent Dream
Or a dream that you would like to have tonight

27. No Way Down from A Cake

28. A Scary Spider Monster

29. Escape from the Witch House

30. The Quaking Man

31. Ghosts in Front of School

32. Falling Down a Waterfall

33. Share Your Dream with a Friend

34. How Do You Feel Now?
What happens when you draw and share your dreams?

35. Focus on Strengths
“Thus, mental health and psychosocial problems in emergencies
encompass far more than the experience of PTSD or disaster-
induced depression. A selective focus on these two problems is
inappropriate because it overlooks many other MHPSS problems in
emergencies, as well as ignoring people‟s resources.
Men, women, boys and girls have assets or resources that support
mental health and psychosocial well-being. A commonerror in work
on MHPSS is to ignore these resources and to focus solely on deficits
– the weaknesses, suffering and pathology – of the affected group.
It is important to know not only the problems but also the nature of
local resources, whether they are helpful or harmful, and the extent
to which affected people can access them.”
- Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) in Humanitarian Emergencies:What
Should Humanitarian Health Actors Know?