Last night I had a dream that I went to the cinema for the first time in neary 12 months. I sat in a large, spacious auditorium, with a massive, crystal clear screen, state-of-the-art cine projectors and a sound system to make the road crew of U2 green with envy.
In this glorious movie-drome, I watched the latest Hollywood blockbuster Inception, one of the most visually dazzling movies of the 21st century, and I sat there awe-inspired and enraptured with the rest of the audience, from the opening credits to the final frame of the last reel.
Well, that was the dream. The reality was that I did go to the cinema to watch Inception last night, but it was shown in a tiny projection room probably best used for preview screens or art-house movies in foreign languages, on a screen that seemed barely bigger than my TV set at home, and through a lens that had a very large white mark, that covered about 1/3rd of the centre of the screen. The picture jumped around the screen, there was constant scratch line running down the right hand side of the image, and the sound was so thin that a rustle of a sweet paper 5 rows ahead of me almost drowned out the dialogue. The audience (not more than 15 people) got so bored with the show that at least 2 of them got out their iPods and started chatting online.
Now to the movie itself. It may have been visually stunning - and I have to admit that I was impressed with some of what I saw on the screen - although I would have been more impressed if I could see it properly. But I was not impressed with the Hollywood mumbo-jumbo that passed for dream psychology. OK, it was only a movie but instead of wallowing in Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster, I found myself getting more and more irritated by what I saw as 2010's biggest load of cinematic codswallop, so far. We'll all have our opinions on the movie, and they may differ widely - and that's fair enough.
And, the interpretation of dreams in counselling and their significance for the client is also an area of wide debate amongst counsellors and psychotherapists. Some say that dreams are important areas for discussion and should be actively addressed - the client should be asked to write down a dream, if they remember it and encouraged to discuss it in the session. Others say that dreams should only be discussed if the client specifically wants to discuss them, and others say they have no place at all in the counselling room.
Some say that the dreams themselves have very specific meanings, and others say that the dream needs to be interpreted only by the client - and what makes sense to them is the real interpretation. The viewpoints will, of course, vary depending on the models of therapy being used by the therapist.
To get you started on reading about dream interpretation, I have added 2 more PDF's to the Therapy Resources page. One is the full text of Sigmund Freud's classic (1910) book "The Interpretation of Dreams" and the other is a chapter on Gestalt dream interpretation from a much more recent book (2006) by Fredick L Coolidge "Dream Interpretation as a Psychotherapeutic Technique". I hope you find them interesting. Whether they make any more sense than the screenplay of "Inception" is something you may prefer to decide for yourself.
As for the movies - I complained about my experience and got complimentary tickets for another film. I think I'll try Fritz Lang's black and white silent movie classic: Metropolis (1927). At least I won't have to worry about the dialogue not making any sense.
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