Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming: Exploring Interior Landscape through Practical Dreamwork

That month, after my father's death, I became driven to perform a ritual in my office at the end of each week. On the wall behind my chair, over the fireplace--which used to warm the Cambridge, New England, Victorian room years before I moved in to make it my psychoanalytic office in 1977--hangs an unidentifable tool that used to belong to an ancient woodstove. A thick cast-iron shaft elbows up in aspiration to a circle at the top, while staying solidly connected to a circle at the bottom end below. After the death of my father I began to touch the bottom circle, cupping it with my left hand at about the height of my head. Then I would close my eyes and see the galaxy. My vision would travel in a spiral along this Milky Way to the center. There I'd see my father's scalp, with his pride of white hair he loved to comb back in a V between bald, glistening skin (though I never thought of my father as bald). It would hover in the center of the galaxy, where the light was most dense. Many tiny stardust dots would become a cloud of white starlight. Then I would say "Thank you for all you have given and for all you have not given. Now take it all back." I'd send off the turmoil and leave for my leisure at home. My rational self grins with imperious superiority at these childish antics, but to this day, three years later, the foolishness continues to ritualize itself at the conclusion of each week. Ilyatjari the ngamkari, an Aboriginal spirit doctor of the Pitjantjabara people of central Australia who treats body and soul, sits across from me. His dark, shining face, with curious eyes that observe me with intense dispassion, is all business. He knows how far I've traveled--across continents and hemispheres--and what little time I've got. He wants to talk with me. How do I want to use this less than a week? I tell him that I want to discuss dreams with him. This is a formality, since I had written to anthropologist Diana James, who speaks his language, months before this initial trip to the Australian outback, asking her if she knew of an Aboriginal dream doctor willing to meet with a Western dream doctor to discuss our trade. Ilyatjari had agreed. "Shall I first tell you how I work?" I ask, so he can observe my work. He nods after receiving the translation. He, his wife, and his sister-in-law obviously think it an excellent idea. They sit on the burnt-sienna powder-kne sand, comfortable in their dusty clothes. My clothes are getting there, but they still have some leftover cleanliness of half a world back, where I packed them in my black backpack. I sit on a travel stool, minding my back, although later, in the heat of our conversation, I will move down to sit closer to them. A speckled brown mutt sleeps stretched out behind llyatjari. I randomly choose the last dream I worked with, since the work is still fresh in my memory. It had been the dream of a young white man, presented at a Melbourne dream practicum (a dreamwork training using live material of participants). While talking, though, I realize his story is about myself as well; the choice has not been random. "The day before yesterday, this man in his early thirties presented me with a dream I worked on," I begin. The dream involves a car. I know that llyatjari travels the red desert in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. We had seen him enter the camp in a cloud of dust, driving the car from the right hand side, as they tend to do down under, grinniBosnak, Robert is the author of 'Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming: Exploring Interior Landscape through Practical Dreamwork' with ISBN 9780385315265 and ISBN 0385315260.