Is the CI
(Central Image or Contextualizing Image) the Fast Lane on the
Royal Road to the Unconscious?
Ernest Hartmann, MD, is
the author of over 300 articles, and eight books, most recently
Dreams and Nightmares. He is a Past President of IASD and was
the first Editor-in-chief of Dreaming. He is professor of
psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Abstract
The Contextualizing Image or
Central Image (CI) is the most powerful image in a dream, which
sometimes appears to picture the dominant emotion or emotional
concern of the dreamer. Thus the dream “I was overwhelmed by a
tidal wave” pictures the dominant emotion of terror or
helplessness in someone who has just experienced a severe trauma.
Such dreams are very common after trauma. The situation after
trauma, when there is one overwhelming emotion, provides the
clearest example, but other dreams can be approached in the same
way.
However, is the CI
more generally an important part of the dream? Will an examination
of a CI lead quickly and reliably to an underlying emotion or
emotional concern?
In this workshop, the
CI will be carefully defined and a system for finding and scoring
CIs will be briefly described. Participants will have a chance to
examine some of their own dreams to determine whether powerful
dreams, memorable dreams, “big dreams”, contain CIs. Participants
in pairs or small groups will have a chance to work on their own
dreams, either starting with the CI or working on the dreams in
other ways to get a sense of whether beginning with the CI is
useful in dreamwork, or in therapy.
Finally we will try
to construct or build a dream using the CI model of dreaming. We
will examine whether, even in the waking state, allowing imagery
to develop while experiencing a powerful emotion can lead to a
dream or very dream-like imagery.
