Index

History of Dreamwork in New Zealand
Dream Research in New Zealand
Dream Groups in Zealand
Dream Workers in Zealand
Author

Dreamwork
in 
New Zealand

DREAMWORK  IN  NEW  ZEALAND

The indigenous people of NZ, the Maori, have their own approach to dream interpretation, based on their own spirituality, mythology and oral tradition. It includes strong elements of clairvoyance, precognition and guidance from ancestors, with special knowledge being held by certain elders in the tribal groups.  Being strongly connected with Maori spiritual beliefs, it is considered not appropriate for non-Maori people to seek to “colonise” this knowledge, before Maori themselves are ready to share it.

    New Zealand was colonised from the early nineteenth century on by waves of settlers from Europe, mainly Britain, followed more recently by Pacific Islanders and Asians. We are now an increasingly multi-cultural society of nearly four million. As a practical pioneer society, there has been considerable resistance to matters of psycho-spirituality, such as dreams, so we have a big task here of public education.  Counselling did not begin to get established here until the late1970s, and dreams are still largely ignored.

    During the ‘80s, the only dreamwork seriously taught in NZ was by Gestalt specialists. A significant event was held in Auckland in 1985 when Ann Faraday, author of “Dream Power,” ran a dream workshop for the public.  As a consequence, a group of  7 women counsellors set up an on-going practice-group. Within a year, three of us were offering dream workshops ourselves.  The group continued for years, and two of us are still meeting monthly.

    I was immediately excited by the combination of verbal and action methods, having chosen to do my own training in Transactional Analysis and Psychodrama.  Reading all the dream books available, I soon added basic Jungian theory and drawing to my workshops, and early in the ‘90s I set up a 3-stage Dreamwork training programme of 30 hours under the auspices of the Human Development and Training Institute of NZ, of which I am a co-Director. In 2001, I expanded this into a 100-hour Dreamwork Practice Certificate for counsellors. A spin-off from this has been at least twenty small informal dream practice groups all over the greater Auckland area, some of which have been going for years.  Basic dreamwork has also been incorporated into two training programmes for spiritual directors, based in Auckland.

    Over the years, I began to collect vivid examples of dreams with permission to quote them.  In 1997, my book “Dreams and Visions – Language of the Spirit” was published by Tandem Press, and re-published the following year in the USA by The Crossing Press.  I now have a second book on nightmares seeking a publisher. Meanwhile, I frequently present dream papers and workshops at professional conferences, to lift the awareness of counsellors and psychotherapists, whatever their training background. I co-authored an article on “Dreamwork Treatment of Nightmares” with Evan Sherrard in the October 1999 issue of the ITAA “Journal of Transactional Analysis,” and they have accepted my case-study, “The Fern Monster,” for publication in 2002.

     In 1993, Ian Laird set up the C.G.Jung Foundation in Auckland with an eager following, and has been teaching Jungian dreamwork in study groups ever since.  A member of the Jung Foundation, writer Jenny Hatherley, focuses in articles and books on people’s experiences and reactions to dreams.  Her first book “Women’s Big Dreams – Resurrecting Intuition,” was published by David Bateman in 1998. Her second book, which explores “good and evil” in dreams, is near completion.  In 1997, David Bateman also published a short book by another NZ woman, who calls herself a psychic, Lili Leclerc-Jude, “Dream Power for Pregnancy and Childbirth.” 

C.A. Cannegieter, Ph.D., Dr. Ec., is a dream interpreter in Orewa, New Zealand.. He has studied psychology, parapsychology, and economics and has given lectures, seminars, courses about dreams and dream- workshops in New Zealand, Australia, and The Netherlands. He has collected dreams over a 57-year period, leading to a book Around the Dreamworld, as well as to articles about dreams.

Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts

Institute of Psychosynthesis, New Zealand

Elizabeth & Case Cannegieter, contributors to the Dream Library and Archive

"... dreamwork is gradually catching on in NZ, and it is certainly heartening to hear of new research and worldwide outreach to the public through ASD.  But there is no cross-disciplinary forum here for serious dreamworkers...  I will be interested to see what can sustainably evolve in this remote corner of the world. " 

 

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