Dreams and Creativity with Lisa Massei

On my Instagram I chatted with Lisa Massei about Dreams and Creativity, here I report a summary of what she told us. I translated this chat in english for you.

Lisa is an italian art therapist and psychologist and has a beautiful website, a very interesting podcast on this topic and offers targeted paths that through art therapy help us to know ourselves and to contact the deepest part of us. 

If words are limited and limiting, art and creativity are a universal, non-verbal, very ancient language that connects us with our emotions. Even in representing dreams, artistic tools are useful to bring back emotions, symbols, sensations in a more coherent and satisfying way.

Writing or representing dreams, for example in a diary, makes us remember them more and more, it is a practice that improves with training. However, it is not important to just transcript the dreams but it's important to write down words, emotions, sensations and symbols that then help us in self-knowledge. Sometimes, for example, the dream is a reworking of the day and gives us a different, deeper point of view, if we know how to read it.

What color are our dreams? Science has done some studies on the color of dreams and it has been seen that the dream can be in black and white or in color but after the advent of television and devices, the trend is to have much more colorful dreams.

Dreams, however, are very linked to emotions and when we wake up it is useful to ask ourselves what is the color that comes to our mind when thinking back to the dream we had and try to make a drawing, a collage, an artistic expression that contains this color. This helps us to understand the language of dreams which is that of the unconscious, a language we do not know and through the universal language of art we are able to reconnect with this hidden part.

To approach the Dream collage method, we have to extrapolate some symbolic elements from the dream we have had, perhaps the dominant color, we look for and cut out images that represent these symbols and recombine creatively in a collage that represents our dream. This reconnecting with one's creativity is nourishment for the soul and is a more suitable way to remember and rework dreams than writing.

Editor's note: The dream collage is a path that Lisa proposes in depth with a workbook avout this technique.

A dream is a wish your art makes as the song says but dreams are not just wishes, they are much more. In dreams wishes, fears, anxieties, even primordial needs and repressed needs appear, listening to them and welcoming them can lead us to a deeper knowledge of ourselves.

Dreams often influence the mood or the course of a day because they draw from the well of the unconscious. Our fears and desires harbor in the unconscious, it is a well of wonders made of light and shadow.

In the journey to draw from this well one goes into the shadows; sometimes there are things within us that we would not want to see, actually the shadow needs to be seen, it wants to communicate something to us, the more we avoid it the more it comes back, if we can instead look at it, after having communicated its message to us it will fade away.

The lucid dream, that dream in which we not only have the perception of being dreaming but we can also interact with the dream, is a bridge. By interacting and manipulating the elements of the dream, a dialogue and interaction is established with one's own unconscious. It can also be very useful in the case of nightmares because by interacting with the elements of the nightmare, fears are reduced.

Thank you Lisa for your generosity and willingness. 

You can find Lisa here:

Web: lisamassei.it

Instagram: @masseilisa