Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom: A Two-Mirror ... (ISBN 0595343937)

Worth reading!:
In Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom, writer and clinical psychologist Lucy Daniels offers the reader a glimpse into the strange, mysterious world of dreams and how these can affect the creative process and be used as a tool to cure writer's block. This book is the result of the author's decades-long struggle with writer's block and how, with the help of dreams, she successfully overcame it. In Daniels' words, her two-mirror approach, which is outlined in the beginning of the book, "should pay off generously." The aim of this process is to make the blocked writer realize that sometimes it's not the writing itself what blocks, but the negative feelings and emotional issues that writing represents. Having said this, dreams become revealing sources for those subconscious, deeply-buried "blocking" feelings and emotions. In the first part of the book the author gives some background about the psychology of dreams, summarizing the main ideas of Sigmund Freud, Susan Deri, Lawrence Kubie, Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner, Gilbert Rose, and Morton Reiser, among others. In "My Dream Journey," which takes most of the book, Daniels shares a series of dreams she experienced from 1982 to 2004. Each dream is given a little background beforehand and an aftermath afterwards, so the reader may understand its significance. The book ends with other artists' dreams and their "explanations." Though the ideas in this book are highly interesting, a person with no knowledge of the meaning of dreams won't be able to profit fully. What is obvious to a clinical psychologist about the interpretation of dreams may not be obvious for a regular person. How can a person be sure what their dream means? How can they be sure the interpretation isn't simply wishful thinking? What happens if dreams are erroneously interpreted? Unfortunately, Daniels offers no guidelines for this. This is not an easy, "friendly" book about creativity like from Julia Cameron or Natalie Goldberg, but one that requires at least a basic knowledge or familiarity with psychology and the meaning of dreams.

She's done it again!:
I've read Daniels other books, Caleb, My Son, High on a Hill, and her memoir, With a Woman's Voice. This latest book is a non-fiction primer, it's easy to follow and incredibly useful for the creative project I'm working on. I really like that she's able to share so much of her process! Thank you Lucy!!