Interview with Psychotherapist Andrew Feldmár

On dreams, myths, symbolism, and more

Andrew Feldmár is a psychotherapist in Vancouver, BC, where he has been in private practice for over fifty years¹ He has led dream workshops and worked with clients’ dreams for the entirety of his career. You can read more about him on his Wikipedia pages (English, Hungarian).

He is the author of several books published in Hungary; his first book in English, Credo: R.D. Laing and Radical Psychotherapy, was published by Karnac Books in the UK in 2023 (available on Amazon here). His newest book in English, Radical Adventure: An Inquiry into Psychedelic Psychotherapy, is forthcoming from Karnac Books in February, 2025.

I interviewed Andrew recently via Zoom to hear his take on dreams and dreaming.² The following transcript of our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

JW: When did you become interested in dreams?

AF:  I met a woman here in Vancouver when I was at the very beginning of my career, a very greenhorn therapist. Her name was Joyce Frazee, a Gestalt therapist. She had studied directly with Fritz Perls.³ For some reason, I knew that in order to make it as a therapist, I had to be visible. I was going to give a workshop at UBC’s continuing education on dreams; I just decided that everybody dreams and that would be a good topic. I remember that I read somewhere that in the Talmud it's written that, “A dream not understood is like a letter unopened.” And I built a whole workshop around it. Joyce Frazer attended, she came to the lecture that I gave, and afterwards she said, “I run dream workshops, Gestalt dream workshops. Why don't you co-lead one with me?” So we started to do that. We did them in Vancouver, we did them in Victoria. We even took one to Esalen. We worked for many years together. Fritz Perls believed that one medium-sized dream, if you really want to get into it, is worth something like three years of therapy. You could go to that many depths, and it would have that many different implications. So it was inexhaustible and always very exciting. And then, of course, I started to consider that “life is but a dream,” that one can analyze one's own life as if it were a dream. One can come to very interesting hypotheses and stories. So that's how I got involved.

JW: So now, how do you approach a dream? Is it from a Gestalt perspective? Maybe you could speak to how do you approach a dream when someone tells you one.

AF: I think Lacan⁴ had the greatest influence on me, where he said that the unconscious is really what we know but are too chicken shit to articulate. So it's the unspoken, the inexpressible, the unthinkable — that’s the unconscious. He thought that dreams were: we're presenting pictures, and pictures are worth a thousand words. So the inexpressible, the unspeakable, form the dream images. When Freud said that the royal road to the unconscious is dreaming, Lacan agreed that by attending very closely to the dream image, you suddenly can hear yourself articulate something that you have always known but never had the courage to put into words. And because of the dream image, out it comes.

I’ll give you a quick example so that it doesn’t remain abstract. Suppose all I remember is an apple on a table. If I stick very closely to the image, it's about two things that are in an asymmetrical relationship. The table supports the apple, the apple doesn't support the table. The apple sits on the table, the table doesn't sit on the apple. It's an asymmetrical relationship. And as I begin to say that, first, when I look at it, that's all I remember. Then I wonder, “What am I saying? What asymmetrical relationship am I in that has to come out in a dream image?” And suddenly it flashes in: I support my wife financially. My wife doesn't support me financially. Asymmetrical. My wife is the apple, I'm the table. Do I mind being the table? Does she mind being the apple? What are the implications? I have learned that there is no dream fragment that's insignificant. Even with just a little image, once you find the words for it, it starts resonating. Then I could have a talk with my wife about it, when it has never been a topic before. Not complaining, not saying it shouldn't be like that. If she's comfortable being an apple, and I'm comfortable being a table, no problem.

JW: But you said that the unconscious images are those things that we can't quite say, it's too hard or it's too painful or too uncomfortable to articulate.

AF: Or somebody doesn't want us to say it. Sometimes we don't articulate something because an adult in a child's life, or an “other,” really doesn't want to hear those things articulated and they don't want to think about it. If you don't have words for something, then you can't think about it.

There are social pressures not to articulate something. For example, just recently, I was reading something that just suddenly turned the light on around the Israeli-Arab hostilities. There is so much morality and opinions and blaming and responsibility. And if you just find the right words, suddenly, at least for me, it was clear: like, hello, they are enemies! And you don't have to go any further. That one word. They are enemies. As long back in history as we know, people have always had enemies, and enemies have always massacred each other. Enemies don't want to solve the problem. They want to solve the problem by annihilating their enemies, and their enemies want to annihilate them. So in a way, it's a bourgeois privilege to have opinions as to what those people should do and how they should make peace, when in a way, their hostilities, that they are enemies, are like an erupting volcano going, “now there is this.” Just as I would be running away from an erupting volcano. I'm not going to visit Israel these days. So one word helped me to see things a little more clearly. One is never at the end, because I think veil upon vail shall lift and veil upon vail shall remain. But any even remotely accurate articulation of what is shifts everything. And talking about dreams is really helpful.

JW: I think you kind of answered this already, but I'll just ask it explicitly: do you think all dreams are worthy of exploration or are some just throwaway?

AF: I don't throw away anything, because even if they are residues from the previous day, even if they are just little unresolved tidbits from the neighborhood, there are so many things that could come into the dream that the selection has to be meaningful. There are even psychic dreams. I am totally convinced that we have clairvoyant and other psychic abilities while dreaming. If I tune into a murder that is happening in a neighboring city while I'm asleep, one thing about it is the psychic tuning in to reality. But why do I tune into that particular one? There are probably a thousand other things happening that I could have tuned into, so why I tune into one thing rather than another says something about me.

One thing I have learned is that dreams are multiply determined, which is to say that they are like holograms that you illuminate with different lights; different pictures come out of one hologram. You can take five, six different pictures, one with green, one with red, and then what you recall deepens depending on what light you look at it through. Dreams are like that. That's why it's good to turn it around between us. If there are several interpretations that you can give to one dream, you want to know which one is true. It’s never, “Or…Or…Or…” It’s always “And…And…And.” It's amazing, the creativity that we have. The generator of dreams, the poet inside us, the creator, it can create images that are true on several levels. Sometimes three, four or five. At least three come to mind. A dream always says something about the present moment in your life. So it's always an existential snapshot. It always says something about your childhood.

JW: Always?

AF: Always. In my opinion, a dream is always fueled by something in your childhood. And it always says something about your inner dynamics. So it's about the past, it's about your inner dynamics, and it’s about the social minute that you are participating in. So at least these three. And then there could be other layers.

JW: Do you think dreams, by definition, have a medicine in them as well? Or can they really just be like an X-ray that shows you something on the inside?

AF: I don't know. The ancient Greeks had a method — in fact, it’s the only psychotherapy they did. It was called “incubation,” where, if you had any problem, spiritual, psychological, or physical, you were put into a pit, on a stone. All around you there would be snakes. And then they put a lid on the cave that they put you in, and basically said, “Knock when you have dreamt something.” So you would have to fall asleep among the snakes. Now, Asclepius was the Greek god of medicine, and his symbol is the caduceus, the two snakes, which is still, today, the symbol of medicine. The snakes were the ally spirits of Asclepius. So when you had a dream, you had to knock, and the priests would come and say, “What was your dream?” Then the priests would judge whether that was a dream sent by Asclepius, or whether it was just a personal dream. If they didn't think it came from the god, through the snakes, you would have to stay in, and they would give you bread and water and put the lid on. You would be highly motivated to dream something that would lead the priest to say, “Ah, here is the medicine. Asclepius, through the dream, says, ‘If you do this, this, this, and this, you are going to feel better physically, mentally, whatever.’” And it seems to have worked. It was practiced for hundreds of years.

JW: But it suggests that not all dreams have the medicine in them. Only some.

AF: It suggests that Asclepius sent special dreams. Not every dream comes from the god of medicine.

JW: So you have named Lacan and the Gestalt approach, but do you have other favorite thinkers or writers on dreams?

AF: Jung is a lot of fun. To think in complexes, in archetypes — it's a whole different approach. Jung was great with symbolism. I shy away from getting too deep into symbolism because one can then come across to the people one works with as an expert: “I know what the symbol means.” Whereas, if I use symbols at all, I would ask you, if you had a dream, “What do those things symbolize for you?” I would never come up with a universal dictionary of symbols, but I would encourage you to create a unique, private, personal dictionary of symbols. And if I am your therapist, I would have to learn your vocabulary, rather than you having to learn the Jungian vocabulary.

The Senoi Indians wove the dream life and the day life together. Every morning they gathered together and told their dreams to each other. Now, if in my dream, you appear and you hurt me, then when I tell it in the morning, it ends up that you owe me something. You have to buy me a gift to compensate me for having hurt me in my dream. And if you do a good deed, if you do something wonderful for me, then I owe you a gift. So they constantly had daytime/awake interactions based on what they did to each other in their dreams. I think that's a wonderful way of using dreaming as a feedback to the conscious life.

Jung said that dreams are good for tapping you on the shoulder. You have a daytime attitude. The dream, according to him, often taps you on the shoulder and says, “Think again, buddy. That's what you think during the daytime. But could it be that this is what you think?” Dreams are a kind of poke at you to not get too dogmatic, and to see the other side of things. Which I find useful.

JW: On the point of symbolism, do you think there are any universal meanings, like that water is a symbol of emotions, for example, or an automobile is a symbol of how we move through the world, that is, the body?

AF: No, I don't think so. The closest I would get to that is myths. There are myths that have been alive for thousands of years, and myths are very similar in different cultures. So I think some myths are like dreams in the collective unconscious. We all buy into it. Well, why would we buy into one kind of story unless we have a common experience? And where I think throughout history in different cultures, we have almost identical experiences is the time between conception and birth, and perinatally. A stone-age baby goes through the same thing as a baby who is conceived now. A Black baby in Africa goes through the same experience as a Chinese baby or a European baby, at any time in history. Some of the myths show this.

For example, Shakti and Shiva, two Hindu gods, are depicted as two triangles intertwined. They are lovers who are having eternal intercourse, like, 24/7 they are making love. Where would that come from? Well, when you develop in the uterus, you develop out of one egg, one sperm. The zygote grows into what we call a triumvirate: the placenta, the umbilical cord, and the fetus. But every cell in all three have the same signature. That's you in the womb. You are these three things. Now, if you think about what happens for nine months, subjectively an enormously long time, is that with every fetal heartbeat, you ejaculate blood through the umbilical cord into the placenta, and then from the placenta, with the next heartbeat, blood comes back and ejaculates into you. And it's eternal intercourse between the placenta and the fetus. Both male and female babies have the experience of being ejaculated into and ejaculating out. And then the cord is cut — that's why I think “sex” is called “sex,” which in Latin means “to cut, to sever.” “Sex” is to cut and sever; “nexus” would be to connect. But we don't call “sex,” “nex.” I think it's because sex begins after your umbilical cord is cut. You lose your lover, and for the rest of your life you're searching for the lost beloved; you are looking for the one with whom you can have this eternal intercourse.

The Greeks had that idea. The Greeks had a myth where originally all humans had two heads, four arms, and four legs. They faced opposite ways, and they were running around like that. And they got too uppity, had hubris and pride. The gods said, “We don't want them putting their noses into our business,” so they severed them, they cut them. These total human beings, they cut them in half. And then the human beings that started running around had one head, two arms, two legs. Originally, there were female-female, there were female-male, and there were male-male four-legged and four-armed creatures. When they were cut and mixed, that was the origin of homosexuality. If originally you were a woman-woman, you would be looking for a woman. If you were a woman-man, then you would be looking for the opposite gender. And if you were a man-man, you would be looking for a man. Very handy explanation.

One more myth, quickly. Isis and Osiris, where Osiris gets chopped up into tiny bits and scattered on the countryside. And Isis, because she loves him, gathers all the parts and puts him together and he comes to life again. That’s the bare bones of the myth. Well, if you imagine that you have “blood consciousness,” so let’s say that blood could speak, then in the umbilical cord there are two veins and one artery, and paradoxically, through the veins come in the blood and through the artery goes out the blood. Now, what happens is, so imagine you are the blood, you are together, I'm Osiris, I arrive in the placenta and I'm torn to bits. The placenta is like a tree, blood vessel after blood vessel. The bloodstream is sprinkled all over and the placenta is a huge area, like on a field, my blood is splattered. And then, through some fantastic mechanism, it's gathered again, after it gets purified and oxygenated, it's gathered again. And by the time it comes back into me, it's whole again. So the intrauterine experience must have inspired this myth. My lover gets all cut up into bits, I gather, and then he's whole, and it's repeated.

Not only that, but there are people who think that the whole idea of agriculture started from this knowing. That, in a way, you shit on the field and life comes out of it. You fertilize with all the used blood, and somehow it's reborn and it comes back as nourishment. Well, that's the basis of agriculture. So I think there are some common experiences that generate a common symbolism.

JW: Do you think that we benefit psychologically from a dream, even if we never write it down or talk about it or share it with anybody?

AF: Well, I suspect, I don't have proof, but I suspect that a lot of things have to do with the digestion of difficult experiences that happens in dreams. All I know is that there are mornings where I wake up with a headache, for example, and the only thing I can think of is that I had a very stressful dream in which I was working through something. One way to think about it is that dreams sometimes digest difficult experiences, and it's not always necessary to know and to understand what goes on. Wilfred Bion⁵ was the psychologist who said that there are people who can't even symbolize. One of the worst human conditions is when you can't even dream. You are so frightened by your experience that you can't even symbolize. Then there are other obstacles that you can symbolize, but you can never verbalize. So dreams, already, by allowing you to symbolize, relieve some of the “What happened here?”

JW: Do you think that people can effectively understand their own dreams by themselves? Or does it require another person?

AF: Well, Jung said that as he became more and more skilled at helping others to understand their dreams, his own dreams became more and more complicated. They kept up with him, and he could never understand his own dreams. I am not a Christian, but Christ is known to have said in the Bible, in the reports by his disciples, he said that after he dies, “Whenever two or more people gather together in my name, in the name of the Way, the Truth, and the Life, I will be there.” He never said he would appear to one, he said “two or more.” And I think it has something to do with that. The truth, it's binocular. It doesn't appear to one. But if you are candid, and I am candid, something can appear between us that neither of us suspected. That's why it's important to turn the dream around. It's like a diamond — it may flash pink in my direction, green in yours. And if you say “green,” I say “pink.” Then we keep turning the diamond, and eventually get to know it. Alone, I would never get a report from the other side. So I think dream interpretation really has to be done in company. Two or more.

JW: Couple more questions. Do you personally dream in Hungarian, or English, or both?

AF: By now, I think mostly in English, almost always. I remember noticing in my diaries, from when I arrived in Toronto in 1956, for the first three years, I dreamt in Hungarian. I didn’t know English, I had just started. I was very happy with my first dream in English. I thought, “Hey, I think I’m beginning to feel at home in English.” Up until then, only Hungarian. Now, hardly ever.

JW: And finally, anything else you want to include, or say, about dreams or dreaming?

AF: Well, just how widely differently people think about dreams. I want to tell you a little story, which I think I told you before. [Francis] Crick, the Nobel-prize winning biologist, geneticist, who was partly the discoverer of the double helix, in an interview, said that people who occupy themselves with their dreams are really like people who eat shit. He thought that dreams are the excrement of the brain, because the brain is like a processor, like a computer. And huge computers clean themselves, clean the rubbish data out at night. It would be like trying to read the output of these computers, which is garbage. He wrote a very authoritative note on “dreams are garbage,” and why would you want to recycle garbage? You already threw it out, why would you want to re-enter it? So I called him up on the phone, and I talked to him, and I said, “How did you come to that conclusion? Did you actually do experiments? Do you think it’s a fact? What are you talking about? Because that’s certainly not my experience.” He hemmed and hawed, and then admitted that he and a fellow had put in a request for funding for a series of experiments that were supposed to show that. They never got the money, they never performed the experiments, he just talked about it as if he already knew. So I said, “Look, you have enormous authority; you are a Nobel-prize winner. How dare you say that as if it were a fact! If you say that’s what you think of your own dreams, fine. But my dreams aren’t shit.”

JW: Thank you, Andrew. This has been very enlightening and fun.

AF: Good, Ok.

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1. Andrew was my psychotherapist from 1996-2001, and again from 2023 to the present.

2. Our interview took place on October 21, 2024.

3. Fritz Perls (1893-1970) was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term "Gestalt therapy" to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s.

4. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.

5. Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) was an influential English psychoanalyst.