Copyright 2010 Roberta Osborn. All rights reserved.
Emotional Recovery
Imagined Dreams Method
The source of the Imagined Dreams Method was my own attempt
to recover from bereavement. After two years of grieving over the
death of my father, I found myself in a very cold, contracted
emotional state. I was getting no help from my subconscious, which
had always before been a source of healing, restorative dreams.
Desperate
for relief, I
committed
myself to
imagining a
beautiful
dream
every day
until I felt
better. I
was
prepared
for it to
take a very long time. The effort quickly took on the specific form of
one page of five paragraphs every day. I tried to convey the most
beautiful things I could imagine or remember, whether from dreams
or experience, and to write as beautifully as possible. I gave each
day's work a title.
Over the course of a mere seventeen days, I moved from writing
mostly from imagination and recalled dreams to writing entirely
from transcendant and mundane moments of real experience. I
emerged from this exercise reacquainted with the beauty and
mystery of my own life, and my sadness lifted.
I believe what works about this approach is the focus on beauty,
nature, and beautiful experience of any kind. I suggest that this
method will support the recovery of anyone from any purely
emotional state. It is important to recover from severe
emotions, because new biochemistry science tells us these
emotions, unchallenged, can eventually create lasting, sometimes
devastating changes in the physical brain.
The fact that beauty heals is a deeper message to us all.
The result of my own effort, in its original order as written, is
