For about three years, my practice has been that whenever someone tells me a dream, I stay with the dreamer's telling of the dream as long as possible.

First of all, if the person reads the dream, I then ask them to tell me (i.e. speak) the dream. On rare occasions, the dreamer will decline.

Then, when they have told the dream once, I ask them to tell the dream again. I will continue to ask them to tell the dream again until either i. The story stabilizes and no new material comes out or ii. The dreamer expresses some resistance. Clearly, for a very long dream, this may not be practicable but I always ask for a second telling of the dream.

In a group, I might ask the dreamer to turn to each other person in the group and re-tell the dream. The effect of telling 5 or 6 other people the dream can be quite dramatic: The dreamer "gets" the dream without any external prompting or interpretation.

It is typical that the first telling of a dream is not the final version.

Without any formal examination I'd say the following changes tend to occur:

When the dream is told instead of read, there tends to be less information. The dreamer doesn't really have in their memory, the incidents and details that were written down. The details can contradict each other.

When the dream is re-told:

1. The next telling produces additional details e.g. . "The woman looked like my sister"
2. The dreamer can recall be entirely new segments of the dream. "Oh yes then the woman said …"
3. The dreamer will often produce spontaneous associations e.g. "It was a gray shirt – like the one my father used to wear" (You can then later ask "How old were you when your father would wear that gray shirt…and you have a whole new line of inquiry).
4. Sometimes an entire segment of the dream will disappear in the retelling.

[These differences are hard to notice if you are writing down your own dreams. You tend to write down what you need and "know" whether or not there are other details without being aware of the consequences (We've all got exhausted writing down a very long dream). But if you think about it, many dreams would have a short version and a longer version. In addition, telling a dream is a performance in a way that writing down a dream is not (few people get lost in the literary quality of the written dream)]

The effect of the re-tellings is that the dream-worker doesn't have to intrude until the dreamer has generated quite a lot more information (and numerous spontaneous associations) than would happen if he/she stopped at the first telling of the dream.

Research questions

1. What would show up if this re-telling process were rigorously examined: What kinds of changes would be evident?
2. Is the dreamer creating new details or did they exist before the first telling? (You can ask people and you'll get both answers as well as "don't knows").
3. Is there discernible evidence that the dreamer is using the new details to keep repressed material hidden (a la Freud)?
4. What are the differences between the written dream and the spoken dream?
5. Do different tellings contradict each other?

We are in the realm of narrative studies. We are considering memory. We are looking at the question of how stable is the dream experience.