Spoken clues

What is the difference between a thief and a robber?

A client dreamed there was an intruder in his house. He couldn’t see him, but he could sense him. “What can you sense about him?” I asked. He closed his eyes, searched for the feeling. “He’s a robber.”

At the time, the word ‘robber’ struck me as odd. I was in dream therapist mode, unable to look up the difference between a robber and a thief in a dictionary. The word hung in the air, demanding attention.

“Robber seems like an old-fashioned word,” I said. “I wonder why you didn’t see him as a thief, or a burglar.”

In a flash, I realised why the dream figure was a robber. He represented the part of the client that was robbing him of something valuable. The clues offered by the rest of the dream fell into place: the client had a limiting belief that was robbing him of an outcome he desired. The limiting belief was easy to identify in the dream, but it was the sense of being robbed that helped drive the message home to the client. A dream thief or burglar really wouldn’t have cut it.

After the session, I checked a dictionary for the difference between a thief and a robber, and realised that I had known the facts, but had forgotten them. According to law, a thief is someone who steals without using force. A robber steals using force or intimidation. A robbery is violent. Theft is not physically violent.

In everyday English, many of us equate a thief to a robber, and we either tend to use the words interchangeably, or favour thief. Yet we also commonly say, ‘it was daylight robbery’, or ‘it robbed me of my sense of purpose’.

My client’s framing of the intruder as a robber was elicited by my question. Because we were immersed in his dream, my question was directed to his unconscious mind which responded accurately. It told us that the feeling was ‘being robbed’.

As a dream therapist, I know when and how to address questions to a client’s unconscious mind for deeper illumination.

But there’s more.

I find it’s often the words clients use when talking about a dream that are revealing. It’s quite common for a client to pause, midway through telling a dream, and say, “I just realised what I said there!”

When you are engaged in describing a dream, you are straddling two worlds: your conscious (waking world) mind and your unconscious (dreaming) mind. Your tongue will scatter clues!

You might like to speak your dreams aloud, either to yourself or to a friend. Speak freely without restraint. Let it flow. Listen to what emerges.

 

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