Frederick Perls (1893-1970) iss the founder of Gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy seeks to fill your emotional voids so that you can then become a unified whole. Perls believes that dreams contain the rejected, disowned parts of the Self. Every character and every object in a dream represents an aspect of the Self. You are the tornado, you are the attacker, you are the broken down car and you are the dusty book. Perls rejects the notion that dreams are part of a universal symbolic language. He believes that each dream is unique to the individual who dreams it.
In order to discover what aspect of yourself is being disowned, Perls believes that it is important to retell your dream in the present tense and act it out accordingly. It is important to verbalize how each and every component in your dream felt, even inanimate objects. Reenact the dream and take on the role of the different characters and objects. Start a dialogue with the dream object and express how you felt toward each other. By taking on a different role within your dream and reenact it, you may then be able to acknowledge and realize feelings that you may have overlooked or buried.
