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Apollo Beach Woman Dreams Big On Reality TV

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By WALT BELCHER, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 20, 2007

APOLLO BEACH - A 57-year-old woman named Joyce dreams that she is riding on the back of a truck overflowing with the most beautiful bright red tomatoes.

She cannot resist eating one. But with the first bite, she is arrested because the tomatoes in this land are sacred.

The punishment for eating one is death. She is asked how she wants to die. She asks to be taken to the highest building and pushed out a window. When this happens, she flies away. Somehow, she knew that she could escape.

This is not the strangest dream that dream expert Lauri Quinn Loewenberg has interpreted.

Not even the man whose nightmare had his dear old grandmother working in a strip club is the wildest.

Loewenberg says the really weird ones usually involve sex and can't be repeated in a family newspaper.

But some of the most outstanding dreams she has encountered are going to be featured on "In Your Wildest Dreams," a new reality television series that could run on the Discovery Health Network next year.

The pilot episode for the series is debuting at 9 p.m. Saturday. Discovery Channel officials haven't announced yet whether or when a weekly version of the program will debut.

"This is like a sneak preview," Loewenberg says. "We are going to be using real case histories that will be re-created on camera. I will be commenting on what the dreams mean.

"I think people will be fascinated because we've all had nightmares and strange dreams."

Loewenberg, 35, is a dream analyst, author, radio personality and member of ASD, the Association for the Study of Dreams. She writes a newspaper column on dreams, The Dream Zone, and is a frequent guest on radio shows.

Fleeing, Flying, Falling

The above case history of Joyce and the forbidden tomatoes is from her book "So, What Did You Dream Last Night?"

"Everyone dreams," Loewenberg says. "We don't always remember what we dream, and people don't usually understand what the dream means.

"Very often things that seem like nightmares actually are positive reinforcements, the subconscious mind's way of working out anxieties."

Joyce's dream, for example, falls into one of the three most common dream types: fleeing, falling and flying.

Loewenberg says the overloaded truck represented feelings of being overburdened; being punished for eating the tomato represented feeling oppressed; and flying away is the mind's way of reassuring her that she has the ability to free herself from these woes.

And she determined that Grandma's pole dancing was a message from the man's subconscious to "strip away" his old-fashioned beliefs that a woman's place is in the home.

Thousands Of Interpretations

Loewenberg, originally from Chattanooga, Tenn., is a former aspiring actress who began to study dream analysis in the mid-1990s. She says that since 1996, she has interpreted more than 50,000 dreams.

She has appeared on CNN, "Good Morning America," the "Today" show and "The View."

She has lived in Los Angeles and Nashville, where she attempted to run a 1-900 call-in line for dream interpretation.

"We were trying to offer legitimate dream analysis, but the psychic hot lines made every 900 line questionable," she says.

She and her husband moved to the Tampa Bay area a couple of years ago.

She says her husband, a business entrepreneur, was lured to the area during the real estate boom.

"That has gone bust now, but we decided to stay here," she says.

Loewenberg says she has been looking for another outlet to share her dream analysis skills, and television seems like the next step.

Alon Orstein, executive producer for "In Your Wildest Dreams," says because of Loewenberg's background, experience and on-air presence, she is a "natural for the show."

The pilot episode features three people with seemingly troublesome dreams. A pregnant woman has a disturbing nightmare about women removing her stomach; a fitness trainer dreams of being attacked by dogs and his teeth falling out; a woman is haunted by a dream in which she and her mother are on a sinking boat fighting over a life jacket.

"We bring Lauri in to explain her take on these dreams," Orstein says. "We also have a psychiatrist who gives his views."

No 'Clear-Cut Answers'

Orstein says dreams have fascinated people since ancient times, including the story of Joseph in the Bible. Dreams were a large part of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis theories.

"Dream interpretation is a little controversial because there are no clear-cut answers," he says. "There are differences of opinion about what dreams mean."

Loewenberg says she enjoys enlightening people about dreams and the dream process.

She likes to dispel myths about dreaming: "We never dream in black and white," she says. "And we dream every night. We average five dreams per night.

"Dreams are the language of the subconscious. The subconscious mind uses dreams as a means of relaying messages to us. But it uses symbolic images and metaphors that seem ridiculous at first when we wake up and the conscious mind tries to sort it out."

In her book, Loewenberg shares some of her own dreams, such as one in which a large man in a fuzzy hat chases her out of her garden and down the street. (This was a subconscious message about her anxiety over dealing with a relative.)

She also has had those "naked in public" dreams, which reflect fears of being vulnerable and exposed, and the "back in school" dreams, in which an overdue term paper or report isn't ready.

Although she doesn't discount the possibility that a dream could predict the future, she hasn't encountered one yet.

"Most of the dreams deal with the here and now and what is going on in a person's life," she says.

For information, go to Loewenberg's Web site, thedreamzone.com.

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