Always make your dreams have a positive outcome and exact a creative product from them. Seek the poem, painting, song, or other material that can be extracted creatively from the dream. Look for the gift within the imagery. Of course these, for the most part, presuppose that you have been able to achieve lucidity , that you are awake and aware within the dream, before you can implement any of these techniques for working with your dream. The various dream clinics and centers, such as the Jungian-Senoi Institute in California, which have cropped up since those first days exploring Senoi dreaming at Esalen teach such techniques so that dreams can be worked with under the auspices of Senoi dream theory.
Controversy exists in all methods of dream theory due to the subjective nature of the dream.
If you are a lucid dreamer, this approach to dreamwork may work for you. I personally utilize method 3, creating from the myriad images of my dreams. If you can recall your dreams , no dream manipulation is necessary during the actual process of dreaming to make this an applicable dream tool. You simply must translate what you remember into a creative expression. I've yet to confront and conquer the spiders that haunt me in night terrors, and sharing these dreams with my husband do little to abate the terror in daylight when confronted with an eight-legged monster, but for me, some aspects of Americanized Senoi dream theory are effective tools, and do work.