Why Work With Dreams?

When we sleep, our conscious brains go offline. The unconscious comes out to play. Its language is nonlinear, so it can compress a tangled ball of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations—what Jung called a complex—into a single sensory image. An egg, a tree, a person, the smell of baking, a pounding on a door. Dreams offer a fast-track to self-understanding and growth.

But What Is the Unconscious and Why Does it Matter?

Most famously, the unconscious comprises taboo thoughts and feelings (e.g., I tell myself I like a person, while secretly I resent them). But the unconscious also involves the senses. It includes the parts of your body that mostly work in the background—breathing and digestion, for example. It’s gut energy, wordless emotion. It’s information you’ve absorbed from your environment without knowing you’ve absorbed it. It’s capacities you have without knowing you have them.

Making unconscious material conscious can enhance compassion for self and others, facilitate authentic decision-making, and suggest creative alternatives to impasses.

What Does Dreamwork Consist of?

My approach is dynamic and interactive rather than interpretive. The goal is for you to directly experience the parts of you that have surfaced in a dream. Often this leads to an “ah ha moment” in which something sinks in viscerally. My role as your therapist will be to guide and support you in this process, not to tell you what your dream “means.”

Typically, you’ll start by narrating the dream in as much detail as you can remember. Or, if you’ve written it down, I’ll invite you to read it aloud. The purpose is to re-immerse you in the world of your dream.

Collaboratively, we’ll then identify images we’ve spotted in the dream. We may notice different things. We’ll reflect on the list and pick out one or two that feel especially charged to you.

Now comes the heart of the work. This is quick to write but slow in practice. You ground yourself in the image. Say the image is “a room with a high ceiling.” What happens inside you when you think of yourself as a room with a high ceiling? What does being a room with a high ceiling feel like? And now, what does it feel like to separate yourself from that feeling—to not be a room with a high ceiling? Are any memories surfacing? Does being or not being a room with a high ceiling feel pertinent to anything going on in your current waking life?

Depending how urgent a dream feels, this process can be shorter or longer. We might dip into dreamwork for just a few minutes. Or we might devote several sessions to exploring multiple images from the same dream.

What if I don’t remember any Dreams?

Sooner or later, if something important is going on in your unconscious, it will make itself felt—if not through dreams, then maybe in daydreams or daily activities. Adopting a stance of open curiosity toward yourself helps. Be interested in passing thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations. We can work with them the same way we work with dreams.