Across time and culture, people have been fascinated by their dreams. Dreams are a window into the unconscious mind, revealing thoughts, feelings, and desires that might be hidden from the conscious self. Dreams can offer insights and guidance for personal growth, and can be a valuable help in your counseling.
Learning how to understand your dreams can help you understand your inner world and unconscious motivations, help to process unresolved emotions and traumas, lead to a more integrated and balanced self, and inspire creativity and problem-solving.
Nightmares typically have stories that are so scary it awakens you or makes you dread returning to sleep. They are common during times of crisis, after trauma, or at a time of transition or physical sickness.
Learning how to understand the message of the nightmare can help the intensity to lessen so you don't have to fear going to sleep. It's almost like your unconscious is yelling as loudly as it can to get your attention about something important.
It can be so distressing that the message gets lost and people just want the scary dreams to go away. We can do that too. There are things you can learn to do to help the nightmares to not return, or to return in far less frightening way. When you have constant nightmares, sometimes all you want is a good night's sleep.
Dream interpretation is one tool that can be used in therapy. If you are interested in understanding your dreams, start writing them down, and talk about them in your counseling session.
I have used AI as a tool to understand dreams, and it can be really helpful at some things. It does a good job of giving some common associations to different symbols. However, understanding what the symbol means given who you are and what is happening in your life now, is far more complex.
Copyright © 2025 Jeannie Colvin, MFT - All Rights Reserved.
Newport Beach, CA 949-241-0042
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