Dream Work in Counseling

"I often wonder what my dreams mean." 

"I get the worst nightmares and I really hate going to sleep."

Your dreams are already speaking.  Dream work is one way of learning how to listen.

Some dreams stay with us long after we wake up. A recurring dream, a strange image, a dream about someone you've lost, or a dream that seems to carry an emotional weight you can't quite explain can leave you wondering: Why did I dream that? What does it mean? 

Dreams can offer another way into our inner lives. They sometimes bring attention to feelings, conflicts, desires, memories, and parts of ourselves that are difficult to access through ordinary conversation. 

My approach to dream work isn't based on a universal dictionary of symbols. We explore your personal associations, emotions, relationships, and life experiences, while also considering the mythology, fairy tales, symbolism, and cultural stories that can give a dream image additional layers of meaning. I'm interested in both what a symbol means to you and what it might be saying in a larger symbolic language.

The goal isn't to find the one correct interpretation. It's to become curious about what the dream might be revealing in the context of your life, and why it is coming to you now.

You don't need to be experiencing in crisis to be curious about your dreams. You might want to explore your dreams if:

• You have a recurring dream or dream theme that you can't seem to shake.
• A dream has been unusually vivid, emotional, beautiful, disturbing, or mysterious.
• You are going through a major life transition and your dreams seem to be changing.
• You are grieving someone and having meaningful dreams about them.
• You keep dreaming about relationships, family members, work, sexuality, or other areas of your life.
• You feel disconnected from yourself and want to understand your inner world more deeply.
• You are experiencing recurring nightmares and want to understand them or reduce their impact 
• You are curious about symbolism, the unconscious, or the parts of yourself that don't always have words.
• You have a spiritual or numinous experience in your dreams and want a therapist who can explore it without immediately dismissing or pathologizing it.
• You simply have a sense that your dreams are trying to get your attention.

No. A symbol doesn't come with one fixed meaning. Its meaning depends on several factors, including your associations, your history, what's currently happening in your life, and the emotional tone of the dream.

That doesn't mean symbols are completely arbitrary, either. We can draw on mythology, fairy tales, cultural symbolism, and Jung's concept of the collective unconscious to explore meanings that may not be immediately obvious.

For example, you might dream of a snake and read in a dream dictionary that it symbolizes transformation. But then what? Is something already changing in your life, or is something asking to change? Is the snake connected to a relationship, your work, your history, or something internal? These are the questions we explore together. 

Fragments count! You don't need to remember an entire cinematic dream from beginning to end.   Sometimes the image you remember most vividly, a particular feeling, or even one strange little detail is enough to give us somewhere to start. 

One way to improve dream recall is to write your dreams down as soon as you wake up. If you don't tend to remember your dreams, try telling yourself before you go to sleep, “If I have a dream, I promise I'll write it down.”  It's almost as if your unconscious says, “Oh, hi! You're listening. I've got some things to share.”

There are other ways to improve dream recall, too, and many people find that their dreams become easier to remember once they start paying attention to them in therapy.

Recurring dreams or dream themes can sometimes circle around something unresolved or persistently asking for attention. Exploring the pattern can help us understand what the dream may be connected to in your waking life. 

No. While intense or vivid dreams often show up during life transitions, loss, or big change, dream work is valuable for anyone curious about what their inner life is communicating, regardless of what's currently happening on the surface. 

Nightmares can be jarring enough to wake you outright, or leave you dreading sleep itself. They often surface during periods of stress, after trauma, or during major life changes. It can feel less like your unconscious is talking to you than screaming at you.

Nightmares deserve to be taken seriously, not simply interpreted. Exploring recurring nightmares with a trained therapist can sometimes help reduce their emotional impact while also helping you understand what may be contributing to them.  But I don't recommend doing that work alone or without training. Your psyche may already be overwhelmed, and the last thing you want is to overwhelm yourself further.

That said, if recurring nightmares are simply wearing you down, rest matters more than analysis. There are evidence-based approaches specifically designed to reduce nightmare frequency and distress, and sometimes that is the more appropriate place to begin.

My approach draws from depth psychology and Jungian traditions, which view dreams as an important avenue for exploring the unconscious and the symbolic dimensions of our lives. Dream work is one part of the broader depth therapy I offer. It sits alongside exploring patterns, relationships, and the questions life is currently raising for you. 

We'd start with the dream itself. What happened? What did you notice? What did you feel? Which images stayed with you?

From there, we might explore your personal associations, what is happening in your life, and the symbolic possibilities suggested by mythology, fairy tales, and Jungian psychology. Sometimes a dream makes sense quickly. Other times, it takes a while to unfold.

We don't have to force it to mean something. We can be curious and see what emerges.

If you're a therapist looking to deepen your skill in working with clients' dreams, I offer professional consultation and supervision focused on dream work.