Working with Dreams

If you have come to this page, you are at least curious about what it means to “work with dreams.” Well, we all dream, whether we “remember” our dreams in the morning or not.

Carl Jung, and many other great psychological thinkers, felt that dreams are like messages from your unconscious mind. They are not just there because of something we ate or because our sleep was disturbed by a noise in the night.

In therapy, dreams act as avenues into your interior world. Often the messages from dreams are not what we would think from the content of the dream. For instance, it may be frightening to have a dream in which someone you love dies. Some people may worry that this may be a message of impending disaster or death. Something quite different can be the message, however. It may mean the end of one part of life or of one role in life, and the dawning of a new beginning.

Writing down your dreams upon waking, even if it is just a snippet, can help you to remember more of your dreams over time. Jung believed that by being in this process of writing down, working with and processing your dreams with another, you are actually having a dialog with your own unconscious or inner self. This can be an exciting, enlightening and moving experience in gaining access to your motivations and how you can be happier and more satisfied in your life.

Working with dreams can help move a person through the process of mourning a relationship that has ended, help a person understand more about why they continuously pick partners that seem wrong for them or jobs that don’t fit or are not what they want.  Dreams can also be an invaluable tool in working with problems of addiction to alcohol, drugs, food, sex and other behaviors.  In the process of working through trauma, dreams can provide the clues and the map for exploring long buried experiences that need to see the light of consciousness to heal.