Dreaming

Is Therapy For Me?

Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year can be difficult times for many people. We spend the holiday with family in a more intense way than normal and this can reveal strains, tensions and ruptures that we normally overlook or don’t like to admit in our daily lives....

The Art of Self-soothing 4: Using Our Senses

Using Our Senses This final post in my series is about using our bodily senses to self-soothe. There are lots of ways that we can self-sooth by looking. Sight Natural Vistas As I’ve already mentioned in a previous post, nature and landscapes are very calming. For...

The Art of Self-soothing 3: Creativity

Creativity is a sure way to self-soothe. People have lost themselves in creative pursuits since time began.  Getting in touch with our creativity is a way of reaching something within ourselves. By allowing this to develop we can usually make something bigger than...

The Art of Self-Soothing 2: Nature

This month’s way to self soothe is by being in nature. It’s long been known and proven that being outside and preferably in nature can improve our mental health. Take a Short Walk The simplest ways are often the most effective. Such as going for a short walk from your...

The Art of Self Soothing

There is so much going on in the world now. It’s hard watching the news, in fact I am more likely to just quickly check a news ap than I am to watch the news in real time. Many people I speak to are unable to watch the news at all because they struggle to think of the...

Interpreting Dreams

In the last of my series on dreaming we look at common images and symbols in dream interpretation. I love working with the unconscious and find dreams fascinating. We can think of them as metaphors for what might be going on in the dreamer’s life and/or the...

Nightmares and Night terrors

It seems difficult for people to talk about their nightmares. Even if the person has told me during their assessment that they suffer from nightmares, I often find people don’t talk about them in any detail until we have been working together for a while. Maybe by...

Types of dreams

Types of Dreams Every dream is as unique as the dreamer, but there are specific types of dreamsthat most commonly find their way into my consulting room. These are daydreams, vivid dreams, recurring dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares and night terrors. This month, I...

Dream Journaling

How To Remember Your Dreams I often work with people who dream frequently and are interested in their dreams. Many suffer from nightmares and night terrors which they remember vividly.  I will be exploring these in a later post. But a lot of people don’t remember...

Time for a Mindset Spring Clean

March is a hopeful month. Officially the first month of spring with emerging colour, bulbs bravely shooting through the ground and trees starting to sprout buds. A couple of years ago in the UK we had a mini heatwave in March. With the unpredictability of the climate,...

Cyber Bullying

Cyber Bullying When researching this subject, I was shocked to see the number of people who had taken their lives due to cyber bullying and sextortion. Between March 2019 and March 2020 19% or one in five children between the age of 10 and 15 in England and Wales...

Photography by Gregory Pappas on Unsplash

Psychotherapy and Dreams

During an initial consultation with a potential client, I often ask about their dreams. Do they dream regularly? Do they have significant dreams from childhood? Do they have recurring dreams? This is because as a psychodynamic therapist I work with the unconscious. We believe that some difficult events have been pushed deep into our unconscious so we don’t remember them and therefore don’t need to think about, or be troubled by them. Usually, these things are hidden in our psyche, sometimes forever. But if something happens to remind us of an event, then it may bubble up from our unconscious into our consciousness. Dreams are a classic way this can happen, making the unconscious more conscious through no conscious choice of our own.

A Little History of Working Therapeutically With Dreams

Historically, dreams have held great interest: religious texts often have dreamers (usually prophets) who are able to see the future, for example the character, Joseph who interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams predicting future famines. Even today – as in the past – the theory holds that dreams can be prophetic i.e. they are messages from God or a higher power about the future. Some people even believe that dreams can be clues to past lives that we may have lived. In 1900, the Psychoanalyst, Freud, called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious” in his famous work The Interpretation of Dreams. His main theory was that a dream represented a ‘wish fulfilled’: something we unconsciously or consciously want to happen. Some everyday examples in a modern context: we dream of being on a desert island snorkelling with dolphins may indicate we’re working too hard and need to reflect on our current work life balance. Or if we dream of living in a flat shared with fun loving friends we hang out with after work, maybe it’s time to start saving up and move out from living with our parents. A colleague of Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, took Freud’s work further. He too saw great value in dreams but the way he worked with them was more complex. He asked the dreamer for their associations with the dream content and then explored these personal, cultural or universal associations with the dreamer. As a psychodynamic therapist, this is my preferred method of working with dreams. I often work with people who suffer from nightmares and night terrors. These can be very disturbing whatever age they happen, and it can take time to understand what significance and meaning they may have on the dreamer.

When Do Dreams Happen?

Scientific research into dreaming suggests various functions: they can process emotions; they can process events from the day (both the trivial as well as significant) we didn’t have time or capacity to resolve, and they can erase memories for us. Scientifically, dreams can happen at any point whilst we sleep but the most significant ones generally happen during our REM sleep which happens at a later stage of our sleep cycle.

The Mystery of Dreams

But there is so much still unknown about dreams. I think that is why so many of us find them fascinating. Whilst the neuroscientists continue their important work discovering more about dreams, I believe that as in psychotherapy, generally the dreamer is the most important person to make sense of the dream. Join me next month as we delve into the subject a little more and in particular, look at ways of recording your dreams.

My next post will be on dream journaling…