Category: Personal dreamwork

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Do your dreams both fascinate and mystify you? We have answers!

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Dreams are invaluable allies in our relationship with ourselves, but for most people, they seem like a nonsensical mystery, or they are barely ever recalled. How do we remember and make sense of them? I have some answers for you…

When I wrote my first book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019), I spent more than a year researching ways to help therapists guide clients to use their dreams as a pathway towards an enriched, authentic life, and toward greater freedom from mental health issues. Now I plan to make this information accessible to everyone, whether you work clinically with dreams or not. So many of you have asked me for ways to personally work with your dreams that I am now working on a course and a book on this fun and fascinating topic. And I’m hoping you can help me by joining my pilot course.

 

Free video series answers the most common questions about dreams

When I talk about my work and writing about dreams, the first thing people tend to ask is how to remember their dreams. I have the answer for you here as Part 1 of a 3-part free video series. Part 2 explains why it is so important to pay attention to dreams: they can even save your life! And Part 3 offers three dreamwork practices you can use right away to deepen your experience and understanding of your own dreams.

The second question people tend to ask me about my clinical dream book is, can I use the information as a guide to understanding my own dreams? Is it written so anyone can understand it? The answer is yes, although is written mainly for clinicians, it is written in a user-friendly that is accessible to all.

 

Overcoming the challenges of working with your own dreams

But also no, it’s not the best guide to dreamwork for yourself. This is because there are special considerations when you are working on your own dreams. It’s just much easier to spot the foibles of others than it is to clearly see the blind spots in ourselves. So we tend to transfer this bias onto our own work with dreams. However, there are many ways to compensate for this and develop a deep connection with yourself via your dreams, and I will be teaching you all about these, and other ways to overcome potential challenges of personal dreamwork.

From March 2020 onward, I will be offering an ongoing program in dreamwork for yourself that will culminate in the publication of my next book. Each month, we will learn about and try out a new self-dreamwork practice and discuss our experiences as a cohort. We will talk about what was amazing, and what fell flat. We will brainstorm ideas about how to glean the most from our dreams, and share our breakthroughs.

This is a pilot course that will ultimately be offered more widely. The first cohort will be limited in size, and you will receive a discount in return for your feedback, active participation and willingness to act as part of a focus group of sorts on the topic of personal dreamwork. So it will be more interactive and hands-on, with more instructor involvement than future versions. With your permission, I may include some of your thoughts and dreams in the book itself! And of course if you want your dreams to remain private, I will completely respect that.

 

Check out the free video series

For a taste of my teaching, and more on the topic of working with your own dreams, enjoy this series of short videos. If you have already decided you want to join me for the course, you can get more detailed information and register here. Space will be limited, and this discounted rate ($297) and higher level of interaction will only be offered this one time as we co-create the course and enjoy discovering the most effective self-dreamwork practices together!

Sweet dreams, Leslie

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Come home to yourself via your dreams

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Is your inner life getting lost in the fray? Are you feeling overwhelmed with information, tasks and all the shiny objects that bombard us from the online world? Yes, this is another invitation, but one with a difference. This is an invitation to slow down and look inward, an opportunity to come home to yourself through your dreams.

If you have ever been utterly transported by a dream, immersed in a startlingly-real other world that has set your mood and train of thought on an entirely different path than is usual, then you know the power of dreams to evoke transformation. Most people I talk to about dreams are curious about them, fascinated even. You can sense they are pregnant with deeper meaning, but often frustrated that you cannot penetrate their mysterious nature.

Maybe you don’t dream very much, at least not as much as you used to. You may wake with a sense of having dreamt something profound – having solved the world’s problems (or your own) in your sleep — only to have this remarkable insight slip away the moment you open your eyes. Or you could be someone who recalls your dreams vividly, but then remains mystified by them.

 

Letting a big dream pass by without reflection is a huge missed opportunity

All the dreams that pass by without you actively engaging with them are missed opportunities to tend your inner life and reconnect with your depths. Dreams are the most direct, creative and personalized path to connecting with what is most important and meaningful to you. Unlike other forms of inner work like meditation and mindfulness, dreams are speaking directly to you. They’ve been called the ‘poor (wo)man’s therapist’ because they help us process our most salient emotions and memories night after night. But they are even more helpful if we know how to tend and work with them.

Would you like to be able to recall, record and work with your own dreams? Would you like a clearer understanding of their nature, and why they are so important? Or are you already working with some of your dreams via a dream group or therapist, but want a reliable way to entertain the dreams you don’t get a chance to discuss?

 

Your questions answered in a free short video series

If you said yes to any of the questions above, I have some immediate answers for you. In three 10-minute instalments, I tell you:

  1. How to recall more dreams
  2. Why dreams are so important
  3. Three simple practices aimed at making sense of and deepening your connection to your own dreams.

If you like what you see, you may want to join me in my 6-month online course on how to work with your own dreams. If you are intrigued, but not sure, check out the videos to get a sense of my teaching style and the material we will cover. And read on as I explain more.

 

A leaisurely, guided inward journey in the company of others

This is not a typical online course, but more of a guided inward journey in the company of other dreamers. The pace will be leisurely, allowing time for you to gather dreams, to spend time with the practices offered, and to reflect on them with other like-minded dreamers. The course, starting in early March, will be uniquely collaborative because it is the first time I’m offering it. In return for your feedback and active participation, I am offering a discounted rate.

The initial cohort will be a kind of focus group for the book I am writing on the topic of personal dreamwork. The class is also the first step in a comprehensive dreamwork certification program, so you can continue to deepen your dreamwork practice beyond this course if you want to.

 

How did I come to value dreams so much?

I have always been a bit of a dreamer, both day and night. As a kid, one of my favorite activities when I came home from school was to sit backwards on the couch and stare at the huge maple in our front yard. I would lose time as I drifted into the world of my imagination. People could shout in my ear and I wouldn’t hear.

Fast-forward many years to my 20-year career as a psychotherapist. As part of my training, I worked with a Jungian analyst, and as we opened up my inner life, I began to dream prolifically. When I was pregnant with my beautiful daughter Grace, I dreamt of being immersed in a forested pool of frogs. As her birth approached, I began to dream about my own very premature birth, not an easy one, and in fact, I was lucky to survive. My dreams helped me access and process this dramatic and triumphant start in life, weaving images of myself in an incubator with another near-death experience in a frothy river. (See my TED-style talk on nightmares for more of the story.)

In my work with clients, with dream groups and in the many classes I have taught, I have consistently found dreams to offer healing images, ways forward where none seems possible, and strikingly apt and densely-packed vignettes that are perfect for the person who dreamt them. Consistently, dreams bring just what is needed in the moment.

But almost all of us need help unpacking the treasures in our dreams. I have written a book for therapists on how to do this for clients. Now I am writing a book and a course for everyone interested in their dreams, and how you can begin working with them on your own. You don’t have to be a therapist, all are welcome.

 

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Four Reasons to Work with Dreams… and at the risk of being dramatic, they can even save lives!

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By Dr. Leslie Ellis

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my recent book which outlines 4 excellent reasons to work with dreams. This list is aimed at psychotherapists, but holds true for all dreamers! So, why work with dreams?

They point to our most salient emotional concerns

It may seem that we don’t need dreams to do this, but that we are always well aware of our most pressing emotional concerns. However, human consciousness is not always straightforward or consistent, and people can be very good at unwittingly deceiving themselves. In fact, one of the most popular forms of therapy (cognitive-behavioral therapy or CBT) was founded on the premise that our mind leads us astray and distorts our experience in a number of ways. One example is rationalization, a habit of talking ourselves out of our feelings using ‘rational’ arguments, such as, “I’m not sad that she left; I didn’t really love her anyway.” We can often fool our conscious mind, but such a person may dream of losing something of great value and wake up crying. If they pay attention to their dream, they will realize that they are in fact very sad about the loss of their relationship. Dreams are like that very good friend who is willing to be honest with us even when what they have to say is not easy to hear.

Dreams can also provide therapy clients with a way to introduce important yet deeply personal topics in the course of therapy, subjects they may want to bring up but are reluctant to do so due to fear, embarrassment or cultural norms that discourage personal revelation, even in therapy. A researcher (Goelitz, 2007), who works with clients preparing for death, found that dream work brought the focus of the session to the deeper emotional concerns rather than the more typical discussions about physical symptoms and treatment. She noted that the dream work helped her clients feel less alone and better prepared for death. She was convinced that these discussions would not have taken place had they not been facilitated by a dream.

Dreams bypass our defenses and speak the truth

Dreams tell the truth, even when such truth is uncomfortable and defended against in everyday awareness. During sleep our prefrontal cortices, responsible for, among other things, rational thought and executive functioning, mostly shut down for the night. During dreaming, our internal editor, and our moral authority also go to sleep. That’s why our dreams can sometimes be bizarre and why normally taboo subject matter such as explicit sexuality and violence can often appear in our dreams. At times, it seems as though our dreaming consciousness is trying to get our attention by delivering its content in the most flamboyant or dramatic way possible. It helps to know that dreams are often metaphorical, not meant to be taken literally. For example, I had a dream that I was eating horseshit and kind of enjoying it even though I was well aware of how disgusting this would seem to the people around me. I laughed to myself when I understood the dream’s message might have to do with a lecture I had listened to a few days’ prior that I found highly entertaining and yet filled with ideas I considered completely far-fetched.  Because I liked the person, I was trying to remain open to their ideas, trying to take in and digest the material, but having trouble doing so. The dream captured the complexity of my feeling about the situation with economy and humour.

There is considerable clinical evidence to suggest that dreams carry emotional truth that is often difficult for the dreamer to assimilate. One of the major benefits I have seen in working with dreams is that it can help clients to see and truly experience an unconscious aspect of their personality or behaviour that is not congruent with how they see themselves or want to be. For example, a client I will call Michael had a dream that he was walking on a beach and came across a group of people sitting in a circle, and his cousin was there with them smoking a crack pipe. Michael had a strong judgement about this, as smoking crack was something he would never do. But if, as some theories suggest, characters in a dream represent aspects of ourselves, then Michael was like his dream-cousin in some way. In the dream-work he did, I asked him to ‘be’ his cousin on the beach, and when he imagined this, he felt an attraction to the pipe, and then a dawning of awareness that this feeling of addiction was familiar to him as it coloured the dynamic of his relationships with the women in his life. He was flooded with shame and a heartfelt desire to change which fueled transformation in his relationship and many other aspects of his life.

 

Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that is stuck

History provides many good examples of how a dream can bring a creative new perspective. The person who invented and patented the first lock-stitch sewing machine solved the main challenges to developing a reliable machine because a dream pointed to the solution that had long eluded him. Elias Howe, who eventually became the second-wealthiest man in the U.S., came up with the novel idea of putting the hole in the ‘wrong’ end of the needle from a dream of a spear fight between warring native tribes. In the dream, some of the warriors’ spears punctured the fabric of the tents, snagged loops of thread and pulled them back through with the tips of their spears. Dreams are the sources of many great inventions, including the periodic table and Einstein’s theory of relativity. For someone who has studied a subject deeply but who has become stuck in a fixed way of looking at the problem, dreams can bring the fresh creative inspiration that was elusive. Sometimes ‘sleeping on it’ can bring unexpected and creative answers.

Dreams are embodied, and present us with an internally-generated world that is detailed and appears very real to all of our senses. This total immersion brings us in touch with the magical quality of dreaming. A dream is a richly-detailed world that is experienced as entirely real while the person is dreaming it. Even for those who experience lucid dreaming and become aware they are dreaming while in the midst of it, the experience feels very real. This aspect of dreams is what makes them so compelling, and such a useful tool in therapy for assisting clients in stepping out of their ordinary way of experiencing or seeing things. A dream can bring a broader perspective, a new way of seeing, a shift from ordinary consciousness, or habitual ideas, a step toward change.

 

Dreams provide diagnostic information and can show clinical progress

There are many ways that dreams can provide diagnostic information about clients, although the subject is a complex one because dreams can be cryptic. According to Oliver Sacks (1996) dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” Neurological disorders can alter dreaming processes in quite specific ways, and these can vary from person to person. Sacks gives the example of a patient with an occipital angioma who knew that if his dreams turned from their usual black and white to red, he was about to have a seizure. Some other examples Sacks offered are loss of visual imagery in dreams as a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams presaging remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to subtle changes in the body, and so appears prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

In some cases, this premonitory aspect of dreaming can even be life-saving. Famous dreamworker Jeremy Taylor offered the example of a woman from dream group that met regularly who dreamt of a purse of rotting meat. The dream was so disturbing to her and the other group members, the woman felt unsettled enough to have a diagnostic pap smear which turned out to be negative. She insisted on further testing which revealed she had a particularly aggressive form of uterine cancer that would have killed her had she not caught it in time. At the time of the dream she had no symptoms and was about to go on a trip – she credits the dream and the dreamwork for saving her life.

Not only can dreams be indicative of potential health changes for better or worse, they can also be used to track clinical progress. Tracking shifts or progress via dreams can be an easier task for therapists than using a dream to make an initial diagnosis because it is often easier to spot incremental change in the pattern of dreaming than to decipher something completely new. It takes some time to get to know the unique world of each dreamer, and paying attention to a series of dreams will make it clearer when something significant has changed. For example, in my research into the nature and treatment of recurrent PTSD nightmares (Ellis, 2016), specific kinds of changes in dreams that had been recurring repeatedly, sometimes for years, appeared to coincide with trauma recovery. This observation is supported by research that sampled 94 trauma survivors and found the closer their nightmares were to replicating the actual trauma event, the higher their level of related distress. For trauma therapists who track dreams, the progression from concrete to less realistic, more imaginative dreaming can be seen as a sign of clinical progress.”

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers online courses in personal and clinical dreamwork, and is opening a dreamwork certification program in 2020. For more information see www.drleslieellis.com or join her email list  if you want to receive blog posts, and training opportunities.

 

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Do we benefit from dreams whether we work them or not?

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There are varying schools of thought about whether we can benefit from dreams even if we don’t work with them.  At one end of the spectrum is the notion that dreams don’t do anything for us at all. At the other end is the idea that dreams are a piece of unfinished process that moves us forward only when we revisit the dream. The middle road is the notion that dreams are useful in and of themselves (and there are many theories about why and how they are useful), but they are more beneficial if you work with them. If you don’t have a dream therapist, simply writing your dreams down, telling someone, and allowing dreams to send your musings down an unfamiliar path can spark new ideas and insights.

I fall into the middle ground somewhere, but personally have found dreams to be most beneficial for myself and my clients when I spend time with them and actively try to align myself in the direction they send my attention and intention.

A dream that prevented suicide

There are many examples of dreams that do their work by themselves, needing no interpretation or further exploration. An entire book,  Dreams That Change Our Lives, a publication by the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), is devoted to the topic and filled with examples of transformational dreams. In one striking example, a woman who was planning suicide had a dream that she was at a friend’s funeral and Jesus angrily told her she had to give the eulogy. As she did this, she deeply felt the sorrow of all the friends and family attending, and forever changed her mind about killing herself.

For me, the transformation from a dream has mostly come in the context of therapy or working with through it with a friend or dreamwork partner. In a recent example, I dreamt I was trapped on a cliff, had run up a ridge with my sister and was trying to get down to the water via the rocky canyon on the other side that led to a small, rugged beach. We were on an island that was beautiful but with incredibly steep shores. My sister jumped down into the canyon where there was a brown leather couch – still a ways from the water, and I could not see any realistic way back out of there. But neither could I get back to where I had come from. I was perched in a small hollow that was sloped down toward the cliffs, and it felt like now that I had stopped my momentum, any little movement could affect my balance enough for me to fall to my death. That’s kind of where the dream left me – if I pushed myself back against the rock, as close into the little hollow as possible, I could hang on, but there was no way to rest in it, no flat enough perch to take my entire weight. In a word, it was terrifying. And it felt like there was no way out.

Dreamwork provides the way forward

I had the chance to work with the dream a few days later with a fellow therapist as part of a group exercise. I realized from my own work with traumatic dreams is that fear often narrows our field of vision, and we are not aware of all that is possible. I was dimly aware I was in a dream when I had it, but not enough to attempt to defy gravity. But I did realize, in talking about the dream, that there was another way to get out of my predicament: I could jump! I goal was to get into the water anyway – this would be the most direct route. The danger was in falling too close to the cliffs and landing on the rocks below, but it felt as though I could use momentum to run down the ridge and with momentum, launch myself up, out and away from danger.

Making the leap!

I told my friend how for most people, the prospect would be scary, but for me, jumping from a cliff would be fine because I spent my university years competing for the diving team. I wasn’t afraid of jumping from great height into deep water. She repeated back to me my sentiment about this: you know what you’re doing. The felt sense I got from this was, yes, be bold. Make the leap. So I imagined myself in the dream again and instead of cowering against the rock, I ran down the slope to get some speed and then launched myself into a swan dive, fully expecting to drop like a stone. Instead I started to soar. It reminded me of the one time I went parasailing from the top of Grouse Mountain, the pilot and I launching ourselves by running down a steep slope and then lifting off. I love it when dreams surprise me, and I came away with a feeling of soaring, of lightness and of being lifted up. It was such a different feeling from the way the dream had ended, and I felt grateful to my dream partner, and so glad I had a chance to move forward from where I had been crouched in terror on the cliffs.

Does this resolve everything as tidily as that? I don’t think there is anything tidy about dream work. If a dream is indeed alive (which is how I experience it), it is always changing. And there is never just one way to interpret and dream. There is probably a place in my life where I can’t quite rest, a place that feels precarious. There is also a part of me that feels the confidence of mastery, a sense of being called to do something again that I had once dedicated many hours over many years to achieve mastery. I am not talking literally about diving of course, my middle-aged body would have something to say about that. But writing is also a skill I acquired, and then honed, in my ten years as a professional writer and editor. Now I am writing again after a 20-year hiatus where my focus was on the practice of psychotherapy.

I feel like I did when jumping off that dream cliff – a sense that this is a familiar activity, a sense of knowing what I’m doing. It feels as if the dream is asking me to be bold and to be brave, implying I won’t drop like a stone, but will soar. I don’t know if dreaming the dream on and having such a splendid ending is truly a prediction of the future. But I can say that it gave me a lift, and implies I will be propelled forward by forces greater than my own if I boldly move forward, which feels both motivating and true. The feeling of soaring was a pleasure in the moment, one I can still feel when I sense inside, especially in my chest and shoulders. If that is all the dreamwork brings, it will have been worth the exercise. It made me want to sit down and write.

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Personal dreamwork example: Evolution dream

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In the last couple of posts, I wrote some suggestions about working with your own dreams, and now I’m going to give you a personal example of what I’ve done with an impactful dream I’ve been carrying around with me for the past month or so. Other dreams have come and gone, but this one has stayed with me. It feels like a big dream, the kind of dream worthy of extended time and attention.

Evolution Dream

I am driving my blue Audi (which often appears in my dreams) and nearing the peak of an ever-steepening mountaintop. I am almost at the crest and gun the engine but can feel steepness of the pitch is too much for my car. Just as gravity is about to pull the car back and down, I turn sharply to the left, like the perfect hammerhead turns my dad used to do with me in his little aerobatic biplane. I see a patch of grass about a mile down below me in the valley. I no sooner think this, when I am making a soft spongy landing on this bright green patch of grass. I have somewhere to get to, and ditch my car to start swimming toward a vague destination I imagine as a very exclusive cocktail party in a house perched on a cliff. My car follows dutifully along on the roadside, which is a gorgeous narrow European waterfront road with old stone retaining walls. I am swimming with a large, twisted stick that offers just a bit of flotation, and also slows me down, but I keep it with me because it will get me further in the long run. It’s getting dark and I still haven’t reached my destination, am resigned to get out, get in my car, and head back the other way, try again another day.

In the dreamwork with Robbyn, she suggests I don’t give up, but keep heading to my destination. Then I am Gollum, a small black lizard-like human emerging from the water at the base of the cliff on which the house is perched. I imagine starting to climb the cliff and as soon as I do, I am there, dressed up and standing in the cocktail party, surveying the view from the large front windows. There is a buzz of communication in all directions, many conversations at once. But then it dawns on me: no one is drinking. And no one is talking either. They are all telepathic and in the dream I think: I’ve found my people!

The dream gave me an expansive feeling, and I was content to carry that with me. This is what I mean by carrying a dream along in your body. At times I imagine swimming with the stick that takes me further though it’s cumbersome and wonder what that’s about. I consider the Gollum-figure as the earliest phase of evolution; I have an association to the idea that we evolved from the sea and at one point crawled up on land. Which makes me think the telepathic people represent the other polarity, a higher form of evolution.

I’ve worked with the dream for a good couple of hours with my dreamwork partner, and am very lucky to have someone so empathic, intuitive, highly trained and loving sit in the soup with me and my dreams. The process has stirred up such aliveness in this dream that I will keep working the material. I also recently attended the annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) and planned to don an aviator’s mask and scarf along with some webbed scuba gloves and a black hoodie to retell the dream as an enactment at the dream ball on the final night. I arrived late from dinner and the parade of dreamers had begun, so I chose to stay and watch rather than chase up to my room at the far corner of the 900-year-old Dutch abbey where the conference is held every few years. I did tell my dream to some friends at the ball, and again to my daughter. It seems that this is one of the purposes of having such dreams – to marvel at them, linger with them and then to share them, which immediately takes conversation to a deeper level of intimacy and connection.

In the future, I may paint the dream, continue to embody its most mysterious places, and possibly even talk about it in another dreamwork session. It’s clear I won’t be done with this dream for a long time, but it feels more like the dream is not done with me!

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Work with your own dreams using ‘bias control’

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In the last post, I introduced a few ways to work with your own dreams: by writing them down and journaling about your impressions and associations, by drawing them and by embodying the emotion the bring and letting it stay with you to mull over. There is another way that is so useful it deserves its own post. It’s a method called ‘bias control’ because it is intended to do just that: control for the inherent bias we bring to most of our own dreams. Although they always bring something new, we tend to see them in terms of what we already know and believe, so we are notoriously bad judges of our own dream worlds.

Bias control is an idea from Eugene Gendlin, who developed an experiential, body-oriented practice called focusing as a systematic way for people to sense into their body’s wisdom, and its responses to their current situation. He developed a method to let your body interpret your dreams, and suggested bias control for those wanting to work on their own dreams.

Dreams bring us back into balance

The practice is simple, but contrarian. It asks that you take the least-attractive, most aversive aspects of your dream, and experientially imagine being that way. This idea is in keeping with Carl Jung’s idea that dream are compensatory: whenever our view is too much one way, a dream will come that could help bring us back into balance. In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung gave an example of this. He dreamt his client was in a high tower, so tall that he had to crane his head back to look up at her. In fact, in his analytic work with her, he realized he had been looking down on her, and the dream helped set him straight.

In another example, a client dreamt about a good friend whom she thought was far too permissive with her dog, letting him run free in situations the dreamer deemed unsafe. In the dream, the dog is driving a car, doing a good job of it and having a lot of fun, but the dreamer was really anxious the dog will crash. She is annoyed at her friend’s nonchalance, so I asked her imagine having that more relaxed, permissive point of view, to feel what it might be like to have less worry. It was a good feeling to move a little in that direction, provided she didn’t take it too far.

Try being dream characters you don’t like

You can try this yourself any time you have a dream figure that you take exception to, and this tends to happen often. If you dream of an authoritarian prison guard, for example, you might consider where you could be more assertive or protective. If you dream of a meek, mousy little figure that makes you squirm with their obsequious nature, you might try out being a bit gentler and more humble. If there is an irresponsible crack addict in your dream, you might try on the idea of being less responsible, or where addiction plays a role in your life.

What happens when you take this contrarian path is that it leads out of your usual way of doing things. Gendlin said it doesn’t mean you need to become just like the figure in your dream that you despise, but that moving slightly in that direction might bring you something new that expands and changes you, and that this might be the dream’s very purpose.

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How to work with your own dreams: Stay engaged with them

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I’m feeling celebratory because yesterday I pressed ‘SEND’ on the very last step in writing my book on the clinical use of dreams. Happy and tired, like I’ve just given birth – which, in a way, I have. Now I want this long-term labour of love to be read widely, and to reach those it’s intended for. Hence, this blog, intended to help spread the word about the book, and to be a vehicle to continue sharing my expanding knowledge about how to work with dreams. I expect to be a student of dreams for a long time.

The question I was asked most often in the past year and a half, when I told people I was writing a book about dreams, is, will it help me interpret my own dreams? Can anyone read it, or is it just for professional therapists? Most seem to be wanting some dreamwork self-help, which got me thinking about what kinds of things might facilitate doing dreamwork on one’s own.

The first caveat is that I think it is always better to tell a dream to a partner or group because we can be amazingly obtuse about our own dreams. Dreams often refer to things we repress, and as we revisit them, the same biases are present in our attempt to make sense of our dreams. However, there are lots of situations where you might want to do some personal dreamwork: if you have no one else available, if you want to revisit a dream that is still reverberating with you, or if you have a backlog of dreams you can’t get to in your dream group or therapy session. Sometimes a dream just lingers, its striking images flashing through our minds during the day, and inviting some form of engagement with the dream.

Let the dream fill you up

There are many things that will open up the dream to you in spite of your inherent tendency to dismiss or overlook some key aspects of it. The first is to write it down in detail along with your impressions and associations to the dream. Then read the dream back and attempt to re-experience the dream, especially the emotion it brought with it. In sampling that emotion, perhaps ask yourself if this feeling is familiar or trying to tell you something, or maybe just linger in the feeling and don’t try to figure it out. If you let it fill you up, it will speak to you in some way that may not be predictable in advance. You can’t get the message by speculating about how you would feel if such a thing were to happen, but rather by having the experience in your bones, or your belly, or wherever it seems to live in your body.

You can draw a sketch of the dream. This also has the potential to quiet the analytic part of you that will prematurely try to decipher the dream as if it were a puzzle to be solved. Drawing a dream shifts you into the right hemisphere, the associative, experiential side of the brain that is better suited for dreamwork. As you draw, the image may speak to you more directly from the dream itself than from your written account, and surprise elements may creep into your drawing.

Both carrying the dream images and emotions with you, and making a drawing of the dream are ways to continue the engagement with your dream over time. The big, numinous, moving dreams we have are worthy of this level of engagement, and the process can shift and change, sometimes over a lifetime.