Counseling & Dreamwork
in Oregon & Washington
How Do We Do Dreamwork Together?
What is a Dreamwork session like?
A creative, sensitive, and spiritually-minded dreamer has been awoken many a time by attention grabbing dreams. They have enjoyed sharing those dreams with others as amusements and sometimes with a quiet pull to listen more closely. With more recent challenging life transitions, new awarenesses of aging, and an existential languishing sense of meaning and purpose, they are newly inspired to take their nightly messages to heart.
They have written their dreams down occasionally in their journal, maybe even regularly for a week or month at a time. But life has had a way of relentlessly intervening. Now is the time, they know, but lament over how daunting it feels to try to make sense of dream language on their own.
Finding someone to work on their dreams with, someone who is trained as a therapist and as a dreamwork guide would be welcome ground. They think, “I don’t have to do this alone.”
They search and find someone to work with, and are directed to get a dedicated dream journal. Be intentional, the guide implored. Consider making the cover an art project. Make the first page a love and gratitude letter to your dream-maker, said the guide in the initial consultation.
That next night, they lay down to sleep. They glance over to their nightstand where their new dream notebook and pen rest in wait. Lights out, head on pillow, this soul on a journey welcomes what may come as they slip into the realm of all that is unconscious—all that holds the potential to be revealed in symbols, images, and surreal dramas.
Night rolls through to morning; they wake slowly allowing any remembered dream material to come into focus before doing anything else. Sitting up, they write down or type all remembered details in the present tense to hold onto the aliveness of the dream experiences.
With anticipation, excitement, vulnerability, and hope, they prepare to begin the collaborative process of dreamwork with the experienced guide. They imagine this active dreamwork process deepening their relationship with the unknown, wondering how it will go.
They email copies of all their remembered and recorded dreams ahead of the session, however fragmented, unimpressive, disturbing or awesome.
They enter the virtual meeting space from the familiar surrounds of home or other safe and supportive space to begin the guided inner journey.
“What has had your attention this week in waking life?” the dreamwork guide asks.
With dreams in mind, the dreamer offers connections they have made overall throughout the week.
“What themes or patterns are you noticing in your dreams?”
More reflection.
“Listen in for a moment.”
“Which of your dreams wants to be explored?” Or, “What dream do you feel most reluctant to attend to?” Asks the dream guide. The dreamer choses a place to enter.
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“Stepping back in, read the dream aloud to me.”
So, we begin.
WHAT DREAMWORK REQUIRES
Dreamwork requires a commitment to healthy sleep habits, an intention and effort to remember your dreams and then record them before they slip away back into the oceanic unconscious realm. It also requires a desire to explore your inner world with creative imagination and respect for ways of knowing that are beyond rational and/or scientific inquiry, that are in the realms of all that can only be known through symbolism, metaphor, religion, ritual, philosophy, poetry, story, art.
So, it is prerequisite that you have an inherent respect and interest for these ways of knowing, exploring, and journeying.
You will need to type up your dreams to be able to send them the morning of or night before a session to give me time to read them. We will likely work with only one of the dreams in a session, and as time allows identify some overall themes and repeating images over time.
The reason for recording and sending me all your dreams regardless of how brief, incomplete, or uninteresting they may seem is because our waking egos can be quite guarded when it comes to exploring any territory that may challenge its control. That way, the dreams we work with are in the context of all that comes through from your dream maker.
Once we’ve chosen a dream to enter back into, I’ll invite you to read the dream out loud in the present tense. The present tense writing and reading supports an experiential, immersive state increasing your ability to remember more details, experiment with different points of view, and actively imagine the dream forward, particularly if the dream does not seem to have a natural conclusion.
METHODS OF DREAMWORK
From there, we will work from a fairly consistent structure informed by C.G. Jung and those who followed in analytic and archetypal psychology. This is a merging of interpretive and experiential (animation of dream images, somatic, active imagination) approaches as seems useful.
Methods we will use include:
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Identifying the overall feelings you experienced in the dream
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Naming the dream (If you haven’t already)
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Looking at the dream’s dramatic elements:
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Setting
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Characters or dream images (this may include animate and inanimate images)
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Plot—narrative story line (if there is one)
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Resolution—If there isn’t one, this would be an opportunity to use active imagination to dream the dream forward to a resolution of some sort.
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Identify all the individual elements in the dream—the dream images.
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Make associations to those elements from different points of view:
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Personal
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Cultural
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Archetypal
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Experiment with replacing those associations for the image
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For example, if you had a stray dog pulling on your pant leg and you associate “Stray Dog” with “dangerous,” “abandoned,” “needing help” you might retell the dream with “there was dangerous, abandoned, need for help” pulling on my pant leg.
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This can be particularly helpful when an image is someone or something that is difficult to make subjective because you are engaging with them in your waking life on a daily basis.
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Reflect on and explore new insights and ways of incorporating them into your conscious, waking life.
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This could include expressive arts, experiments with approaching a problem or relationship differently, or making a change parts of you have been avoiding or unsure of their merit.
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Once you get more familiar with how your psyche or dream maker communicates with you, you will learn to trust messages in your dreams to show you things you don’t already know, things to integrate into your conscious awareness about your self and life dynamics. You will be less and less inclined to project your shadow elements or unconscious motivations onto others and instead integrate them into your sense of Self. These insights and changes all being in service to your personal growth, individuation, becoming your whole, true self.
Note: As a dreamwork guide, I do not interpret your dreams for you. We work together to discover meaning from them by exploring your personal and our cultural and archetypal associations and engaging the dream images. You’ll come to trust your associations and let go of any that don’t move you.
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