Dream Therapy
Have you ever wondered about a strange dream you’ve had?
Have you been haunted by a particularly intense dream?
Do you ever wonder why dreams seem so crazy?
Perhaps you have difficulty remembering your dreams.
Have you been having more nightmares lately?
Max Ernst
Dreams offer us a valuable path to personal growth and psychological healing. I have found in my private practice and in the trainings I lead in working with dreams, that even the dreams we do not remember have a lot to offer us. In all my years working with dreams I have yet to come across one that did not offer opportunity to integrate significant material. Often the most frightening nightmares offer us the most valuable material.
Applied Existential Psychotherapy (AEP), which I both practice and teach, is uniquely effective in its approach to dream work. It is rooted in existential phenomenology, which deals with consciousness and our tendency to deceive ourselves about the nature of consciousness. AEP also draws techniques from somatic psychology, Gestalt therapy, and psychoanalysis. From Gestalt comes the technique of becoming the dream in real time, somatic psychology offers the technique of embodying the dream, and psychoanalytic theory uncovers the value of understanding dreams. Additionally it is more valuable to integrate a dream than to understand it.
The Benefits of Exploring Dreams in Therapy
We spend on average one third of our lives sleeping. Much of the time spent sleeping we are engaged in the process of dreaming. This points to the probability of the importance of dreams. Throughout written history there is evidence of the weight humans have applied to the experience of dreaming. Recent trends in behavioral psychology have tried to diminish the importance of dreams, reducing them to mere working out of the days issues or pointless meanderings during sleep. I find this to be a product of a rather shallow view of what it means to be human that negates the vital role of the imaginal in our daily lives.
Iris Raiz
Freud’s first major work was The Interpretation of Dreams. Carl Jung’s depth psychology is entirely rooted in the analysis of dreams and the imagination. His ground breaking lectures on psychosis, Symbols of Transformation, is based on the analysis of his patient’s dreams over time.
The act of imagining is where we find meaning in life. It is also the essence of all human accomplishments from the arts to the scientific to the technical. Dreams are consciousness in the mode of imagining. In dreams we have stepped out of our comfortable everyday reality into freedom. As Sartre puts it, “Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.” Perhaps that is the most frightening aspect of dreams - in dreams we are free, untethered from the illusion of solidity.
The founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls worked extensively with dreams. He believed that dreams were a vehicle to self-actualization. He said, “ The dream is an existential message.” What he meant is that the dream is created by you and that it is you telling yourself about what is going on in your life. According to Perls every part of the dream is you since you created it. Often dreams are telling you something fundamental about what you are avoiding in your life. Jung says something very similar about dreams: “ A dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself, the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public and the critic.” While these two titans of psychology had a similar view of the nature of dreams, they differed vastly on how to approach dreams.
R Chauvin
Jung would spend years analyzing a patient’s dreams looking for repeated symbols and archetypes that would point to the unconscious direction of a patient’s psyche. He believed he could direct a patient toward “individuation” or balance through the analysis of dreams and other imaginal processes.
Perls was always focused on the now. He was influenced by existential philosophy and did not believe in an inaccessible unconscious. The methodology of both Gestalt and Applied Existential Psychotherapy (AEP) are rooted in an existential understanding of the nature of consciousness. We live bodily in the present, always moving away from the past and towards the future. The way to approach a dream is to be the dream in the present moment, to become all the parts or characters of a dream. In other words, to use Jung’s dream description above, become “the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public and the critic.”
The Dream is Our Creation, if We Become the Characters We Unravel its Meaning
Mango Cornel
In this way of working with dreams, the dream interprets itself to the dreamer and the dreamer is able to integrate as opposed to simply understand the dream material. Coming back to the quote from Sartre above, the dreamer is able realize their freedom, which is what Perls means when he talks about actualization.
With the guidance of a skilled therapist trained in Gestalt-existential methodologies, you can come to understand and integrate any dream from the simplest to the most baffling. You were trying to tell yourself something, usually important, when you had that dream. You can learn to understand what you were saying and how to act upon it. Most clients and students I do dream work with are astounded and pleasantly surprised by what unfolds when guided through performing their dream in the present moment.
Are You Ready to Explore the World of Your Dreams?
The power of your imagination can lead to a full, rich existence. One other note about the AEP approach to dream work. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been working exclusively with virtual sessions. I find virtual sessions to be somewhat lacking most of the time for a variety of reasons. This, however, is not true with dream work. I have found virtual dreamwork sessions to be every bit as effective as the usual in- office sessions. This is true with dream groups as well. In fact the only groups I have continued are my dream groups and supervision groups.
So please if you would like to gain greater understanding of your life and your dreams, CONTACT ME. I love doing dreamwork - online and offline.
In the Meantime, May Your Dreams be Rich and Fulfilling.
R. Chauvin