Dreamwork may be extremely clarifying, liberating, and even beautiful. But it is not therapy. I highly recommend seeking out a therapist before doing dreamwork. It's also a good idea to share your dream analysis experience with your therapist if you feel comfortable doing so. Dreamwork is a fantastic adjunct to traditional psychotherapy, and it may uncover themes that would not be unearthed as easily through talk therapy. These experiences may point you toward new goals and growth areas, and your therapist will be happy to work with you to process these.
These are some important objectives of therapy which are not facilitated through dreamwork:
Sometimes, we identify behaviors in ourselves that we would like to change. While these sorts of behaviors may come up as we analyze dreams, dreamwork itself cannot modify these behavioral patterns. Dream analysis may indicate dynamics behind an addiction, but on its own it cannot treat addiction.
As a person who has experienced depression and anxiety myself, I have found that dreamwork gives me a sense of meaning when I might struggle to find it otherwise. Dreams sometimes present us with symbols that tell us important things about our depression. Our anxiety may be represented as an insurmountable mountain or an indecipherable high school locker, and we can work with these images to learn a great deal about the causes of these difficult emotions. That said, dreamwork itself cannot treat anxiety, depression, or any other complex emotional issue.
Traumatic events often replay themselves in dreams. Dreamwork can help to make sense of nighttime experiences which are otherwise meaningless and cruel. The past few decades of work in the field of trauma therapy, though, have taught us that it is crucial to reconnect with our bodies, to regain physical autonomy and a sense of safety, after a traumatic event. We must learn to regulate our nervous systems, and this should be done with an experienced trauma therapist.
When we sleep, our unconscious mind communicates more freely than it does during waking life. Freud theorized that this was because we are immobile when we sleep, and so our ego relaxes its control over our impulses. After all, we are not able to act on these impulses while in this state (unless we sleep walk!). Jung would say that dreams "compensate" the conscious attitude, and so heavy subject matter we have repressed emerges through dreams; in this sense our psyche is attempting to maintain balance, to integrate darkness and express wholeness. Because of this, it is not uncommon for dreams to reveal more about us than we realize. Frequently, when I do dream analysis work, people are surprised that a "silly" dream tells much about their so-called shadow, or relates to a trauma they have experienced.
If difficult or traumatic subject matter arises during dreamwork, I will refer you to an experienced trauma therapist. I highly recommend finding a good therapist before starting dreamwork.
That said, most dreamwork is energizing and empowering! Don't worry too much about what might come up. Just know that it might happen sometimes, and if it does, I'm prepared to connect you with further resources.
As mentioned above, dreamwork can cover sensitive subject material. For this reason, all dream content is strictly confidential and encrypted. However, if you share anything in your dream that indicates a situation of future and/or ongoing harm/abuse to yourself or others, I will need to break confidentiality to contact the appropriate authorities. This is extremely rare, but if it happens, I will reach out to you to explain why I needed to do this.
When you submit a dream, I ask for some personal information. This is solely for the purposes of adding context to a dream. Certain symbols and images may carry different meanings depending on our age and the way we express our gender. Your email is only collected for the purposes of sending the dream report. I will never sell this information, and I will never share it, unless I need to break confidentiality for the reasons stated above. You do not need to provide any information that you'd rather not disclose.
In ancient times, dreams were often analyzed as prophecy. While it's enticing to view a dream as a promise of riches or a happy marriage, my view is that dreams cannot predict the future in this sense. Dreams may intimate events to come, but they do this by revealing dormant unconscious contents. We may have dreams which tell us we will be successful, but this is not because the dream is "seeing the future". The unconscious mind is simply communicating information about a potential which is already there, though this capacity may be in a nascent state. An individual may choose to develop this potential or ignore it. Dreams are not usually telling us about anything divinely fated to be. More often they are telling us what we already knew, but had forgotten about ourselves.
A good gardener can look at a seedling and tell you that it will probably grow up to be a sunflower, or spearmint, or a weed. Only time will tell us what the plant will actually develop into, and the results might be totally surprising!
As you work with your dreams, you will integrate their contents into your conscious mind. This is not always straightforward, but in general this means that your dreams will evolve as you analyze them. Jung observed that dreams became more abstract, more symbolic as his clients continued to analyze them. For this reason, I can't guarantee that dream analysis will reduce insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, or any other "abnormal" sleep phenomena. Dreams, when tended to, may allow the unconscious mind to resolve its tension. But they may also seek further expression, and this may disturb our sleep.