Dreams are the magical, sometimes scary imaginative worlds we inhabit during sleep. The journeys, adventures and encounters our nocturnal selves make to potentially bring back important encrypted messages, clues and insights into what we may need to do in this reality.
As an avid dreamer and also someone who works supporting others to unravel their dreams I recognise that I’m not always that effective at working on my dreams alone. Having an outside perspective always gives me greater insight and meaning leading to clearer actions from my Dreamwork.
Catching Dreams.
First Nation American Lakota and Ojibwe people use dream catchers to capture bad dreams. In the west, we have appropriated this tool as a symbol to hold onto our dreams which are often elusive upon waking.
Many people don’t recall dreaming (although we all do dream) and some people are rampant dreamers. Dreams offer coded, symbolic, mythic gifts from our unconscious and the best way to ‘catch’ them is to write them down. Whatever you can recall even if it’s just a word, a feeling, an image, try to have a dream journal by your bed and get down as much as you can as soon as you can upon waking. Telling a willing listener you dream is also a great tool for recall and gives you something to work with.
If you are experiencing a dream drought and want to rekindle your relationship with your dreams several techniques may help which you can find on the internet or you could have an experienced dreamer dream for you.
Not all Dreams are the Same.
My Teacher Robert Moss says that we experience all sorts of things in our dreams including communing with the dead, travelling into parallel lives in alternate universes, journeying to other places in this world, pre-cognitive dreams, warning dreams, and messages from our subconscious that can support us in our waking lives. To explore the rich world of your dreams is the potential to take away insights, actions and healing.
What’s in a Dream?
Dreams are often made up of archetypes and symbols, things are not necessarily as they seem (although they might be). We are all unique and different and so are the symbols of our dreams. Freud thought that anything long and skinny represented a penis (very simplified explanation) but Dreamwork will all have very different meanings depending on the context, the individual and their relationship to the image. For Example, Freud’s ice-cream might be erotic, My ice-cream might be offering me to participate in activities from my childhood to bring more pleasure into my life. Your ice-cream might be warning you to reduce sweets and check your teeth. The Dreamwork process with a practitioner supports you to unravel the messages of your dreams and to honour them by taking some form of action whether that’s a dream-re-entry to find out more, a ritual, a dream inspired shopping trip or some other kind of action. Dreams offer us an opportunity to learn, heal and discover.
Regular dreamwork supports in developing intuition – a tool for life. Because dreams don’t necessarily make logical sense we are required to use our intuitive knowing when exploring the meaning of our dreams. Building skills in listening to and trusting our intuition is important in the process rather than someone else telling you what your dream means.
Dream Work with My Way Therapy is a powerful process to examine deep unconscious material that is revealed to us nightly through our dreams.
The work is non-interpretive (You are the expert of your dreams) but a process of exploration supported by a trained therapist to examine the archetypal and symbolic content of dreams to discover how they may inform our waking lives. We honour the dreams by creating actions and rituals to bring into daily life.
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