Dream therapy is a way of doing therapy in which each session focuses on a dream you would like to work with. Usually, this will be a dream from the previous week. However, it might just as well be a dream from earlier in your life that you were reminded of during the week. Whatever dream you want to work with, the fact that you feel motivated to work with that dream material suggests it has relevance for you now.
My core training is gestalt therapy, and I have written a blog post about the gestalt approach to dreamwork that you might find interesting. However, my approach to dreamwork generally is to integrate insights and ways of working from a wide range of approaches. This doesn’t mean that switch from theory to theory. Rather, I have a certain style of dreamworking that is able to draw on a wide range of influences.
My style of dreamworking is to explore the dream as a present influence in the room with us. I consider dream experiences to be as subjectively real as waking experiences, and I have found that affording this level of respect to dream experiences lends intensity and power to dreamwork. The way that we explore the dream material, and the kinds of suggestions I make, will be influenced by a combination of what you need from the dream exploration, and my sense of what might support you in getting that.
I offer dream therapy on either a brief or ongoing basis.
Brief dream therapy is good for working on a dream series or a particularly long and vivid dream that you feel is important and needs to be fully explored. We aren’t going to cover a long and complex dream in a single session. However, we can identify the important themes, characters and sequences, and plan a number of sessions, focusing on one or more elements in each.
Ongoing dream therapy is good for having a regular space in which your dreams can be honoured. If you have recurring dreams or recurring dream themes, then ongoing therapy offers a good set up for exploring those themes as they come up. Developing the dreaming state, in particular experimenting with lucid dreaming, is more appropriate to ongoing dream therapy. This can also be a good medium for working with nightmares, provided these are not nightmares caused by post traumatic stress (if you think this could be the case, then trauma therapy might be more appropriate for you).
If you’re interested in dreams but have difficulty remembering your dreams, then creating a space focused exclusively on your dreams is a good way of developing your ability to remember dreams. It is a gestalt observation that we can only develop in areas that have sufficient support for development; our culture does not generally support dreaming as a worthwhile activity, and so we tend not to develop our ability to dream. Ongoing dream therapy is one way of supporting that development.
If you feel like dream therapy would be good for you, then contact me to book an initial consultation. In the meantime, to give you an idea of the kinds of approaches that influence me, I have written rough summaries of a range of approaches to dreamworking that I am familiar with.
Freudian
Jungian
Perlsian gestalt
Lucid dreaming
Dream questing
Dream development
Dream weaving
Tibetan dream yoga
If you think dream therapy is an approach that would suit you, then contact me for an initial consultation.
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