The Importance of Dreams
Dreams often depict, through images and scenes, important thoughts or emotional content that is out of our waking awareness. While they might seem weird or nonsensical, dreams provide meaningful glimpses into aspects of ourselves that can assist our understanding if we attempt to make sense of them. If a client is interested in collaborative dreamwork, I will invite them to explore their thoughts, feelings, and connections to the dream and the images in it to see how it might relate to something they are experiencing in their life at a given point in time. I might also offer my own thoughts and, through this conversation, we often reach a richer understanding of the dream.
There are many different types of dreams, and some dreams are common to all people, such as dreams of falling, being naked, running away from a threat, and flying. A dream which involves a specific person might relate to specific aspects of that person or to common associations with the person. It could also relate to aspects of that person you admire and would like to incorporate more into your own life. A dream about Taylor Swift, for example, might relate to themes of performance, singing or speaking, romance, fame, celebrity, or influence. Maybe the dreamer is being encouraged to communicate more freely, put themselves out there, or to embrace their innate talents in some aspect of their life. Dreams also use wordplay to reveal their meaning. A Taylor Swift dream might relate to the words “tailor” and “swift”. Maybe the dreamer had an experience in real life with a tailor who did alterations on his pants in a hurried way. The “tailor” was “swift”, and the dream might capture that by including the musical artist “Taylor Swift.”
What you are feeling during the dream is also helpful information about what the dream might be bringing up. Anxiety, fear, excitement, anger, outrage, guilt, shame, sadness, fun, desire, love and lust are all common feelings that show up in our dreams. The most important thing about working with dreams is that there is not one “right answer” or single correct interpretation. Dreams have layers of meaning and are best approached with an open mind and some imagination.
While there are resources online to help decode specific symbols in a dream, this can be a limited way of working with dream material because it takes the symbol out of the context of the rest of the dream. There are also almost countless meanings any given symbol can have. A gun, for example, could represent self-defense, aggression, masculine power, or self-efficacy. But if the dreamer is a police officer, the gun might relate to his or her job. Or if the dreamer recently read a news article about gun control, the gun dream could relate to freedom, rights, and control. Talking through a dream with another person — such as a therapist — can be a more dynamic and enriching way of exploring the dream in greater depth.