Pleasant Dreams

The quest for a good night’s sleep is exhausting but once you get there you enter an incredible adventure into your subconscious mind. We all dream. Sometimes we remember them in their entirety, we remember pieces and parts of them or we don’t remember them at all. Some sleeps are full of them and sometimes we can go weeks, months or years thinking that it’s been so long since we’ve had a dream.

In the clinical world, both Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) produced philosophies and theories pertaining to our dreams. Freud viewed dreams as scientific where "Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” Freud believed that symbols in dreams only apply to the individual on a personal level. Carl Jung viewed the dream world as more spiritual. Jung believed "Dreams are the guiding words of the soul” and that dreams were part of a collective unconscious containing the combined knowledge and experience of all humankind, where symbols (called archetypes) are universal.

A dream is your mind’s way of trying to communicate with you in your resting state. Therapists can use client dreams to interpret issues, trauma, hope and emotions to better understand the client’s waking world. However, to give therapeutic dream interpretation the respect and value that it needs to be reliable, an established relationship between the Client and Therapist needs to have a solid foundation. Dreams can prophesize the future, process the past, resolve issues and provide symbols with different meanings. In order to get a full account of an interpretation, the Therapist needs to put it into perspective within the bigger picture.

For more information on dreams and how it relates to therapeutic processes, or to schedule a therapeutic dream interpretation (minimum 6 weekly sessions), contact Rebecca Cola, MSW, LCSW.