Healing with Dreams

healing with dreams

This article about healing with dreams and the therapeutic process examines how Jungian dream work promotes emotional healing and personal transformation. The author offers several examples of individuals deeply affected by reflection on dream symbols. Portions of this material were incorporated into the book Dreamwork and Self-Healing (Routledge, 2009).

Dreamwork and healing with dreams is one of the central techniques of depth psychotherapy, allowing symbolic formations of the deep unconscious to communicate their insights and to guide the patient toward greater wholeness. Dreams make emotionally charged material accessible to consciousness, quickly and safely. They help give focus to the therapeutic process and indicate the direction of treatment. Dreams provide important clues about the origins of the client’s pain and what issues or emotions need to be examined and resolved. Working with dreams can be a potent catalyst of intrapsychic and behavioral change, and has a unique capacity to promote healing from within.

Dreams are like icebergs rising out of the deep waters of the unconscious. Some are icebergs of the past, helping us understand past traumas and undigested memories, and thus are retrospective. Dreams are integrative in that they enable us to perceive and reconcile our many conflicting sub-personalities. They are also prospective or anticipatory, icebergs of the future, depicting what is emerging, images of what the individual potentially can become. Looking backward and forward simultaneously, the dream’s essential function is always to expand the aperture of consciousness, the circumference of perception, the sphere of identity.

The main dreamwork technique I utilize is a willingness to inquire with open curiosity into the current significance of every character, place, and action in the dream — each of which refers to the dreamer’s intrapsychic condition and current life situation. The often humorous and paradoxical messages revealed by dreams jog loose new perceptions. Received reverently, each dream becomes a pearl from the depths of the ocean of consciousness. Reflection on the dream’s mystery evokes a feeling approaching religious awe; we become filled with amazement at the psyche’s capacity to portray its own condition.

In this paper I will recount some examples of how dreams can influence the therapeutic process, evoking central themes that become the focus of treatment. For example, Bob, a man in his mid forties beginning a course of psychotherapy, had this dream: “I am six years old. I am with my mother and we are cleaning out the closets.” The therapist is immediately drawn to the emotional significance of events in the client’s sixth year and the need to sort through whatever has been hidden in the closet. Many family secrets were brought out of hiding in subsequent therapy sessions. I learned about the domestic violence and alcoholism that had been closely-kept family secrets. Bob is currently in a deep depression after the breakup of a relationship. As he begins to examine his anger, his previously unrecognized tendency to act abusively toward women, his sadness, and his need to accept his solitude, he dreams: “I am on my hands and knees in front of my bed potting a cactus plant.” The cactus plant represents Bob’s prickly personality. When asked what the further significance of a cactus might be, he said, “A cactus can live in a desert for a long time with very little water, and it finds its juice within its own body.” The cactus is a symbol of his need to find juice or aliveness in the desert of his solitude, rather than looking to women and relationships for excitement. Bob has to learn to live with himself, to care for himself. Being on his hands and knees suggests the emergence of humility.

A simple dream often carries deep emotional meaning. In her second therapy session a woman reports, “I dreamed that I am in the store where I work, counting a stack of money. A bunch of money is missing.” The client offers the interpretation that, “Being robbed in the dream reminds me of how I was robbed of my childhood. I never got a chance to be a kid, to be cared for and pampered. I was short-changed.” As we explored this theme, Jill recounted to me ways she had been parentified, being forced to function as a little adult in her family from the age of six. She began to understand more clearly how much grief and anger she still carried from her lost childhood. But the dream has another meaning: money is missing. Jill is grappling with serious money issues. She is not earning much and her self-esteem is very low. When I ask for her associations to “money is missing,” she says, “I feel like I’m not worth anything.” Each dream image is a hologram of the inner world full of condensed meanings.

A woman named Wendy, with an extensive history of childhood abuse, had a lot trouble expressing anger and standing up for herself, and she was frequently victimized by others. She dreamed: “Some friends take me to an animal rescue place with wildcats, bobcats. They show us around, show us how they talk to the animals and handle them. A big lioness or wildcat jumps me and puts her claws into my leg. I talk to her and try to stay calm.” Asked for her associations to the wildcat, Wendy said, “It is powerful, untamed. Anger and aggression are hard for me. The lioness is a creature that knows how to show its claws.” The dream suggested a need for Wendy to rescue and shelter the fierce, animal part of herself. Where previously she had been like an innocent lamb or a victim, with little ability to stand up for herself, this dream heralded the emergence of a positive capacity for aggression, will, self-defense, self-protection. A week later Wendy reported standing up to someone who had wronged her, writing a letter to detail her grievance and to express her hurt and anger. The dream coincided with the emergence of her inner wildcat.

Tanya, a woman in an asexual marriage, dreamed that there was a massive wall between the living room and the bedroom of her home. The wall symbolized her resistance to sexuality, her need to maintain boundaries to defend against physical and emotional injury. Contemplating this image proved helpful not only to the dreamer but also to James, her husband, who was able to understand for the first time the depth of Tanya’s fear of sexual intimacy. Tanya was able to recognize how her body had become frozen in fear, creating an impenetrable barrier to any sense of closeness. Working with this dream proved valuable in enabling Tanya and James to begin dismantling the wall between them.

An ex-priest dreamed that he entered a cave where he found an altar, in front of which lay a sleeping wolf. The wolf symbolized both his feelings of being a lone wolf, fending for his own survival now that he had left the Church, but also his long dormant (sleeping) animal nature, his sexual desire, his hunger for embodied, passionate life.

Dreams provide important insights about the therapeutic relationship. A fifty-year-old woman named Ann presented numerous dreams that referred to transference feelings toward her therapist. In one, Ann sat in the back of a lecture hall as her therapist gave a lecture. She could not decide whether to stay or leave. Profound ambivalence about the therapeutic process is demonstrated. Should she stay or flee? The therapist also receives information from the dream that Ann may perceive him as overly intellectual or “preachy.” In another dream, her therapist disappears unexpectedly, reflecting her fear of abandonment by him.

Dreams deepened Ann’s treatment immeasurably. Later, she dreams, “I am a flightless bird.” Her flight and freedom of spirit are inhibited. She is dysphoric, chronically depressed, unable to find any pleasure in daily living. When I asked her to explore this further, she described how caged-in she felt in her marriage, how her husband actively thwarted her movements toward greater autonomy, and how little fun they had together.

Then Ann dreams, “A man is at my window, angry and menacing. There is something wrong with him. I feel concern for him, for he is in desperate need of help.” Ann has a history of incest, so issues of boundary intrusion (angry man at the window) are central. She herself is desperate for help. But conflicted feelings toward her childhood abuser are also reflected, including fantasies of helping or rescuing him. Ann has suffered from a phobic aversion to sex and has been unable to make love with her husband for over twenty years. This dream helped Ann understand how her refusal of sexuality had started out in her childhood as a self-protective measure, to keep out the intruder. She also associated the man in the dream to her husband, who had become increasingly angry with her. She was able to see that, while she was repulsed by her husband, she was also terrified by the prospect of leaving him because, she believed, he needed her to take care of him. Several months later, Ann dreams that she is wearing the red dress she wore the night before her wedding, a dream that evokes the expectancy and excitement of marriage, and feelings of being young, beautiful, sexy, and desirable. Later she dreams that she is pregnant for the third time. She is pregnant with herself; the dream portends inner rebirth and renewal. This dream coincided with her beginning sex therapy with her husband.

Dreams reveal and intensify our emotional states. A man dreamed he went to a Thanksgiving party but there was no substantial food there, only a few pieces of fruit and some small snacks. Some children arrived at the party and were disappointed that they were not going to eat. Healing with Dreams: This dream encapsulated an emotional experience of deprivation and lack of nurturance that he realized he had felt since childhood.

Dreams may also help us understand the complex developmental challenges of a particular stage of life. Here are two dreams of a man in midlife (39 years of age). A longtime meditator, Karl longed to actively pursue his inner, contemplative journey but felt restricted in these pursuits due to the responsibilities of fatherhood and his career. He sought psychotherapy to address marital stress, an obsession with viewing pornography, and sexual problems in his marriage. Karl dreamed:

A woman is sitting on the floor meditating. A guy with a reputation for being inconsiderate of others is there making alot of noise. I tell him I’ll beat the crap out of him if he doesn’t stop. Teenagers are playing a sound system really loud, playing CDs of contemporary teeny bopper love songs, full of teenage angst. I wonder how to change this music to make it better for meditating. Then I crisscross a river and see a shelter or leanto where I find two guys in their early twenties. They look worn, as if they’ve been homeless for many years. Then a group of people in a room discuss how to care for the sick and elderly. They want to help but are afraid of not knowing what to say. They might offend someone or say something taboo. What if they make the person feel worse? What about diaper changes for the dying person, or what if they had to watch the dying person go through something deforming or disabling? Someone presses a button and an electronic Tibetan bowl starts to make a sound. It is meant to relax everyone, to get their minds to quiet down. The sound changes; upper harmonics gradually fade in. The overtones are opening. I go deeply into the sound, which takes me into a deep trance. I lose the sense of the room. As I come out of trance the people in the room are still in a quandary about what to do about the dying person. I suggest that they go and simply express their love. I realize I haven’t visited my sick uncle in over a month. I feel bad about not visiting and decide to do so as soon as possible. Then I wake up.

When asked about his associations to the various dream figures, Karl said, “The woman meditating represents my desire for spiritual exploration and inner freedom.” Indeed, the dream itself provides a taste of release in deep trance. The trance later in the dream could also be taken as indicating a possible dissociative tendency, a desire to enter altered states to avoid painful feelings. He continued, “The inconsiderate man reminds me of a part of myself that snaps at my kids or wife. It’s my temper when I’m reactive and inconsiderate, my way of being demanding of others, coming across as harsh and unpleasant.” Here the dream focuses on the integration of Karl’s shadow material related to anger. Then Karl noted, “My statement in the dream that I will beat up this man reminds me of how I beat myself up for snapping at others, for wasting time, masturbating too much, watching junky TV, staying up late, not getting enough exercise, for not being romantic enough with my wife.” We have now uncovered a hostile inner critic for further exploration.

The teenagers in the dream reminded Karl of his twelve-year-old son and his peers, and of the noisy, disruptive quality of adolescents and adolescent culture. Asked about the homeless young men in the dream, Karl said, “They don’t want to work hard. They have a degenerate quality I don’t like, and it reminds me of the degenerate quality of how I fritter away time looking at pornography on the internet or watching crappy TV shows.” When asked about what part of himself feels worn, Karl replied, “I feel worn from carrying around my baby girl.” Karl and his therapist were now able to identify the pressures and fatigue of parenting (changing diapers) as central themes in his present life, quite in contrast to the blissful pursuit of meditative trance and inner journeys. Karl is feeling the weight of the earth, both in the responsibilities of caring for children, but also in his awareness, brought into clear focus by the dream, of the need to care for the dying. Karl said, “I haven’t wanted to deal with the fact that my uncle is going to die soon. And I wonder, is it okay to talk with him about his own death?” As a man in midlife, Karl is both caring for new life and confronting the end of life. In the midst of it all, he is surrounded by teenagers, full of sexual energy and longing. The theme of adolescent sexuality is further addressed in the next dream:

I leave a business meeting and go into the bathroom. I find a Playboy magazine and start getting really excited by it. Then a woman walks through the room, a prostitute who is just getting off work. She is holding her child and is taking him upstairs to go to bed. Another woman comes in and I pay her $20 to remove her clothes. I see she has terrible surgical scars on her body and then I am shocked to see an erect penis. He is, in fact, male, a transsexual. I am horrified and repulsed. Then I realize I’ve been absent from the business meeting for a while. My wife Jane shows up and ushers me back to the meeting. How will I explain my absence? Inside the meeting my colleagues are sitting around a round table in discussion. Several guys are older, in suits, with gray hair. Somebody makes a comment about a city planner. Another gray haired guy says, “City planner? What are you talking about?”

The dream portrays the ongoing theme of Karl’s distraction from work (the business meeting) by his pornography obsession. The dream depicts a conflict between an adolescent type of sexual excitation by pictures of Playboy bunnies, and Karl’s efforts to love a real woman with a child. When questioned about his feelings toward the prostitute, he says, “I feel compassion for her. She’s a hard-working person trying to raise her child on her own. But the fact that she has a child makes me less interested in her sexually.” The figure of the prostitute-mother is a symbol of woman as both whore and Madonna, a sacred image of unified opposites. Karl quickly makes the connection between this dream image and his wife, mother of his children. Karl is able to feel how deep his love and respect for Jane really is, how much he appreciates her both as mother and lover.

The dream image of the transsexual reminded Karl of an aggressive, demanding, phallic quality he perceives in Janet. He said, “Sometimes it is a turn-on for me when she is sexually aggressive. Other times, I find it totally intimidating and overwhelming.” The image also reminded him of an androgynous being combining both male and female qualities. But what about the terrible scars? Karl said,

My masculinity feels wounded. I feel ashamed of my desire to have affairs. It feels like a scar on the purity of our marriage. The scars also remind me of the ordeals of an initiation or rite of passage. Our relationship has been both an ordeal and an initiation. Sometimes we hurt each other so much, it feels like we cut each other open. But we’ve also reached some places together that are really deep and intense. There’s lots of love and tenderness and also lots of anger and hurting each other.

Working with this dream helped Karl explore a full range of feelings and perceptions about his wife and their marital relationship.

The older men in Karl’s dream symbolize the senex, the archetype of age and maturity, which sometimes also carries with it a sense of being trapped by responsibilities and obligations. These figures contrast with the dream’s puer (archetype of eternal youth) imagery (in the bathroom with the magazine). The men sitting around the round table suggest Arthurian knights, introducing a mythic dimension to Karl’s need to accept his role as a mature, stable man, a provider, a “city planner” — an image which symbolizes his need to plan for his family’s future.

These dreams illuminated a number of opposing elements in the psyche that ultimately may become unified in Karl’s awareness: madonna/whore (mother/lover), young/old (puer/senex), male/female, love/hate, birth/death. In these potent dream images Karl discovered material enabling him to live a more spiritually meaningful life, one lived in the conscious tension between opposites, and in the awareness of how they are eternally intertwined. Dreamwork helped Karl understand some of the complex emotional and interpersonal challenges of his current stage of life, and led to noticeable gains in his capacity to find satisfaction in his work and family relationships.

I have found dreamwork and healing with dreams to be an essential tool in my therapeutic work, portraying my clients’ central concerns, deepening access to their most emotionally charged material, and leading directly to increased self-awareness and personal integration. Dreams are like a fountain flowing from our inner depths that can be of inestimable value to the process of psychotherapy.

Originally published in Dreamscaping: New and Creative Ways to Work with Your Dreams, (Edited by S. Krippner & M. Waldman) (Los Angeles: Lowell House, 2000).

This material formed the original nucleus of the book Dreamwork and Self-Healing (London: Routledge, 2009)