Dreams about T

Here's a thread to describe any dreams about your therapist or therapy. I'm starting it because I have had a few dreams about therapy lately and I have noticed there's no suitable spot for me to write about them on this forum. So feel free to share any therapy-related dreams here!

I'll start... I had my second dream in a row about T1 the night before last. I dreamt I bumped into him in a carnival and resumed therapy with him while still seeing my current T. I was having sessions with both Ts in the dream and trying to choose between them. T1 was even behaving inappropriately towards me in the dream but I still couldn't choose between them.
I wish that guy would get out of my unconscious.

Sounds like a dream about ambivalence. T1 is just the character your dream has enrolled to try and resolve the feeling. Corned be someone else next time in that role.

Anyone has lucid dreams? I have those often, naturally. I also invested a great deal of interest and effort into learning to have even more lucid dreams and to manipulate them. I was also teaching it for a little while in the past. It is very interesting for me though what sorts of (conscious) motivations I get in these dreams. There was a period, maybe a year ago, when I constantly wanted to look for dream characters that resembled my second therapist. A pattern was that I often saw them but was unable to execute whatever act I wanted with them. A few times it worked though, and I am not going to get into detail Seeing this thread just made me wonder what it might be like to have a lucid dream therapy session? Not sure I can do that but now I got a challenge!

I don't really have lucid dreams. A lucid dream about T would be great. In a lucid dream can you consciously control all the characters or just yourself?

My main T shows up in my dreams quite often - we always talk about them. Him waiting for me is quite a common theme. Dreams can be very telling of things we aren't conscious of.

I have had a few dreams about T since her passing. One of them I really felt like were in the same room. I had s iui ch s dealing of peace like she was still with me.

I dont recall having dreams about either t before that

I had one recently about my current T. In the dream, he was my professor, and I was doing some extra work with him, like I was a TA maybe? He was texting me saying he appreciated our relationship and liked working with me. There was also a bit of a flirtatious vibe to the texts. My mom was there and grabbing the phone from me, trying to read the texts and prevent me from texting him back. Later in the dream, T wanted me to measure the size of his desk using tissue boxes (I go through a lot of tissues in session!). As I did that, a woman sitting in his office (seemed like an admin assistant maybe?) was glaring at me.

I figure the stuff with my mom is fairly obvious. And it makes me think of a situation with a male teacher in high school for whom I had what I now realize is transference. And she was bothered by my connection to him (nothing inappropriate ever happened, though I was alone with him at school once or twice). I wonder if the woman in the office in his dream could represent another client? Or maybe his wife?

I did tell T about the dream briefly, but we didn't discuss it in detail because I had a lot of other stuff to discuss that day.

Excellent question! Not as easily consciously as the one I identify with as myself. Sometimes I can make characters manifest, for example what I said about "looking for my T" - then the character appears in a scene, but they usually have anomalies, are not exactly as the real life model for them. But my feelings about them in the dream can be very much like the waking ones, and often more intense. Sometimes I have dreams where I do not really identify with one character as "me" and it's more like watching a movie, then it can be easier to manipulate the characters' behavior. I often find that in my lucid dreams, I still cannot do things easily that would terrify me or demand another dream character to do something that would be very uncharacteristic of me. It all depends on the level and stability of consciousness in the dream as well. I like the idea of a lucid dream therapy session because it often works for me very well to have meaningful one-on-one conversations with dream characters. I have done a lot of these with my parents' characters, for example. The whole thing also depends on how much I think about it in waking life and do the little tricks that facilitate the skill. There were years in the past when I was really into all this and constantly trained myself, I had plenty of really fascinating and crystal clear lucid dream "experiences" then. These days I don't think about it much or make efforts, so they mostly just happen and the consciousness is not as clear.

I just remembered an old non-lucid dream about my first T, it was not very long after I started working with him. Quite complex, but the most interesting part was that he tried to pull me (physically, by grabbing me) into spaces where I did not want to go and I fought it. I even got a physical object, like a piece of furniture, between us as a barrier. The "barrier" word was very much on my mind in the dream. That dream can be interpreted in many different interesting ways. I think it was also significant that it wasn't a conscious dream. Back at the time, awake, I did not consciously feel that there was much wrong with him or that I wanted to resist therapy at all. I think my unconscious resistance came earlier than what I very much became aware of with time. I probably also sensed that he had very messy boundaries before it became so clear in waking experience.

Yes, I've had lucid dreams. I didn't control mine so much but they were very interesting. 😴

I am disappointed I don't have them much anymore. Something happened to my brain after I started therapy.

You could probably re-learn. There is a lot of good info online about techniques, also good books. I took a course ~10 years ago with Stephen LaBerge (the guy who first reported scientific evidence for it), it was seriously one of my best vacations ever, including all the participants. They still run the course every year, it's just shorter now.

I used to have dreams in which my t would walk into the dream, but not as a part of the dream story, or she’d even stand in front of the dream like someone standing in front of a television set, to ask me a question or repeat something she’d been saying in therapy. Then I’d wake with it fresh and vivid in my mind. It was like I was pulling those questions and ideas out as a reminder, a “Pay attention to this!” Once, I even had one of those “pay attention” dreams where she was a crow pulling at a pile of sticks. She pulled a stick out with her beak and tossed it on the ground, and said, “What about xyz?” before she flew away.

I usually tell her about the dreams because they are so clearly something I need to address. Once I started, “You walked into my dream last night,” and she laughed and replied, “What did I say this time?”

I’ve only had two dreams about my t, as opposed to dreams she showed up in to tell me something. Both pretty disturbing, in different ways.

I haven't told anybody yet...in one of my dreams both my mom and T were in the room with me. T was telling me everything was okay and reassuring me. My mom was looking on.

That was the first time I dreamed of T and also the first time I felt my moms presence in my dream even though she passed away 18 years ago.

I took it to mean one of of two things. I had been feeling bad that I was grieving T so much and thinking I was grieving more than when my mom passed. I realized later that was not true I just had learned to express them. I felt like they were there reassuring me that mom was okay with things.

Or one of the things I always questioned was if my mom knew about my abuse and either was scared to leave, didn't care, or was oblivious to it because while she was herself abused it was different. T said while we would never know the truth she firmly believed my mom didn't know and quite possible for the last reason. So I wondered if my dream was t being with my mom to tell me it was okay and mom did not know.

I've had dreams about people I love who had recently passed. I don't know what I believe about it but when it happens I always wake up feeling very comforted and happy.

I haven't lost anyone close to me, but I often dream about dogs I've had that died.

Both times that I saw them it was so comforting I really felt that they wolere there. I rarely remember dreams but even a few weeks later I remember everything. I woke up feel fated for birth also sad that they were gone.

I dreamed about my T last night, I dreamed that he was sitting next to my bed and talking to me.

It's obviously something that would never happen in real life, but I think it's interesting because I generally feel relaxed and safe under the duvet, and I think that - after a lot my time in therapy! - I also feel relaxed and safe with my T. So it was interesting to see it like that in the dream. It was a nice and a comforting dream.

I dreamt about my t last night.

Or didn't, actually. I dreamt that I was running errands and stopped in for my appointment with her, but it was at a church instead of her office, and a very earnest young man told me she wasn't available, so he'd be meeting with me instead.

Then he started spouting Bible verses at me, to comfort me. Because Bible=comforting, apparently, and he was going to make me feel better, by golly, in that very earnest and chipper way that young folk have when they are going to Save The World whether te world likes it or not.

I thought, "I don't want to be comforted. I want to be listened to."

Then he asked what I'd been doing and when I said running errands, he asked in an appalled voice, "You don't buy your kids second-hand clothes do you?" As if a 20-something therapist should be giving me input about where to buy my kids' clothes. No thank you, not even in my imagination.

So I left. Sheesh. Dreams are weird.

The dreams about the therapist were usually some form of nightmare ranging from mild to very bad. I have had dreams about my mother and my person after their deaths and they are so real it is extremely jarring to wake up and remember they are not here.

I recently had a dream about T how he gathered all his patients (there were 5-8) of us to tell us about his life story. He told us about how when he was 17 he went through bombing and due to that needed surgery and the person who operated him talked to him about psychoanalysis and this got him interested. The other event he told us was how he was raped at the age of 10.

This dream came after I realised my wish to know more about his life story to understand how we two got together. Because I'm very picky, I would not have accepted just anyone as a therapist. Also, I think that most therapists would have had no idea what to do with me because I had no single acute (i.e. clinical) problem. Anyway, I have no idea why this stuff had to emerge in dream in such a dramatic way.