the function of dreams in therapy process

I generally dream a lot. If I wanted to, I could write down detailed dreams from every night. Also, I often take naps during the day (because I have to get up super early for my therapy sessions) because I work at home and I also dream a lot during these naps.

I've always dreamt a lot, also before starting therapy but I don't remember that I would have experienced any feelings in the dreams. But now I do, to the point that my dream world is quite distinct from the real world. Whereas in the real world I have struggled a lot (and still struggle) with understanding what's my place in the world and if and where I belong in relation to people then in my dreams all these issues are gone, everything is smooth clear in terms of the world and the other people in it. This is a feeling I have only felt in my dream and never in my waking life.

My therapy is psychoanalytic and my T would be more than happy if I could bring my dreams to therapy sessions. However, I believe we have a little mismatch with my T in terms of how we think/believe the therapy should proceed. What he tells me about how he thinks the psychoanalytic therapy works sounds somewhat useless to me. I proceed following my intuition. Although he is consciously saying something with his words (which I reject), he is unconsciously able to follow me. The result is that I can intuitively understand that there is process but I'm not quite sure how is it really working. But that's not a problem to me because I think many important things cannot be explained in words (like how poetry or art is created etc).

Anyway, contrary to what my T would want, I don't bring dreams to sessions. But, somehow my dreams illuminate to me the process that has somehow taken place. I just woke up from a dream where for the first time I saw that I truly grieved my mother. The dream showed me that I can grieve my mother and how I can do that. I stood in front of a church and there were sold candles and other small things to light/put for the deceased people. I stood there and thought for all the people there who had lost a loved one and I felt great pain for them, until I realised that this pain is mine and I've had a huge loss too. That I have lost my mother and that I had tried to get from her what I needed and I never succeeded. I cried until my head ached so much at which point I woke up and the feeling started to fade away because I have never felt that way towards my mother in real life.

The context with respect to my mother is that she is still alive but I have mostly cut her off from my life. We do not have a mother-daughter relationship and really have never had. I have never loved her and never missed her, don't recall wanting affection from her even as a small child. I just wanted to be left alone. I felt embarrassed that I had her as my mother and I did not want to be seen together with her. I have struggled a lot of how to grieve what I did not have, especially because it did not make sense to me to have this grieving related to this particular person. But now suddenly, this dream just showed me on a feeling level that this is possible and how to do it and it was a very powerful experience.

It's not the only such experience. I have had such powerful dreams before as well, illuminating to myself about my feelings that I have not been able to feel in waking life. I have no control over this process but I'm amazed that it can work this way. There is no obvious connection to therapy but on an intuitive level I know it's there.

I am also in psychoanalysis. My dream life has definitely changed and developed since I started. I do (somewhat reluctantly) talk about my dreams with my analyst and it’s surprisingly helpful. Like maybe it helps bridge and contain the dream feelings and their real life connections?

Yes, my T would love to do dream work; however, I am uncomfortable with it most the time.

She does love one of the first dreams I had where she was in it. It was early in our therapy together. She had picked me up in a car and was to drive me to the other side of the river. She went to take a tunnel to get us there; however, we don't have a tunnel in our city to get to the other side of the river and that fact reached into the dream; resulting in me screaming in my head that there isn't a tunnel and me waking up. Guess I wasn't up to trusting her yet.

I do a lot of processing life through dreams. I like the word you used, illuminate. I don't know that it's as much related to therapy specifically for me, as it is the overlap between what I take to therapy and the way dreaming helps work though the challenges in my life. Different avenues, maybe. As I dream, I am processing through emotion and image the same issues I am processing in words and conversation in my therapy.

I do talk about many of my dreams with my therapist, because it offers another way for both of us to access and understand the ways I'm working through my sh**.

I’ve only brought up one dream with my therapist and he was very interested in talking about it. We occasionally refer back to it. I thought the dream you described was beautiful and powerful.

i often have quite vivid, detailed and powerful dreams and i'm a big believer that many of my dreams are both representative and reflective of the many feelings and thoughts about my present life and also my earlier life. i often brought my most vivid dreams to therapy to share with my T because he sometimes could provide a different perspective or help me reach my own conclusion to the interpretation of what the dreams meant to me. post therapy now, i continue to pay close attention my most vivid dreams. after ending therapy with my T, many of these dreams were beneficial to helping me find closure and come to peace with where i was at in life.

when i was regularly doing neurofeedback therapy, i did a protocol called Alpha-theta. it's purpose is to help the client get into a 'meditative' or pre-sleep state that is where there is a delicate balance between both the waking conscious and unconscious sleeping mind state. it's similar to having dreamlike thoughts as you are drifting off during a 'catnap'. going into this Alpha-theta state was incredibly beneficial to helping me process much of what was going on in my psychodynamic therapy at the time and it was also beneficial for helping me unite many of my fragmented/dissociated parts of myself. since i've moved forward in my healing, i don't do Alpha-theta training as often anymore, but love to occasionally do it because it's quite relaxing and a good way to help process any new stresses that i may be encountering in my everyday life.

My T also does psychoanalysis and I've shared a few dreams with him in more than one occasion. At first it seemed weird for me that a T would want to hear about my dreams, but now he encourages me to talk about any dreams I want to share with him. All the dreams I've shared with him we've talked about the dream itself as well as what I thought of each part. I haven't talked about my dreams in a while since I had a dream about my T and felt too awkward to tell him about it.

My analyst is actually very good with dreams. I'm not sure he is particularly good with interpretation or reflecting me because I've got this feeling that most of the times he has very difficult times understanding me at all and thus his reflections feel foreign to me and more about how he views the world and people in it than about me. That's normal - I haven't met a person in my life who has understood me, so I am foreigner in this respect.

But there have been few occasions (already years ago) where I shared a dream not expecting much but he responded in a way that clearly touched me, so that I immediately felt it in my body. However, the locus of our work is elsewhere right now and I don't feel like pursuing his talent in relating to dreams at this point when we have such large difficulties connecting on the general level.

Btw, my dream feelings are perfectly contained. I have total mastery over my feelings in dreams. They make sense to me, I can fully grasp them. It's just weird to wake up, still remember it but experience it all being gone within a moment.

Have you thought about why it is uncomfortable to you?

For me, I suppose there are many reasons I don't want to share dreams. One is that I actually don't want to share anything at all Because I think that my T might get some pleasure out from me sharing stuff and I don't think he has deserved any pleasure - I already pay him quite a lot, right.

So I suppose I feel that working with me should be hard and difficult work for him without any pleasure component and I try to do all I can to maintain it this way That includes not giving him dreams to work with because I know he likes it.

But my point was that such dreams as I described are already kind of end products. There's no need to bring them to the therapy at all because their message is loud and clear - they demonstrate me how to feel certain feelings I haven't been able to feel yet in waking life. I think that's different from dreams that might be useful for dream work.

Yes, I think for me it is also very similar to what you described. Different avenue - that sounds about right.

But I feel that in some very indirect way the dreaming is also related to therapy, although I don't know how. I just know that the things I work in therapy (and I don't really work with anything in particular) mess my equilibrium all the time and I suppose it just affects this other avenue as well.

This is one of the reasons I love daytime naps that the waking up is different from the night sleep. I haven't set the alarm and I typically nap about 1.5-2 hours. I gradually wake up, still dreaming but becoming half-aware about waking up. It's like been on the border of two worlds and I can pro-long it by will a little bit.

For me, the dream world feels more home, I feel more full of myself and alive there. I've tried to bring this dream me-feeling into waking life and it just doesn't work. It's so weird to feel myself in one way and after opening my eyes to perceive everything (including myself) quite different.

Hah, actually, the only dreams I share with my T are the ones where he is featuring. For me it's the opposite - I feel that if he is in my dream than there is some justification why he has the right to hear about it. Otherwise it is private and he doesn't "deserve" to hear about it. Especially when the dream feeling and message is very clear to me. I feel that I don't need him to intervene and start "contributing" because there's really nothing relevant he could add.

I also have very good dream recall and countless complex, meaningful and often extremely vivid dreams. I think some people are just naturally wired that way but I've also found that the dreams have changed quite a bit with time and effort spent on self-discovery. I also have quite frequent lucid dreams and that's something I really got into in my mid 30's, for a few years and found to be a wonderful way to tap into the hidden spheres of the psyche - it can be done by myself (I had some training and participated in groups though). The OP reminded me of some recurring dreams I had about my mother, for a couple years after her death. They were usually pretty uncomfortable, puzzling (for a while) nightmares and that was an area I explored in lucid dreams a lot and found really interesting things. Eventually the dreams became less frequent and then vanished completely. These days I am trying to do similar things with some stubborn anxiety dreams. I find lucid dreaming (not merely an awareness of dreaming within the dream state but probing into it and manipulating dreams) very insightful and often fun exercises, for free. It does take some discipline and exercises to maintain the skill though and I have periods when I am interested and periods when I don't care and then I lose the skill some. I did discuss dreams sometimes with my therapists but that was never as meaningful as the lucid dream explorations I had done on my own, sometimes exchanging information with peers who had similar interests. I would highly recommend it for anyone intrigued by dreams and with an analytical mind.

At first it was because there was so much violence in them. These dreams are not nightmares for me. I didn't want to show her what a monster I am/can be/was. I did share with her that I was having violent dreams I didn't consider to be nightmares. I also told her of my intrusive violent thoughts. There's been a lot less violence in both of them and she knows that.

Many of my dreams seem pretty straight forward as well, like the one I shared. So there didn't seem to be much purpose in sharing them.

I can also be embarrassment about my dreams for one reason or another. Like fantasies, they are something that is completely mine, private, owned, ... and so on. I often feel that if I share some of these things then they are no longer mine, that they can be twisted, altered, contaminated/polluted by someone else's interpretations, conclusions, wishes, and desires.

Interesting that you use your sharing or withholding as a power move. I don't think that is why I do it but like I said, there is a part of me that feels like they are mine and to share them means I lose them (or maybe a part of me) in some way.

I have gotten better at sharing them as I started trusting T and as the violence decreased.

i love what you say here...this is my experince as well. i have noticed recently how this feeling has grown stronger, especially as i've grown internally connected, content and in harmony with myself. i'm not quite sure how to explain or describe it, but the feeling definitly resonates with your description of the dream world feeling more like home and one full of aliveness.

I like the way you describe the mismatch between what you how you and your T view your therapy together. I have a mismatch too with my T. Seeing you write about it makes me think of talking to my T more about our mismatch. I’d be interested to hear your view on what you are doing with your relationship?

I also felt like my dream world was probably more real than my ordinary world...for a few years in my mid-30's. I got into Stephen LaBerge's work and attended one of his workshops at Hawaii: Dreaming and Awakening Hawaii, Program

They organize it every year.

Definitely a highlight of my life. And I highly recommend it to anyone interested in psychoanalysis or any other kind of deep exploration of the psyche. It is very relaxed and a wonderful vacation to explore many beautiful features of Hawaii. I am not receiving any funds for this share but, seriously, it was one of my best best vacations ever. Also useful, as I learned to cultivate and target my lucid dreaming skills.

It's a thing that has no concrete shape. Sometimes I feel there is a mismatch and sometimes it seems that there isn't. When there is mismatch then it is there due to the use of words - how my T expects me to use words or how I understand he expects me to to use words and how he uses words or how I understand him to use words.

For instance, when I've told him some words trying to express something that to my mind cannot be really expressed with words and when he responds to me and I understand that he did not understand anything I told him. Then the mismatch is created when he asks me to use more words to explain the thing that cannot be explained. Then I tell him that if you would be able to understand what I wanted to tell you, you would have already understood and I would hear it in your response, but simply adding more words will accomplish nothing.

At the same time, I believe he has the exact same trouble with me as well. He tries to tell me something and I'm just totally unable to understand it and instead pick the words apart. Maybe it's not really a mismatch in how we view therapy - maybe it is really a difficulty in communicating, in ability to understand and make my self understood.

I have felt exactly the same way - that if I share something private then I loose it. It will be transformed into something I cannot recognise anymore and thus it's not mine anymore. Early in my therapy I told my T a fantasy I used for masturbation. He said something that completely disguised its non-sexual nature and later on I could not use it anymore. Needless to say, I haven't told him any such fantasies since ...

So I guess in addition to power move there's that too.

I personally don't have lucid dreams and I don't think I've ever been aware in my dreams that I'm in fact dreaming.

I hope anyone who is interested saw this suggestion. For me personally, all kinds of workshop-like things on topics other than academic/professional are counter-indicated as I have generally difficulties connecting with people and more than few of them on the same time would just overwhelm me and basically send me into a survival mode.

Another reason I totally dislike this kind of workshop/group thing is because of my father who I have basically cut off from my life. He is a local new age guru - groups, workshops, spiritual stuff, yoga, tantra, transcendental meditation, healthy eating, crystal water, nutritional supplements, sexual energy etc etc etc. He does all of this and never alone, only in groups where he of course is kind of a leader. I can't tolerate being with him together in the same room because for me his emptiness is too noticeable. But I guess many people totally dismiss it because I can't explain how else does he find people who will come to his workshops/groups/lectures and accept him as a leader.