Working With Dreams in Depth Therapy

In depth psychology, dreams are approached as expressions of the psyche, autonomous images that reveal the internal forces shaping your life. They are not puzzles to be solved, but depictions of your current inner reality.

In times of anxiety, loss, or disorientation, dreams often carry what has not yet found a place in waking life. They offer orientation through image and symbol when conscious understanding reaches its limits. Dreams rarely offer instructions, but they shift the internal posture from which you meet the day.

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.  C. G. Jung

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From External to Internal

Daily life draws awareness outward, toward what must be managed or responded to. When anxiety, loss, or rupture arises, the psyche seeks orientation, pulling attention back toward the internal landscape.

Dreams arrive unscripted and symbolic. They register how life is being lived beneath the surface, using image to carry what thought alone cannot. Staying with a dream image allows unsettled emotions and memories to take shape and be seen. What follows is a sense of orientation, the clarity that comes from recognizing the actual terrain you are standing on.

A dream functions as a depiction of an unfolding process, showing where life is tightening, loosening, or reorganizing. Working with these images provides a mental shorthand for complex emotional states. In practice, this may look like recognizing a reaction before it takes over, or understanding why a casual comment suddenly feels personal. Decisions may not change immediately, but posture often does. The dream becomes a reference point that quietly informs how you meet the demands of the day.

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Clinical Vignette

Identifying details and imagery have been altered to protect privacy.

I am showering, carefully modest, aware of being seen. I move down the stairs and enter a grotto, a room filled with warm, waist-high water, not threatening, but enclosing. Along one side is a bar where a blue liquid is being served. I sit down with a glass while others remain standing. Being in the room feels like standing on a threshold.

Dream work here involved staying close to the image rather than moving quickly to interpretation. For the client, the dream registered a shift away from familiar, defended identities toward a space where those rigid structures could begin to dissolve. In alchemical terms, this corresponds to solutio, the dissolving of forms that have become rigid.

The blue substance did not declare itself. It waited. Rather than offering an explanation, the dream asked to be inhabited. The dream work was not to understand the image, but to remain present as the persona loosened and something new began to reorganize.

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How the Work Unfolds

Working with dreams begins by writing them down, even in fragments. This slows the mind enough for the image to remain present. You aren’t looking for a polished narrative. You’re looking for the raw details.

In therapy, dream work involves tracking associations and noticing how an image resonates across daily life. Patterns show themselves, figures return, and themes repeat. What once felt random begins to show its own logic.

Dreams often carry relational or early life themes, reflecting patterns of attachment and adaptation. Recurring dreams, nightmares, and fragmented images are especially significant, as they often signal essential themes.

I do not interpret dreams for you. I accompany the process as meaning takes shape through your own associations. Archetypal language, terms such as psyche, ego, Self, or shadow, may arise when it helps clarify where life is tightening or where orientation has been lost.

Some dreams offer a counterpoint to conscious perspective, revealing what has been overlooked or overemphasized. In this work, insight emerges through attention, amplification, and feeling. Dreams then become a continuing point of reference. At times, it feels less like we are interpreting the dream and more like the dream is reorganizing how we see.

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