Working With Dreams in Depth Therapy

What value do dreams actually have? Are they just the brain’s way of processing the day, or is there a logic to the images we wake up with?

In depth psychology, dreams are seen as expressions of the psyche, autonomous images that reveal the internal forces shaping your life. They are depictions of your inner reality, giving you another perspective on your day, especially when you are feeling unsettled.

When facing anxiety, loss, or disorientation, dreams can help you find your footing. They offer orientation through image and symbol when conscious understanding reaches its limits. They don’t usually provide literal instructions, but they shift your internal posture, changing how 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 we manage or respond to. When anxiety, loss, or sudden change happens, the psyche seeks orientation, pulling attention back toward the internal landscape.

Dreams mirror 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 terrain you are standing on.

A dream functions as a depiction of an unfolding process, showing where life is constricting, opening up, 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. You may pause in your day and think, “Hmmm, this is familiar, this is what my dream was showing me.” The dream becomes a reference point that quietly informs how you address 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.

Rather than offering an explanation, the dream asked to be sat with, looked at from different angles, and mirrored in the client’s thoughts and feelings. The work was not to understand the image literally, but to sit with it until the persona loosened and new pathways presented alternatives.

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How Do I “Work” with My Dreams?

You don’t need a degree in psychology to start working with your dreams. First, you can train yourself to remember them and write them down, even in fragments. This slows the mind enough for the image to remain present. You aren’t looking for a polished narrative, just the raw details.

Next, track your initial thoughts or gut reactions to images: themes, people, animals, landscapes, events etcetera. Notice how an image resonates, how it touches your past, present, or future. 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 signal essential themes.

In session, 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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You can begin by bringing a dream, even a fragment, into session: