Working With Dreams in Depth Therapy

In depth psychology, dreams are approached as expressions of the psyche, inviting a way of working that stays attentive to inner life as it unfolds.

In times of anxiety, loss, or disorientation, dreams often carry what has not yet found a place in waking life, offering orientation through image and symbol when conscious understanding reaches its limits.

Dreams aren’t coded puzzles to be solved; they’re living expressions of ongoing psychic movement.

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, attention is often pulled back inside, as something in the psyche seeks orientation rather than explanation.

As waking consciousness loosens, the psyche produces its own images. Dreams arrive unscripted and symbolic. Speaking in image and feeling, they register how life is being lived beneath the surface.

Dreams speak in image, a form of knowing that thought alone cannot reach. Images are their language because images can hold complexity without reducing it. Staying with an image gives inner experience somewhere to congeal, allowing unsettling emotions and memories to take shape and come into relationship. What often follows is a quiet sense of orientation — like reading a map and understanding the terrain.

Dreams are not pressed for answers, but returned to with attention, so their movement can be sensed, like a work of art whose meaning unfolds through repeated encounter.

A dream can become a quiet reference point during the day. Something that subtly shifts perception and feeling. In this way, dreams function as depictions of an unfolding process — showing where life is tightening, loosening, or reorganizing itself.

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An example from clinical work. Identifying details and imagery have been altered to protect privacy and it is shared with the dreamer’s permission.

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. A bar runs along one side. A blue liquid is being served. I sit down with a glass while others remain standing in the water. The room carries the feeling of a threshold.

Dream work here involved staying close to the image. For the client, the dream registered a movement out of familiar identities — professional, relational, defended — into a space where those forms were beginning to soften (solutio in alchemical terms). The blue substance did not declare itself; it waited. The dream asked for a willingness to let parts of the dreamer’s persona soften and reorganize.

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How the Work Unfolds

Working with dreams begins by writing a dream down, even in fragments. This slows the mind enough for the image to remain present. Precision matters less than fidelity.

In therapy, dream work often involves noticing associations and tracking how an image resonates across waking life. Over time, patterns begin to show themselves. Certain figures return. Themes repeat. What once felt random begins to reveal coherence.

Dreams may carry relational or early life themes, reflecting patterns of attachment, belonging, or adaptation. Recurring dreams, nightmares, and partial or fragmented images are especially important, as they often signal themes asking to be noticed.

My role is not to interpret dreams for clients, but to accompany the process as meaning takes shape through their own associations. Archetypal language, terms such as psyche, ego, Self, or Shadow, may arise when it helps clarify experience.

Some dreams offer a counterpoint to the conscious attitude, revealing what has been overlooked or overemphasized. Throughout this work, insight emerges through careful attention rather than force. Dreams are met with curiosity and respect, and explored alongside the emotional, relational, and developmental contours of a person’s life.

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