Do Dreams Matter in Therapy?

Most of us enjoy talking about dreams, especially the weird ones, and it might be surprising that some therapists aren’t interested in dreams. I’m not speaking for myself here. I actually believe we work a lot of things out when we’re sleeping, and there seems to be some support for discussing dreams being beneficial in therapy. Based on personal experience as a client, I had some visits with a highly regarded psychologist who specialized in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and she completely eschewed the idea of dreams being relevant. I didn’t have the courage to say anything about it at the time, but that encounter actually made me uncomfortable because it seemed like the main way I could process things in an uninhibited way was being totally disregarded by someone I sought assistance from. In short: I never want to make anyone feel that way.

The thing about dreams is they are difficult to study in an objective way. Not that it’s easy to study anything that occurs in therapy objectively because it’s an individual and unique relationship almost by definition. Part of the “backlash” against dream work by clinicians, especially those trained as scientist-practitioners, is the move from Freud and Jungs’ case studies, to larger empirical studies. Of course, if you look at the populations “studied” in most peer-reviewed research, you will probably notice that most of the samples consist of about 200 white (mostly male) subjects between the ages of 18 and 22 enrolled at a small undergraduate college. Could there be a connection between the researchers being faculty at these colleges and requiring that students enrolled in Introduction to Psychology participate in on-campus studies? I’m not questioning the ethics of doing that, but I think most of us would agree that these studies don’t represent humans on the whole and don’t even represent the United States population. So how far-fetched is dream work at that point anyway?

Part of the reason I value working on dreams is they are powerful experiences for us. As a trauma therapist, a lot of people have come to me with concerns about recurring dreams and vivid nightmares. It’s interesting that anyone is dismissive of these since they are a typical part of experiencing post-traumatic stress.

Symbols and fragments of the collective unconscious tend to seem a bit “out there” to me because they are primarily based on a western interpretation of symbols, and they don’t speak to the personal meaning of places, people, and objects we place on them as individuals. Dreams are personal. This also means that, while nobody can say this for certain, dreams probably don’t “tell you” anything you don’t already know. They’re a reflection and integration of information you’ve taken in and still find yourself processing.

When it comes to dreams and therapy, I welcome processing them. They’re an important part of how you look at the world and what you’re working through, and if you have dreams that are bothering you, therapy might actually help.