Bringing Dreamwork into Clinical Practice

A woman had a dream that unsettled her for days. She was in a large house with her family when she noticed water dripping down a wall. The more she looked, the worse it got—holes in the walls, cracked tiles, broken appliances, rooms she hadn’t known existed. A storm was gathering outside. She woke up sweating and unable to shake a feeling of impending doom.

In her waking life, she’d been developing an intense friendship with a man who wasn’t her husband. She’d repeatedly reassured herself it was innocent, though the line between friendship and something more intimate was starting to blur. Her unconscious recognized this and was bringing it to her attention.

Dreams are one of the best, most reliable ways to get to know our mysterious depths. They draw our attention to what we’ve forgotten, discarded, or left undeveloped. They’re the door through which unknown, exiled, or banished parts of us find their way to consciousness.

Throughout our lives, dreams arise that frighten or disturb us. They confound us with perplexing imagery, make us laugh at their absurdity, and astound us with their stunning insights. For those of us working therapeutically with others, this makes them one of the most reliable windows we have into what’s happening beneath the surface of a life.

The Dream Maker

We call the unconscious dimension that generates our dreams the “dream maker”—an autonomous, unfaltering inner companion that observes our lives and shares its perspective with us night after night. Every person has one.

Here’s a useful analogy for conceptualizing the dream maker: think of moving through life as similar to driving a car where you scan signs, navigate roads, and manage traffic. In the back seat, an invisible passenger pays attention to everything else—and particularly to what distracts or upsets you. If you and your passenger were asked to describe the same trip, your accounts would differ enormously. You’d remember the road work, the beautiful scenery, the clouds, the rest stop. Your passenger would have noticed other details: whether you were alert or drowsy, how you handled an aggressive driver on the highway, or the sadness that surfaced for you when a particular song played on the radio.

That backseat traveler is the dream maker, reporting nightly on your drive through life. And importantly, the dream maker’s reports affect us even when we don’t remember or understand them. Our clients who insist they never dream still carry the emotional weather of the previous night into their sessions with us.

Dreams foster psychological equilibrium in much the same way that physical processes maintain homeostasis. Just as the body regulates temperature and blood pressure, dreams work to reestablish psychic balance—compensating for whatever is askew. The dream maker isn’t a passive recorder with no agenda. It’s oriented toward supporting our wholeness.

To work with the dream maker, it helps to keep four principles in mind. First, dreams are symbolic—the dream maker speaks in image, metaphor, and symbol rather than the directed language of waking thought, and what it has to say is never pointless. Second, dreams present a fresh perspective: they’re invariably seeking to express something the ego doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. Third, the dream ego—the “I” in the dream, a stand-in for our waking personality—is usually the least trustworthy part of the dream process. The figures that seem to cross or threaten us in dreams are almost always bringing something valuable. Finally, dreams are usually about the inner world. In other words, the dream maker selects familiar people and places to depict dynamics inside us, not to comment on the outer world.

The Dream Ego Is Probably Wrong

One of the most counterintuitive—and clinically powerful—principles in dream work is this: the dream ego is usually the least trustworthy part.

We owe this formulation to Jungian analyst Patricia Berry, who drew on the work of British anthropologist John Layard. Layard’s rule: nothing in the dream is wrong, except perhaps the dream ego. When a client wakes from a dream feeling threatened, wronged, or under attack, the instinct is to side with themselves—with the dream ego. But that instinct almost always moves us away from the dream’s meaning, not toward it.

Consider a man who dreamed that dozens of motorcycles roared up his driveway at night. He handed his wife a baseball bat and grabbed his gun. He knew it was going to be bad.

Upon waking, the man’s first reading of his dream was satisfying: the bikers were his pushy in-laws, who showed up uninvited in waking life. The dream confirmed what he already felt. But dreams usually tell us something we don’t already know.

Since he was already well acquainted with his feelings about his in-laws, we pushed further. He had difficulty standing up for himself in his marriage—he suppressed disagreement, gave in to keep the peace. His denied aggression, symbolized as bikers, had literally ganged up on him in the dream, drawing the headlights of consciousness toward his need to access healthy assertiveness in his closest relationship.

Equating the bikers with the in-laws would have confirmed a familiar grievance. Questioning the dream ego’s reaction opened something new.

This is often the therapeutic leverage point in dream work. When the dream ego feels attacked or threatened, we invite our clients to consider: what might this figure be offering? The element that opposes the dream ego—bikers, a house that’s falling apart—provides compensation from the unconscious for a faulty conscious attitude. The dream maker isn’t being cruel. It’s being corrective.

It’s Rarely About the Other Person

Clients almost always assume their dreams are about the people in them. A dream featuring a controlling mother must be a message about the mother. A dream about an unfaithful partner must be a statement about the relationship. Most of the time, this assumption leads us in the wrong direction.

The dream maker is primarily interested in the dreamer. It uses familiar people and places to depict dynamics in the inner world. Jung called this the “subjective” level of interpretation: the other person in the dream isn’t our friend or neighbor, but the “other in us.” A college roommate who appears in a dream years after graduation has been selected from memory the way a stage manager selects a prop. They reflect a quality of the dreamer.

A woman dreamed, with great grief, that her younger sister had been told she had no viable eggs and would never have children. The dreamer’s response in the dream was resistance: surely something could be done. But in waking life, the sister had already had two children. The dream wasn’t about her fertility.

Further exploration revealed that the dreamer’s daughter had recently dropped out of college. She’d been trying not to mourn certain hopes she’d held—hopes that were quietly dissolving. The sister in the dream was an inner figure: a part of the dreamer that was hoping for new life but now needed to grieve. The dream ego’s resistance (“surely they can do something”) was the first movement of a mourning that had not yet been consciously acknowledged.

There are exceptions, of course. When a dream features someone close to the dreamer who appears accurately—behaving realistically, looking as they do in waking life—the dream may be pointing to something unrecognized in that actual relationship. For example, a woman dreamed her husband was driving their car wearing the wrong glasses, unable to see clearly. She said nothing in the dream because she didn’t want to upset him. In waking life, she’d been allowing him to make consequential decisions that she privately doubted. The dream maker delivered a double message: her husband wasn’t seeing clearly, and she’d adopted a dangerously passive stance. Both inner and outer levels were true at once.

Three Modes the Dream Maker Uses

We find it useful to think of the dream maker’s communications in three modes. Dreams usually contradict, complement, or confirm our conscious attitudes. Learning to recognize which mode is operating helps orient dream work.

Contradictory dreams push back hardest. A man who prided himself on sophistication and self-control dreamed he was at a family barbeque, eating potato salad and other decidedly non-finger-foods with his hands—and that people noticed. His dream ego was mortified. In waking life, he was drinking more than he wanted to admit, and his self-image as someone above overindulgence kept him from seeing the uptick in his alcohol consumption clearly. The dream refused to let him off the hook.

Complementary dreams add what’s missing without mounting a full opposition. A woman stretched thin by work and family obligations dreamed she was in sunny France with people who spoke only French, a language she’d loved in college but had set aside entirely. A French woman in the dream encouraged her: you still remember it, speak it. The dream wasn’t criticizing her choices. It was reminding her of an earlier self—when she was curious, pleasure-seeking, and willing to make mistakes—that had been gradually eclipsed by responsibilities and obligations.

Confirming dreams are the rarest, and they often feel like gifts. A woman who’d spent years as a stay-at-home mother and was tentatively beginning work as an artist dreamed of standing in a circle of people. A man reached into a fishbowl filled with folded slips of paper and drew one out. She knew immediately it was hers. He read the number 4D aloud. She stepped forward. Another man poured mud and sludge into her cupped hands—and from it, a large golden ring fell. This woman was on the path to her golden destiny, which was handed to her along with a dollop of the gloppy mud from which things grow. A crucial symbol in this dream was the number four plus D, the fourth letter of the alphabet. For Jung, four represents structural wholeness (buildings, city blocks, gardens are usually squared; there are four directions, four seasons, four suits of cards). All the elements in this dream were in accord. Like the waking ego, the dream ego stepped forward and was rewarded—receptive to what’s offered, even through the muck.

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Dreams address the unfinished business of daily life. Our clients must reckon with what they surface, whether consciously or not. The woman whose house was collapsing—whose unconscious highlighted risks her waking mind wasn’t ready to see—came to understand, through sitting with her dream, what was at stake if she continued to ignore the growing intimacy of her new friendship. It might cost her the relational home. Her dream maker put it plainly. Her waking mind had to decide what to do next.

That’s what we try to offer our clients, when they come to us with dreams: not a decoded answer, but enough of a container to stay with what came to them until it can do its work. The dream maker doesn’t give up on us. Even if we ignore our dreams, they come back, often night after night. As our colleagues and Jungian analysts Edward Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera put it: “The dreams do not stop. The Guiding Self does not withdraw the supportive flow of its expression, no matter who is or is not listening.”

Our job is to help our clients start listening.

Adapted from Dream Wise by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, published by St. Martin’s Essentials, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group / Macmillan.