I frequently work with dreams as part of the therapeutic process for my patients. Dreams are important, but in no way do they constitute the sole form of therapeutic investigation and healing. There is no trustworthy book that can consistently and reliably translate dream images and symbols into significant messages. Though there are overarching themes and elements that have universal significance, each dream needs to be understood in its own right as it relates to the life and mind of the dreamer. This may come as a disappointment to some, but there are no shortcuts. Dreams have different levels of interpretation and some of their messages may become clear only after a long period of time. However, when a dream is interpreted correctly, something clicks and produces a sense of relief that furthers self-understanding. Dreams are not messages from the underworld, spirits, or ghosts, but rather messages from the disowned or lesser known parts of ourselves. They help us process the day’s happenings, connecting both our bodily experiences and new memories with preexisting ones. Often, dreams offer fresh and unexpected insight about current issues in therapy and the back and forth that involves both the therapist’s and patient’s minds. By looking at our dreams and all of the characters in them, we get to know ourselves better. There is more reality than Phantasy in dreams; they concern emerging truths and realizations coming to the surface as well as painful truths we don’t want to acknowledge.
Sigmund Freud was the first to elevate dream interpretation to the domain of scientific and clinical investigation; he considered his book on dream interpretation to be his most important book and described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” In Freud’s earlier model of the mind, the unconscious strove for expression as it fought against societal and internalized restrictions to come into consciousness. Unconscious material found expression in dreams, slips, and symptoms. A dream was like a rebus hidden in the manifest content; it needed to be interpreted with the help of a patient’s free associations. Though I am profoundly indebted to the Freudian tradition, I integrate insights from contemporary clinicians, who interpret dreams at multiple levels and ultimately consider the whole session as a dream and dreaming as a way of processing fragments of proto-emotions into coherent experiences and thoughts. My work on dreams is simple and rarely entails the mental gymnastics of finding concealed puns and rebuses. Though I was a humor scholar before becoming a therapist and considerably appreciate puns, I don’t practice much intellectual exercise with dreams. I let myself have the experience of dreams without prying or breaking down their linguistic form. As my patient and I immerse ourselves in the dream and its details, we resonate with it and expand it into our own internal life and shared experience; it is a bit as if we are sharing our minds and our bodies through the dream, doubling our capacities to feel and understand. We look at the dream’s manifest content; we follow our free associations; we guide some of the associations by asking specific questions; we inquire about the effect and put dreams in context, not only with the day’s residue but also among other dreams, looking for temporality and causality; we look at the dream in reference to a patient’s past, present, and future; we look for metaphors and how they may relate to waking concerns of the patient. We consider the dream a communication about the therapeutic relationship and other relationships. The dream is a metaphor for the body, and every character and object in the dream can be viewed as an aspect of the dreamer and/or the therapist. By investigating what the dream has to teach about current and past relationships or internal mental states, we consider what the dream is attempting to resolve and integrate. Additionally, we use our own reveries and any seemingly unrelated material that comes to mind as a similar communication. Therefore, the dream is no longer the product of only the patient; it is alive in me as well, as we weave together these different strands of meaning. There is a physical shiver, an unmistakable sensation that informs us that we are on the right path to understanding the dream.
Sometimes, we can push a dream a step further. After all is said and done, we can imagine a different ending to a seemingly bad, helpless dream. This may help a patient develop a new narrative and a helpful perspective. Indeed, this technique is very helpful when working with nightmares.
I think of dreams in analytic work in a similar way to how Marxists think of fiction and movies; these can be a reactionary escape from reality, a barren fantasy, and a waste of time that keeps us stranded in illusion and detaches us from social and individual consciousness; conversely, they can be tools for revolutionary action and awareness. The relationship between reality and dreams is indeed reversed: it is in dreams that we find the truth about ourselves. It is in dreams that we can unlock the door of the prison of our automated daily grind; it is in dreams that we dare to think, safely rehearse, and finally to put realize our liberation.