Print this article Dreams in therapy

A dream can be used to "treat" people because it can lead to the conscience through symbols, the energy that supports and justifies an individual’s life, also showing models that are the conscious, making what was previously hidden evident.

This is therefore the reason why a therapist uses dreams like real and personal vehicles which scour messages on the psychic structures and complexes of the dreamer, whether they belong to the past or present. However, they also provide information about the subject’s relationships with all the persons on which the complexes are projected.
At the same time dreams also allow a glimpse of the dreamer’s development potential since they are related to the spiritual dimension.

In order to understand dreams it is in any case necessary to have the ability to interpret symbols, but also art. Art is used for understanding the facets represented in dreams and that are part of a scene that is represented on the stage of the person’s internal theatre. The therapist has therefore a place in the first row to attend the scene that unwinds on the stage of the unconscious.

Therefore understanding a dream requires a sensitiveness in relation to the contents of the dream itself and the characteristics of the dreamer, since it specifically refers to him/her, and lastly, to the interconnections in play between several represented personages, the forms and context. Moreover it requires great sensitiveness in terms of the emotional tones, to characteristics like consistency or the inconsistencies and the discrepancies in the charts, in images, actions and figures. It also requires an understanding between the external reality of the subject and the internal position.

Thus, a dream becomes a kind of radiography that communicates information at different levels on the present situation of the dreamer, seen from a perspective that was unknown or unconscious up to that moment.
For Jung a dream is an “objective and natural product of the psyche, a self-portrait of the psychic vital process that expresses an involuntary process not checked by the conscious will and represents the true inner reality as it is, not as the therapist supposes it and not even as the patient would want it, but really as it is”.
Each dream represents an image of the understanding of unknown things that are, however, of vital importance for the dreamer, his/her therapist and how the therapy is going. Often, from a patient’s dream it is possible to understand where the therapy is up to: if it is necessary to take a step back, if there are still contents to be elaborated or to be better understood. A dream can be considered a message that bursts from a superior intelligence that proposes new significant attitudes: the Guide, the Soul, that Essence that exists before the I, that Daimon that pushes us to become what we are.

In the sense Jung intends there is also the fundamental principle responsible for the process of individualization, but not only, it is the guiding principle of the events in life and of the oneiric material that provides those metaphorical / allegoric and symbolic messages that contribute to individualization.

From this point of view, a dream does not say what we must do, but it implies the necessity of recognising and facing something that exists already in our own life even if we are still not conscience of it; it indicates what there really is in the existential situation of the dreamer.

Dreams provide information about the present state in which one sees certain aspects of the I: what is typical of persons who identify themselves with the best parts of themselves are dreams in which they are forced to take conscience of a lack of responsibility, or of the selfishness of not being generous, and so on; the aspects that emerge in dreams are those that the subject has the most difficulty in accepting.

Often during therapy dreams of fragmentation indicate the moment in which the subject has shown several fragments of himself/herself which must then be recomposed.

Dreams can be complementary or compensators and it is in this way that they maintain the interior and the outside of the subject in balance.
They can represent archetypal and mythological reasons and, in this case, there are ordering models that can give new forms to the structure of the I; there may be prognoses because they give indications to the therapist on how to face certain problems that cause a lot of suffering and the ability of to analyse the capacity to tolerate conflict required by analytical work. When I it is too fragile, undifferentiated, chaotic and devoid of limits, it cannot be capable of starting a dialogue with the unconscious without somatising or episodes experience in terms of regression.
They can give reference points about the body, its functioning, to the needs or to possible pathologies of the body.

To conclude, dreams are the access to the fountain of life. They show the situation of the dreamer as it is, and at times, they seem pitiless, threatening or destructive; this lack of compassion is still objective and deprived of sentimental evaluation like other aspects of the natural process.
In practical terms, dreams are neither good or bad: when the dreamer manages to understand the meaning and to adapt to the perspective indicated by a dream they produce a great feeling of well-being; if instead adaptation is not possible, there remains a sensation that the dream was bad or threatening.

A dream is not and it must not be limited exclusively to the sphere of the pathology and of the therapy. Dreams have an incalculable value in the life of each one of us since they represent a dialogue with the unconscious and its manifestations and are a priceless element that can assist the potential, creativity, and imagination of a subject.

There is a legend that says that. “before birth an angel puts a light over the soul so that she could see from one end of the world to the other, where it will live and where it will die … and it does it for the entire world and shows the just ones and the sinners and all things, but, after birth, the angel extinguishes that light and the child forgets everything his soul has seen and learnt and enters in the world crying because he/she has lost a shelter, certainty and rest, but once he/she has entered into the earthly life, the soul runs away at the body each night, goes into sky, and obtains new life there”.

Perhaps, through dreaming we try to take back what our soul has always known.