What Is Dream Work?
We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Dreams are a part of a completely natural, mental self-healing process taking place within our sleeping brain each night, reconnecting us to our energizing, healing and psychic roots. The development of a gentle curiosity about your internal experience becomes the basis for trust, compassion and authentic expression in your life. I specialize in guiding you as you discover and heal your true Self and potential using dream work. This process comes about through bringing into consciousness what lies in the unconscious as dream images. What we do not or cannot consciously face is often revealed in dreams, and by working with these dreams you can begin to integrate these often painful experiences into your waking life.
In my experience even the worst of dreams can bring meaning to our human existence. Fear and conditioning from a physical or emotional trauma can cause memories to go into hiding in the unconscious, where they often become a misunderstood part of a person’s behavior and psychological makeup. I have come to learn that many crises have a long, unconscious history that can be understood and integrated through dreams. You can gain a certain liberty of spirit that only comes when you are truly partnered with the psyche or soul.
My personal exploration has shown me that revisiting past trauma through dream work can be a necessary part of becoming individuated. The identification and analysis of the complexes and images identified in dreams provides a path toward healing and wholeness. Dream work facilitates healing by supplementing your conscious experiences with your unconscious dreams. This reconnects, restores and balances the conscious mind, supplying you with whatever is missing in waking consciousness alone and allowing you to live a fuller and more satisfying life.
In my practice in Bellevue, WA I use the Embodied Imagination technique, a creative form of working with dreams and memories
Embodied Imagination Can Help You Heal And Feel Whole
Embodied Imagination has a healing effect on physical illness, trauma and psychological and relational issues. The technique of embodied imagination uses images from dreams; these images include the “you” experienced in the dream, as well as other people and objects in the dream. You explore the images from your dream while in a hypnagogic state – a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. You can re-enter the landscape of your dream and flash back into its images to more fully and deeply explore and experience them.
The notion of a flashback memory comes out of trauma work. Flashback memory works differently than ordinary memory. With ordinary memory we remember the narrative; for example, you might remember entering through the door, greeting me, sitting down with your recording device, beginning our conversation and so on. You recall a narrative in a linear sequence. In a flashback memory, however, the whole environment is present – smells, sensations – even things we were not consciously aware of the first time around.
The important thing about being in the hypnagogic state and using the flashback is that you can slow things down. In this slowing down process, the details of the dream become more apparent. The more you slow down the experience of the dream, the more you can feel how the image or character from the dream is experienced in the body. Once you are fully immersed in the images that the dream environment presents, you can recognize and identify the feelings and sensations manifested in the body from its perspectives. Each image has a point of view, or perspective, that can be explored in this way.
We feel these various dream images and perspectives in the body, and locate where they are experienced most intensely. We then “etch” them into the body, so to speak, so that when they are activated the whole experience comes back. At the conclusion of the dream work session, you simultaneously hold in conscious awareness all of these differentiated and complex states of embodied feeling and sensation. Many of these feelings and emotions are completely incompatible. But when you can hold all these emotional states at the same time – including those arising from other characters and perspectives than your own – it changes your way of being in the world. Holding these multiple disparate states at the same time creates a psychical tension from which a completely new image or feeling state spontaneously emerges from your psyche. This new image or state presents a previously unknown awareness through which you can change, transform or greatly expand your ability to embody and integrate a variety of perspectives more fully.
I have completed this training, and am an Embodiment Therapist™. In the same way I work with dreams, I can also work with memories and physical symptoms that arise in the body. This work uses mindfulness, imagination and a trust in the ability of the body, imagination and senses to unfold a process that is held in the body and psyche. I am humbled and struck by the power of the imagination to reveal messages in the characters and images in dreams, memories and symptoms that cannot be discovered by the rational mind.
After working with a dream that had haunted her for years, one client I will call Judy was able to go into her frightening dream, analyze its meaning and discover an integration that resulted in her overcoming her fear and feeling peaceful about the material in her dream.
Dream Work Can Help You Connect With Your Soul
If you would like to learn more about Dream Work or Embodied Imagination, I invite you to contact my office to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation.
