Anda Vintila is a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) and Somatic Psychotherapist. She is devoted to supporting people in processing and healing their trauma through Soul-Led Inner Work which often consists of gentle nervous system rewiring, dream exploration, fostering relational and emotional safety, and re-aligning with one’s personal Truth.
How can we engage our dreams in our waking life? Or to paraphrase Jungian analyst James Hillman, how can we bring our dreams from the underworld into the dayworld?
The most common and known way to engage our dreams in our waking life is to write anything we remember from our dreams as soon as we awaken. My own dream journal always sits on my night table next to my bed, just in case I have a dream that moves me to record it. Different routes to engaging our dreams is to record yourself a voice memo describing your dream or to create a piece of artwork such as a painting, a drawing, clay-work, or a collage of a potent dream image.
People are often surprised to hear that I so vividly remember most of my dreams that I can fill pages of my journal with what I recall seeing, feeling, and thinking in just one dream. However, some people may ask, “what if I don’t remember most of my dreams?” Well, can we start with the smallest of details, perhaps a snippet of a dream? If that’s not accessible, then can you notice the feeling tone or emotional state the dream has left you with? With dreamwork, we can start with the smallest remembrance and allow the puzzle pieces that are meant to surface emerge organically and fill in our memory gaps.
When we create a habit of recording our dreams, we may begin to notice our capacity for recalling our dreams increase. The more we turn towards our dreams, the more aware and conscious we can remain within these dreams, and the more we can work with them in our waking life. When working with my own dreams as well as my client’s dreams, themes often emerge that connect recurring dreams that perhaps contain similar feeling tones, dream characters or elements, landscapes or just an inner knowing that connects certain dreams together.
What are some therapeutic methods of engaging our dreams?
Dreamwork is often known to be the process of translating and interpretating dream images “into the language of waking life” (Hillman, 1979). When you consider this process, what immediately comes to mind? A therapist listening to a client’s dream and offering interpretations? Looking online or through dream symbol books to see what your dream may mean? Although these methods can really support you in engaging your dreams, they place the responsibility of interpretation of the dream externally to you as the dreamer and are not often inclusive of your body or felt-sense experience during the interpretation process. But, when you really think about it, what is dreaming other than an experiential situation? Therefore, what are other methods of engaging our dreams where we can access and process our dreams through an experiential route rather than solely through another person telling us what our dreams mean?
A method that I am trained in called Embodied Dreamwork, developed by Dr. Leslie Ellis and influenced by a pioneer in somatic psychotherapy named Eugene Gendlin, approaches the interpretation of dreams through the very same lens or similar state of consciousness as the dreams occur in which is through the body, through experience, and through the present moment. Another pioneer in the dream field named Robert Moss further deepens this discussion by saying: “the most ancient understanding of dreaming, for me, is the most up to date, most relevant, most accurate, and most scientific”. And what is that ancient, paleolithic understanding of what is means to dream? Robert simply puts it as: “dreaming is travelling”. I can truly add that when we begin working with our dreams outside of sleep, we are creating a bridge between the dayworld and the nightworld. What is this bridge? This bridge can look like closing our eyes and re-entering the dream and allowing ourself to dream the dream on while paying attention to and allowing shifting sensations, emotions, and images to lead the process rather than external interpretations. In this state, we begin the process of internally travelling as we conjure up a dream to work on or be worked by.
Another way to re-enter a dream can be through gazing at an art piece you may have created based on a potent image from your dream. As you gaze at that art piece, notice sensations and emotions that arise, observe them as they rise and fall, and shift, and morph. If you feel drawn, you may close your eyes and allow your inner gaze to lead you further into the dream, noticing if different images start to surface. You can ask yourself, what is the emotional tone right now? What does the landscape look like around me? Are there dream characters or elements pulling your attention? How does the body feel?
These are different ways of working with our dreams while we are alone. Within therapy, I often support clients through open-ended questions while I fall into the dream with them. My curiosity and dual awareness of a client’s engagement with the dream moment-to-moment and their nervous system state often create a sense of safety and an easier time deepening into the process. This collaborative way of working with a dream can support greater access to aspects of our psyche and the collective unconscious. This is because when we sleep, our pre-frontal cortex (responsible for filtering our thoughts) is offline. Therefore, dreams offer a less censored perspective of our self and point to certain dynamics we engage in during our waking life that we may be unconscious to.
What are the benefits of engaging our dreams?
The benefits of dreaming are vast. Robert Moss talks about how our dreams serve to provide healing and guidance in our waking life. He speaks of the importance of bringing and weaving what we learn in the dreamspace, what our soul speaks to us in that space, into waking life and learning to embody it.
In my dreamwork with clients, I often notice a link between the theme of a client’s dreams to a theme that is currently showing up to be worked on in their life. These themes can often be traced to unresolved wounds and experiences we carry from our past that are still alive in the present. I bring up this observation because it can feel more creative, inspiring, and provide a bit more psychological distance from the difficult memories or experiences when approaching the inner work through dreamwork. We are allowing our dreams to guide us into what needs to be processed and how what we are processing can transform into. Through this experiential mode, we are bridging our unconscious with our conscious mind.
Although I personally work with dreams experientially and from a psychospiritual lens related to the individuation journey, I believe it is important to acknowledge the science behind dreaming. According to dream researcher Dr. Ellis (2013), working with dreams can help people “truly experience an unconscious aspect of their personality or behavior that is not congruent with how they see themselves or want to be”. Additionally, many current scientific theories and research suggest that dreams facilitate the consolidation of memory and the process of emotional regulation and assimilation of emotions attached to memories (Malinowski & Horton, 2015).
Thank you so much for reading my article and if you wish to explore further dream content related to dream research and various psychospiritual dream theories, you can visit the website of International Association for the Study of Dreams.
For more info, follow me on Instagram or visit my website if you are curious about working together!
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Anda Vintila, Clinical Counsellor & Somatic Psychotherapist
Anda Vintila is a Registered Clinical Counsellor. She owns a private practice in Vancouver, BC where she regularly sees clients who seek a deeper way to heal from their trauma, patterns, and conditionings. Anda weaves different body-centered modalities that focus on supporting the nervous system and body to have greater capacity in moving through difficult emotions and sensations in order to feel safer in one’s self and within relationships. Anda believes the inner work is ultimately led by the Soul. She is passionate about shining awareness on aspects of the self that obstruct one’s access to flow and life-force energy and creating room for newer perspectives to emerge.
