When I was a kid, I had a lot of nightmares. I was also deeply afraid of the dark.
My mom, in an attempt to help, gave me a dream symbol book. I was a voracious reader of adventure novels, so I suppose the idea of my mind setting off on its own little adventures every night appealed to me. Each morning, I’d look up the strange things I’d encountered in my sleep, feeling as though I were unlocking some little mystery tucked away in my own mind.
Looking back, I think I was hoping someone else would tell me what my dreams meant. Give me the key. Hand me the map. Explain the strange things happening in the dark.
My relationship with dreams is quite different these days. My childhood fear of the dark has softened into something closer to affection. I love the dark half of the year, and I’ve become considerably more comfortable with the darker corners of myself, too. (I would still think twice about walking through a forest alone at night. The body keeps some of its old opinions.) But these days, I’m more inclined to approach the dark with curiosity than fear.
Dream work has been part of that journey. And the real turning point came when I stopped asking a book what my dreams meant and started asking myself.
First, let’s talk about what dream work actually is
When I talk about dream work, I’m not talking about flipping through a dictionary of symbols to find out what a snake, a house, or a dead relative is supposed to represent.
Don’t get me wrong. Those books can be interesting companions, and I still consult one now and then when a particular image leaves me scratching my head. But there’s a problem when we hand our dreams over to someone else’s system of meaning and wait to be told what we’ve encountered. We risk giving away the very thing we’re trying to find: our own inner wisdom.
Dream work, as I practise it, is a creative process and a form of self-exploration. I tend to avoid the words analysis and interpretation. They sound a little too much like we’re sending our dreams into a laboratory to be dissected, as though there’s a correct answer waiting to be discovered if we just poke around long enough.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
A method can give us a way into a dream, but nobody can tell us with certainty what a dream means. There isn’t a right or wrong answer hiding somewhere beneath the surface. We bring our curiosity, our personal associations, and a willingness to sit with the strange and sometimes nonsensical material our minds produce. Then we see what rises.
Think of it less like solving a puzzle and more like getting to know a rather peculiar visitor who keeps showing up at your door.
A gentle note before we wander in
Dreams aren’t always friendly territory. Some are frightening, and some are deeply entangled with trauma. If you’re experiencing recurring nightmares or distressing dream content, please don’t feel that you need to face it alone.
There are therapeutic approaches designed specifically to help with nightmares. Imagery Rehearsal Therapy is one of the best-known. Healthline has a useful overview of the approach, and you can also explore the International Association for the Study of Dreams’ resources on nightmares. This is a different approach from the reflective dream work I’m describing here, and a therapist trained in nightmare treatment can offer support that a blog post simply can’t.
If you’d like to experiment with the process below, start small. Choose a dream that left you curious, intrigued, or perhaps a little uncomfortable, but not shaken. Pay attention to how your body responds as you explore it. If things start to feel overwhelming, slow down, set the dream aside, and bring in a trusted person or therapist.
There’s no prize for digging deeper than you’re ready to go.
Why do we dream, anyway?
Nobody knows for certain. Researchers have several hypotheses about the purpose of dreaming, including the idea that dreams help us process emotions and consolidate memories.
The Jungian perspective offers another way of looking at things. Jung believed that the unconscious was continually communicating with the conscious mind, or what he called the ego. The ego is essentially our daytime self: the part of us making plans, answering emails, paying bills, and trying to remember whether we left the stove on. According to Jung, dreams can offer a glimpse into the deeper layers of the psyche, bringing forward things our conscious minds haven’t yet recognised.
I hold all of these ideas fairly loosely.
I suspect dreaming helps us digest our emotional lives. I also suspect there’s something more mysterious going on. Human beings have been working with dreams for thousands of years, across countless cultural and spiritual traditions. I’m not particularly interested in throwing all of that wisdom out with the bathwater just because we haven’t figured out how to measure it in a laboratory.
We live in a culture that tends to trust what it can quantify. If something can’t be measured, tested, or neatly categorised, it often gets relegated to the realm of superstition or nonsense. And yet, so much of being human lives in that murky territory between what we know and what we feel, between what we can explain and what we can only experience.
Dreams are rather good at slipping through that net.
That doesn’t mean we should believe everything we encounter in the unconscious, either. I’m not suggesting that every dream is a message from the universe or that we should reorganise our lives because we dreamt about a fox on Tuesday.
With anything that has a limited evidence base, I prefer a middle path: neither swallowing it whole nor dismissing it outright. I work carefully, move slowly, and check in with myself along the way, both during the exploration and afterwards, as I bring whatever I’ve discovered into daily life.
Dream work is not an evidence-based therapeutic technique, and I’m not presenting it as one. It’s something I’ve found valuable in my own life and in some of the reflective work I do with people. What follows is my personal approach, informed by Jungian ideas and my own experience. I can’t promise it will work for you, and I wouldn’t want to.
A few things I’ve noticed along the way
One of the most interesting things about dream work is how differently a dream can look once you begin approaching it with curiosity rather than trying to pin down its meaning.
A dream that initially seemed completely nonsensical might begin to reveal something surprisingly familiar. An image that seemed frightening might turn out to carry a different feeling altogether. And sometimes, the dream that keeps returning isn’t trying to torment you. It might simply be knocking on a door you’ve been keeping shut.
I’ve also noticed that dream recall tends to improve once you start paying attention. It’s a bit like a muscle waking up with use. The more regularly you make space for your dreams, the more likely you are to remember them.
Recurring dreams have sometimes loosened their grip on me once I’ve spent time listening to them. I can’t say exactly why, but it can feel as though some part of me that has been knocking finally got an answer at the door.
I hold a quiet belief that there’s wisdom inside us that wants to be known by us. Dream work is one way of leaning toward it.
There are plenty of others. Journalling, free writing, tarot, sitting outside with a cup of tea, going for a long run and letting your thoughts wander wherever they please. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is stop trying so damn hard to figure ourselves out and give our inner lives a little room to breathe.
If dream work doesn’t call to you, follow whatever does. There are many ways to listen.
The dark half of the year
We’ve entered the dark half of the year, and I happen to love this season.
The leaves have come down. The ground is beginning to freeze. The natural world is pulling its energy inward, and the landscape is becoming a little barer, a little quieter. Beneath the frost, everything is breaking down and returning to the soil. There’s a whole lot of life happening down there, even if the surface looks rather dead.
[Check out my blog post about Embracing the Dark Season!]
I think there’s something worth learning from this seasonal shift.
We’re not particularly encouraged to slow down in our culture. There’s always another thing to produce, another goal to reach, another version of ourselves to work toward. Even rest has somehow become something we’re supposed to optimise. But the natural world doesn’t seem terribly interested in this arrangement.
Winter has other ideas.
This is a season for turning inward. For sorting through what the brighter months brought us, letting go of what’s gone to garbage, and sitting with what remains. Not everything needs to become a plan. Not every uncomfortable feeling needs to be turned into a self-improvement project. Sometimes we need to let things settle.
Dream work and other symbolic practices can be lovely companions for this kind of inward tending. They invite us to slow down and pay attention to parts of ourselves that don’t often get the floor during the busy business of being alive.
And a reminder: if this season feels heavy rather than restorative, you don’t need to force yourself into some romantic version of wintering. Some people struggle with the darker months, and that’s real. Please reach out to a trusted person or therapist if you need support. Turning inward doesn’t have to mean going it alone.
A little dream work: my process, step by step
I pieced this process together from what I’ve read about Jungian dream work, which is rich in ideas and sometimes surprisingly short on practical instructions. (Jung was apparently more interested in the possibilities of the psyche than in writing us a handy little workbook.)
He gave his followers considerable freedom to adapt the work to their own practices and settings. This is my adaptation, shaped by what I’ve learned as a therapist and through my own inner work. It’s deliberately loose. Think of it as a trailhead rather than a set of marching orders.
Here’s a good overview of Jung’s own methods.
1. Gather your dream material
First, you’ll need something to work with.
This doesn’t have to be an entire dream with a beginning, middle, and end. You might start with a single image that has stayed with you for a few days. Perhaps there’s a particular place, character, or theme that keeps appearing across several dreams. Or maybe you remember a whole story, complete with all the strange plot twists your sleeping mind cooked up.
A journal beside your bed is a good place to start. In the morning, write down whatever you remember, even if it’s only a handful of disconnected images or a few fleeting impressions. Don’t worry about making it coherent. Doodling a strange image counts, too.
If you’re feeling keen, jot down a few things about the day before. Sometimes our dreams seem to pick up on the emotional residue of ordinary life.
And here’s something important: pay attention to how you felt about things in the dream. A strange tree that left you feeling intrigued rather than frightened is worth noting. Your emotional response is part of the material.
2. Break the dream into scenes
If you have a longer dream, try breaking it into smaller scenes, almost like frames in a film.
Let’s make up a little dream for illustration.
You’re driving a car. You come to a stop sign. Suddenly, an ocean appears in front of you, seemingly out of nowhere. You’re intrigued, so you get out of the car and go for a swim.
You could break this into five scenes:
- Driving the car.
- Stopping at the stop sign.
- The ocean appearing.
- Feeling intrigued.
- Going for a swim.
Don’t worry about whether the scenes make sense or whether you’ve divided them up correctly. You’re simply giving yourself smaller pieces to work with.
3. Make your personal associations
This is where things get interesting.
Take each scene and ask yourself: What do I associate with this?
Try not to think too hard. It’s a little like word association or a Rorschach test. Let the first things that come to mind have a chance to surface before your thinking mind swoops in to tidy everything up.
For example, when I think about driving, I feel anxious. So I might write down:
Uncomfortable. A task I don’t like. Anxiety.
A stop sign might bring up:
My path is blocked. Waiting. Impatience.
The ocean might bring up something entirely different for you. Perhaps freedom, fear, vastness, possibility, or a memory of childhood summers.
There are no prescribed answers here. A car doesn’t have to mean ambition, and an ocean doesn’t have to mean the unconscious. What matters is what those things mean to you.
If you find yourself writing an elaborate explanation of why something might mean something, pause. You’re probably back in your head. See if you can return to the first, simpler feeling or association.
4. Look a little wider if you’re stumped
Sometimes a symbol leaves us with absolutely nothing. We stare at the page, shrug, and move on.
That’s fine. But if you’re curious, this is where you can widen the lens.
I’ll sometimes look up a symbol and explore how different cultures, traditions, or mythologies have understood it. This draws on a Jungian idea called the collective unconscious: the possibility that, beyond our individual experiences, human beings share certain deep psychological patterns and symbolic motifs.
Jung believed these archetypal patterns might appear in dreams, myths, stories, and religious traditions across time and place. We might recognise something of ourselves in an image that reaches far beyond our own personal history.
[Check out my post on Jung’s view of the psyche.]
I treat this as a second step, though, not a starting point. Your own associations come first. A symbol’s historical or cultural meaning might open up another avenue of exploration, but it shouldn’t replace your own relationship with it. And it’s worth approaching other cultures’ symbolic traditions with respect for their own contexts, rather than treating them as a grab bag of meanings.
5. Read your associations back
Once you’ve gathered your associations, set the original dream aside for a moment.
Read only the words and phrases you’ve written down.
Sometimes a thread begins to emerge. You might notice a theme, a feeling, or a little constellation of ideas that seems to be speaking to something in your life.
This part takes some sitting.
You’re not trying to find the correct answer. There isn’t one. You’re looking for something that feels meaningful, something that catches your attention or makes you pause. It can be a bit of trial and error. You might follow one idea for a while, realise it doesn’t quite fit, and return to another.
I also try not to take dreams literally. I don’t believe a dream is instructing me to do something specific or handing me a set of directions for my life. I think of it more as a reorientation from somewhere deeper: an invitation to look at something differently, perhaps.
6. Decide what, if anything, you want to do with it
The final step is to ask yourself what you’d like to do with what you’ve discovered.
This doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. Sometimes simply recognising something is enough.
If you feel grateful to a particular figure in your dream, perhaps you could make a little piece of art for them. If an image has stayed with you, you might draw it, write a story about it, or spend some time imagining what it would be like to meet it again.
Jung himself returned to the characters and images in his dreams repeatedly. He painted them, meditated with them, and engaged them in conversation, sometimes asking questions as though something within him might have guidance to offer.
You could try something similar by journalling a conversation with a dream image. Ask it a question. See what comes back. You don’t have to believe that the image is an independent being to find the exercise meaningful.
Sometimes a dream seems to nudge us toward slowing down, making amends with someone, or tending to our own wellbeing. If something like that emerges, consider a few small steps you might take. Then notice how they feel as you move through your days.
Does the insight continue to feel useful? Does it bring a sense of clarity or relief? Or does something feel off, as though you’ve forced a meaning onto the dream that doesn’t quite belong?
You can always return to it.
You might spend years working with a single image. That isn’t failure. It’s a willingness to give something your attention over time, rather than demanding that it reveal all its secrets in one sitting.
We could all use a little more of that human pace.
Two little things that can help
There are a couple of ideas from Jungian psychology that I find particularly useful when approaching dreams. Think of these as lenses to experiment with, rather than rules you need to follow.
1. Borrow a few Jungian containers.
One way Jung approached dreams was to consider that the different characters, places, and figures within them might represent aspects of the dreamer’s own psyche.
This can be a useful way to keep the work focused on self-exploration rather than turning it into a case against someone else.
For example, Jung suggested that a house in a dream might represent the whole self, with its different rooms reflecting different parts or layers of the psyche. The person experiencing the dream can be understood as the ego: our everyday, conscious self. A dark or unfamiliar figure might offer an opportunity to explore the shadow, or aspects of ourselves that we’ve pushed away, disowned, or haven’t yet recognised.
The larger idea is that every character in the dream can be explored as a possible part of you.
Say you dream about someone you’re angry with. Rather than immediately focusing on what that person has done to you, you might ask: What part of myself could this person be carrying? What qualities do I associate with them? Where might those qualities live in me?
This isn’t about excusing anyone’s behaviour or pretending that real people haven’t caused real harm. It’s simply another way of exploring the dream’s inner landscape.
2. Check how it feels.
The unconscious is a slippery thing. It doesn’t tend to communicate in neat bullet points, and it rarely gives us a straight answer. So one of my guiding principles is that it matters less whether an idea makes perfect sense to the thinking mind than whether it feels meaningful.
When you think you’ve found something in a dream, pause for a moment. Notice how it lands in your body. Does something soften? Do you feel a little jolt of recognition? Does it bring up an emotion you hadn’t expected?
This applies to your associations, too.
Let’s go back to the car. Suppose you’ve written down fast, scary, uncomfortable, out of my element. As you read those words back, one of them might stand out. You might find yourself thinking, Oh. That one.
Follow that.
You don’t need to build a convincing argument for why it makes sense. Sometimes the felt response is worth following before the thinking mind has caught up.
And honestly, a dream that behaved itself and made perfect logical sense would be cause for suspicion.
Part of this practice is learning to trust your own associations and your own inner responses. Not blindly, of course, but with a little more curiosity and a little less interrogation. There are no mistakes to make here. You’re exploring, not taking an exam.
Listening in the dark
If this process starts to feel too serious, too complicated, or suspiciously like another item on your self-improvement to-do list, leave it alone for a while.
Really.
This isn’t homework. It’s an invitation to play, to get curious, and to spend a little time with the parts of yourself that don’t always get much airtime. You can approach it lightly. You can be surprised. You can laugh at the ridiculous things your sleeping mind comes up with. Not everything needs to be profound.
But perhaps there’s something particularly lovely about making space for this kind of listening as the nights grow longer.
I think of the dark half of the year as a kind of soil. Above ground, the world appears to be winding down. The leaves have fallen, the gardens are bare, and the forests have gone quiet. But beneath the frost, roots are still reaching. Old leaves are breaking down. Seeds are holding their little secrets, waiting for the conditions to be right.
Not everything that grows needs to be visible.
Our inner lives have seasons, too. There are things we can only understand after some time has passed. Feelings that need somewhere to settle. Parts of ourselves that have been waiting patiently for us to turn around and notice them.
Perhaps that’s what I love most about dream work. It reminds me that there’s more to us than the busy, thinking, doing part of ourselves that gets so much attention. There’s a whole wild interior in there, full of strange images, old stories, buried feelings, and possibilities we haven’t quite found the language for yet.
We don’t need to understand all of it. We don’t need to make it productive. We don’t even need to know exactly what we’re looking for.
Sometimes it’s enough to leave a little space beside the bed, keep a notebook handy, and pay attention when something from the night follows us into the morning.
The dark has its own kind of wisdom. We might as well get acquainted.
If this spoke to something in you, there are a few paths you can follow from here:
The Wolfskin Project
A growing library of free resources for self-exploration, myth, and everyday magic.
Each door leads somewhere different. It is my hope that all of them lead back to you.
<3 Rachel
What are your thoughts?