Dreamwork

I love working with dreams. I have found that they have the capacity to move therapy work on to a new level, both in individual and group therapy. They speak from a place that is outside the familiar, and often to what is not being attended to, or avoided in life and therapy.
In this paper, I start with a (non-exhaustive) list of ways in which we could work with dreams. It is also not a set of either/ors: dreams can operate on many levels simultaneously. Dreams are incredibly artistic, multilayered expressions. They are an expression of the human capacity for creativity, for living outside the immediate given, and imagining a world that does not yet exist, but which we can work to make actual (like Martin Luther King’s dream).
I then write about ways to extend the meaning of dreaming and Gestalt dreamwork into our waking lives, seeing our lives as a waking recurrent dream.