Become Your Own Dream Therapist and Deepen Your Self-Relationship
What you dream is uncontrollable, but how you perceive them is.
It all started with a nightmare. It was so tremendously vivid and graphic that I decided to turn it into a story. You would think that after having such a nightmare, the last thing anyone would want to do is attempt to remember the experience enough to be able to describe it in words.
But I have found certain processes involved in writing out dreams lead to a deeper understanding of why they transpire.
This is how you can do this for yourself and rapidly transform your self-relationship in the process.
Dream therapy
The main goal of dream therapy is to help people address their real-life problems by analysing their dreams. Although dream interpretation can date back to as early as Ancient Greece, it was Sigmund Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams that formerly introduced it as a standard technique in psychotherapy back in 1899.
A recent analysis of dream reports shows that most dreams are a continuation of what is happening in someone’s everyday life. However, conflicting findings note that dream interpretation has lost some of its significance due to transference and countertransference issues.
A simple solution? More of us learn to think for ourselves and interpret our own dreams.
After all, therapists can attempt to extract enough information to help you understand the potential meanings behind your dreams. You are the only person with untapped access to them. You have the power to pinpoint parts of your dreams that have piqued your curiosity and determine your own relevant meanings behind them.
And the best part is, you don’t need any formal qualifications to apply these methods yourself.
Psychoanalysing our own dreams
Therapists are required — and easily able — to decompartmentalise their personal feelings in order to exert an unbiased and neutral approach to patients. By mentally appointing yourself as your own dream therapist, you are striving to uphold these same principles to the best of your ability.
The unfulfilled University Psychology dropout buried within me aches to fully understand my dreams and nightmares. So my overactive brain usually creates the most in-depth and analytical explanations to try and appease them. It’s important to be able to structure these sorts of analyses in ways that will improve your knowledge and awareness in the long term.
Here are the simple methods you can adopt in order to achieve this, originally inspired by clinical psychotherapist, Jeffrey Sumber.
1. Start to write it all out
The way I do this is by writing daily Morning Pages. The practice was originated by Julia Cameron, with the intent of serving as a “bedrock tool of creative recovery”.
It involves writing out (longhand) your entire stream of consciousness first thing in the morning — in a brain-dump sort of fashion — across three pages (size of pages unspecified). The idea is that you can go about the rest of your day, having given time to process your thoughts and emotions. It certainly emphasises one’s depth of awareness over speed.
“Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.” — Julia Cameron
When I wrote about my nightmare, I probably bled out three A4 pages alone, setting it up like a full-length fiction story. This length of writing isn’t essential — even if bolstered by Julia’s practice. If you wake up and put in the effort to psychoanalyse your own dream by writing it out, then you are already taking steps to better connect with yourself — and this shouldn’t need to be rated by the number of pages you fill.
2. Remember events by using emotion
Now, ask yourself a few questions:
- How did particular events make me feel?
- Do I still feel this way now (the morning after)?
- How comfortable am I when feeling these feelings?
- What character was I in the dream?
- If the dream were a film, what genre would I categorise it?
I made this process a lot more fun by imagining the dream was actually a feature film and I was both the film’s director and lead actor.
As the lead actor, I replayed the dream whilst imagining who my character was — even if this would simply be a case of analysing my own personality. I also wondered what would be like to be the aggressor, or be passive.
As the director, I imagined walking through each scene as an observer and noting the reasons why events stirred up certain emotions. This also allowed me to frame the less significant details of the dream around parts that were more emotionally hard-hitting. There may be something to learn from even the boring parts.
3. Remember your thoughts
During the dream, what were the main thoughts you had? Sumber gives these examples of recurring thoughts: “They are going to kill me.” “I don’t understand.” Or “I’m not going to make it.” There may be links to recurring thoughts you may have throughout the day. If so, ask yourself in what situations have you had these thoughts?
4. Remember that you are the expert
Dream dictionaries exist to keep a record of the universal meanings behind symbols that appear in dreams. These symbols, although carrying a certain collective meaning, ultimately mean different things to different people.
The key to figuring out what a dream means to the individual is trusting their internal locus to navigate them towards answers, and not the opinions of others. Sumber finds this to be the only clear therapeutic method to work by:
“Therapists need to place aside all of their information, tools and associations for universal symbols and dream interpretation with each new client and treat each person as a unique, new world to be discovered.”
In practice
Applying these methods I was able to decrypt my nightmare and deduce my own meanings from it.
The story of my nightmare⤵️
Both myself and the kitten were situated on the outskirts of a busy town
It might not come as a surprise that no matter how old I become, one deeply rooted feeling remains a constant: my life exists outside the “mainstream”.
With four secondary schools and intermediate homeschooling due to the effects of bullying, I became able to adapt to new environments at the flip of a switch.
I’ve always seen this as a personal strength, as it means I can comfortably fit in where needed and uphold the role of ‘observer’. On the flip side, I often feel uncomfortable being in the same place after a certain amount of time.
It often feels like I’m a foreign jigsaw piece trying to convince a puzzle box, with all of its pieces already accounted for, that I too belonged in there with them. This has also applied to working environments, career paths, and forming and developing relationships from the time I started my first secondary school to this very day.
Now I have finally been diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) in my adult life, I realise that these were all symptoms of a greater hidden cause. I can reflect on certain tropes that I thought hindered me and see them as assets (i.e. being an observer is an asset when it comes to writing from an unbiased perspective). It also has enabled me to become analytical of my thoughts, enough to warrant being comfortable psychoanalysing my own dreams.
I blindly followed someone I vaguely knew, rather than stay with the kitten
I very recently admitted to myself that I am genuinely too concerned with what others think of me, especially towards those I am hoping to impress and gain respect from. The person I chose to follow in the dream was someone who in reality had reacted negatively to a post I had recently shared on Facebook.
At the time of reading her comment, I didn’t put too much thought into it. I simply responded to it in the most respectful way I could think of and closed Facebook. The memory of this managed to latch itself onto the shadiest part of my hippocampus and slide itself into a dream, which morphed into a partial nightmare.
Choosing to stay with the kitten and not follow the woman I barely knew would have been a strength. I would have prioritised the things immediately in front of me within my control, and rapidly increase the chances of saving the kitten’s life.
I was absentminded
And this trait doesn’t just present itself in my dream… I am genuinely absentminded and make a self-deprecating point to remind myself of this every day.
As mentioned, I was diagnosed with ADHD at the midway mark of 2020. Since then, I have become a lot more aware of my everyday behaviours and have drawn parallels between them and past actions, which have led to my present downfall. The main one is my inability to focus for long periods of time without my mind taking excursions to faraway places.
The mere fact I had jumped ahead of time in my dream is a clear indication that being so naturally forgetful is having a negative effect on my self-esteem. I am secretly afraid of ever being a mother, or responsible for another living thing because deep down, I believe that I will always be a scared child. One that’s on the ultimate quest for the ultimate answer to “how I can be normal?”.
Lessons learned
It has taken me a lifetime to realise that I can easily identify and begin to overcome certain mental health problems by treating myself as a test subject, and not a victim. Through the practice of observation, documentation and analysis, I’ve realised that I am a visceral dreamer. And I wear my heart on my sleeve — even within the realms of the subconscious.
I have carefully conditioned myself to learn how to interpret the often abstract meanings behind my dreams with these methods. But understanding why they are manifested only amounts to a few short skips along the yellow brick road of overcoming much deeper problems.
It is our ultimate responsibility to be brave and act accordingly once we have identified deeper underlying mental health issues. We might not ever overcome them alone.
I keep to this practice of psychoanalysing my dreams and behaviours because I believe that if I don’t, I would be enabling certain issues to continue to affect me subconsciously. I refuse to have my destiny controlled by lingering mental health issues that I actually have the power to fix.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
Final thoughts
Some mornings when words haven’t come as easily to the page, or I am grappling with myself to relive the trauma of a dream through words, I try to remember one single thing: the practice of writing therapeutically is like building a muscle. To actively strengthen it, it must be exercised every day. It takes consistency and patience before expecting any results.
On the morning preceding my nightmare, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as the hidden meanings spilt onto the pages as easily as my morning tears once did.
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