Freud called dreams 'the royal road to the unconscious', and while psychoanalytic thinking has developed considerably since his foundational work, the observation remains compelling. The sleeping mind, freed from the constraints of rational thought and social performance, produces imagery and narrative that carries emotional charge, symbolic meaning, and connections to waking concerns that the person has not consciously been able to make.
In therapy, I work with dreams collaboratively. I don't interpret them unilaterally — I'm not consulting a symbol dictionary. Instead, we explore the dream together: the images, the feelings, the associations that arise, the ways the dream connects to what's been happening in the person's life and in the therapy itself.
Even a brief dream fragment can be surprisingly productive. The recurring dreams that haunt a person for years often have something important to say. And sometimes the most striking thing is not what the dream contains but the emotions it leaves behind on waking — the residue of the dreaming life that spills into the day.