How to Work with Dreams in Your Clinical Practice

Course Description

The journey into clinical dreamwork begins with a look at the clinical benefits to dreamwork, and how the current science of dreaming supports its use. Research from the last decade has advanced our understanding of what dreams do. Dreams appear to have a role in regulating emotion and consolidating memory, which also describe the process of psychotherapy. Learn why dreamwork is essential to your clinical practice.

We have also advanced our understanding of trauma-related nightmares and how to reliably treat them. You will learn simple ways to reduce the distress that nightmares cause, and to promote safe integration of the challenging emotions that disturbing dreams carry with them.

Dreamwork practices have become increasingly experiential, allowing clients to arrive at their own understanding of the meaning of their dreams. This course offers clear, practical experiential dreamwork methods (with lots of clinical examples) that will deeply engage clients in their own growth and change processes. You will leave this course with a clear sense of how to confidently help clients navigate their dreams safely, constructively and in a way that leads to growth and change.

This course is ideal if

• Understand how to work with client dreams with skill and confidence. 
• Work with nightmares to reduce their frequency, and the related distress they cause.
• Understand how current dream and sleep science informs clinical practice and supports the use of dreamwork.
• Learn how to work with dreams in series in a way that helps you diagnose and track clinical progress.
• Learn to show your clients how to engage experientially with their dreams, deepening the process of psychotherapy.
• Understand how to work with bad dreams and trauma-related nightmares in safe and constructive ways.
• Help your client make the most of the healing potential inherent in their dreams.

Course Overview

Class 1. Why Work With Dreams?

Dreams point to what matters most to our clients, and when we attend to them in sessions, it deepens and accelerates the process of psychotherapy. The reasons to work with dreams are more compelling than ever. For example, you will learn how dreams can be used to track clinical progress, aid in diagnosis and offer markers of clinical change. From the client’s perspective, dreamwork makes therapy more engaging, and takes the conversation away from well-worn, problem-saturated pathways into creative and fascinating new terrain. Dreams also allow for trauma processing from a safe distance. 

1. Origin story: how my personal experience of dreamwork compelled me to practice and teach dream therapy
2. The emotion regulation theory of dreamwork, and how this applies in practice
3. How dreams bring new, creative and honest conversations into therapy 
4. Understanding how dream progressions show clinical progress, and how this applies to treating nightmares
5. How dreams can be a safe way to work with trauma
   

Class 2.  How to Recall, Record and Engage with Dreaming

Many people wish they could recall their dreams better – this session will offer many ideas about how to improve dream recall, how to keep a dream journal, and how to incubate dreams in answer to specific queries. You will also be introduced to alternative forms of dream engagement such as surfing the in-between states between dreaming and waking, seeding daydreams and playing with degrees of lucidity. You will learn how to carry dream images, emotions, elements and characters with you, and encourage clients to do the same, infiltrating dreaming into everyday life.

1. How to recall,  record and incubate dreams
2. Surfing in the liminal state between dreaming and waking: seeding daydreams, re-entering dreams, playing at the edges of lucidity
3. Carrying the dream images with you: ideas include art, inner dialogue, active imagination
4. The lucid dreaming continuum and its usefulness in dreamwork

Class 3. Finding and Embodying the Help in Dreams

Eugene Gendlin, who developed a form of embodied experiencing called focusing, suggested that first and foremost, we should love and enjoy our dreams. Gendlin said the main point of dreamwork is to embody the life force or ‘help’ each dream carries. This session will show you how to artfully search for the help in client dreams in a systematic way. Finding the dream’s life force becomes the guiding quest as you travel through the dream setting, become acquainted with the characters, predicaments and unique elements that the dream brings. You will also learn how to work constructively with challenging dreams where it appears, at first, that no help can be found. 

1. A brief introduction to focusing-oriented dreamwork: philosophy, embodiment, and life-forward energy
2. How to find ‘help’ in a dream, with examples
3. Finding help using ‘bias control’ to try on the opposite of what the dreamer is drawn to, fostering growth from unlikely places
4. How to find help in nightmares and other dreams where it appears there is no help to be found

Class 4.  Experiential Dreamwork Practices 

This session offers an overview of common factors in dreamwork and describes how dreamwork practices have moved away from interpretation and toward experiential ways of engaging with dreams. We will dive deeply into two of the most popular experiential practices: how to embody dream elements, and how to dream the dream onward. Clinical examples will provide a sense of how to apply these methods in practice, allowing you to become more fluid with guiding dream experiencing.

1. An overview of ‘common factors’ in modern dreamwork
2. How to embody dream elements, with examples
3. Dream re-entry and dreaming the dream onward
4. Blending and combining experiential practices

Class 5. Working with nightmares and bad dreams

Nightmares offer a compelling case for dreamwork as they can coincide with depression, anxiety and increased risk of suicide, and are a hallmark symptom of PTSD. This session will offer current information on the nightmare treatment imperative, and ways to experientially adapt the top nightmare treatments available. You will leave with an understanding of the various kinds of nightmares and relevant treatment considerations. You will also learn various ways to help clients understand and befriend these intense dreams. 

1. What are nightmares, and what are they not?
2. Kinds of nightmares and treatment considerations
3. The nightmare-suicide link and clinical considerations
4. Treating idiopathic nightmares, with an example
5. Treating trauma-related nightmares, with an example
6. How dreams after treatment can mark progress

Class 6.  Dreamwork as an Agent of Change

Dreams can challenge our habitual way of seeing the world and ourselves, and as such, they can confront us with powerful emotional truths. This class shows how dreamwork offers us a contrary view, and opens the doorway to new ways of being. You will learn about how dreamwork helps reconsolidate (or update) emotional memories. This will be illustrated with clinical examples of transformative experiential dreamwork. We will also briefly review our 6-class journey into the basics, and some of the nuances, of experiential clinical dreamwork.

1. The basics of memory reconsolidation and how dreams may be implicated
2. How dreamwork can promote memory updating
3. The power of dreams that stay with us to accelerate change processes, with clinical examples
4. How being contrarian with dream material can facilitate transformation
5. Review of the course material

By the end of this course you will

• Have a deeper understanding of how to work with dreams in an embodied, experiential way.
• Be able to help dream clients recall, record and engage with their dreams constructively and experientially. 
• Understand the different kinds of nightmares and how to make wise clinical choices in working with them.
• Understand the basics of focusing-oriented, embodied dreamwork and how to find ‘help’ to make dreamwork more constructive.
• Have developed an open-minded way of seeing that the dream’s more disturbing elements may hold the key to transformation, and be able to facilitate such changes in your dream clients.
• In general, be more adept and comfortable with the fluid, experiential engagement with client dreams (and your own.)