What can our dreams tell us about ourselves?

Dreams have long fascinated us. 

In what is often considered the oldest surviving work of literature, the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, we can see how seriously dreams were taken. In the story, King Gilgamesh dreams of an axe falling from the sky. His mother interprets the dream as a prophetic image of Enkidu, the stranger who will soon enter his life, become his closest companion, and challenge and ultimately change him. 

Thousands of years later, a dream would have a very different kind of consequence. In 1920, pharmacologist Otto Loewi awoke from a dream with an idea for an experiment that would help demonstrate that the nervous system communicates through chemical signals. He famously struggled to remember the idea the following morning, until the dream returned to him the next night. This time, he got out of bed, went to his laboratory, and put the idea to the test. The experiment would eventually contribute to his Nobel Prize and change our understanding of how the nervous system communicates.

Throughout history, across cultures and centuries, dreams have been understood in many different ways. To many ancient cultures, they were messages from the gods or spirits, offering guidance, warnings, healing and prophecy. Many religions have understood them as vehicles of divine revelation, glimpses into ultimate reality, and a means by which we might cultivate ever-greater awareness. A neuroscientific perspective suggests that dreaming may play a role in consolidating memories, processing emotions and rehearsing responses to potential threats. Psychodynamic approaches, meanwhile, propose that dreams might reveal something of the unconscious mind, including wishes, conflicts and aspects of ourselves that our conscious minds might otherwise overlook.

From the first dream I can remember, an unsettling scene in which a slightly sinister-looking Thomas the Tank Engine chugs slowly towards me while I stand frozen in a field of cornflakes, I have felt that dreams are somehow important. And as a therapist who regularly sits with others as they make sense of their own equally unique and often strange dream experiences, my interest and curiosity have only grown. Over time, I have come to find the question ‘What are dreams?’ far less important than what they might say to us, about us, and how, in therapy, they might hold the possibility of another way of approaching experiences for which we do not yet have the waking words. 

But hold on. It was just a dream, right? 

Why might dreams be worth exploring?

Unlike many that came before us, much of modern Western culture has relegated dreams to the realms of either neuroscience or nonsense, merely a side effect of what our brains do while we sleep, or something that, if taken too seriously, places us firmly in the territory of mysticism, pseudoscience, or silliness. 

Perhaps this sounds familiar? “I had the strangest dream last night. It’s nonsense, I know, but…” Or “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this; it doesn’t mean anything.” Or what about, “It was just one of those crazy dreams, you know, I only remembered it because it woke me up!” And then there’s this one: “I know it was only a dream. I don’t know why I’m getting so upset”, as we wipe away a tear and say, “I’m being so silly; I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.” Subtly, and in all sorts of ways, our dreams are often dismissed as ridiculous, irrelevant, and ultimately unworthy of attention. 

In response to such attitudes toward exploring dreams, I often offer this: if you spent roughly a third of your life writing a diary but never read it, you might think that quite strange. Or, if someone rushed up and started speaking to you in another language, you probably wouldn’t assume, simply because you didn’t immediately understand what they were saying, that they didn’t have anything to say. Every night, your mind spontaneously creates stories, images, emotional experiences and relationships without conscious control. Whether they contain profound wisdom or not, they are part of your psychological life and worthy of attention. In my experience, when people pay sustained attention to their dreams, they may discover things about themselves that they had not consciously recognised.

Or, as it is put in the Babylonian Talmud, “An uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter.” Perhaps we might simply take the time to open it. 

Exploring dreams in therapy

So, what does that actually mean in the therapy room?

For me, I tend toward an approach I have called ‘CAT’: curiosity, attention, time. We can be curious: Why this image? Why now? Why that interaction between those figures? What does that image bring to mind? We can give attention: What else did you notice? What feeling did that evoke? What felt most important about that part? What does that make you think of? What did you notice in yourself as you were there? 

And we can give it time. In an ever-increasing ‘on-demand’ world, patience can be hard to muster. But dreams run to a different clock. They move to a different rhythm, inviting us to stay with something alive rather than treating it as a puzzle to be ‘solved.’

With time, we might discover that, just as the tide moves in and leaves something on the shore, the dream has left something behind in our waking life. Perhaps something has been brought into awareness, something has shifted, or something that was difficult to find words for has begun to take shape.

How to remember and explore your dreams

What can we do as dreamers to become a little more attentive to this strange and sometimes elusive part of our psychological lives? Perhaps the first thing is simply to remember them. Dreams are notoriously difficult to hold on to. We can wake with the sense that something important has happened, only for it to disappear as we reach for the alarm, check our phone, or begin thinking about the day ahead.

Keeping a notebook, or whatever method works best, beside the bed can help. Write down what you remember, even if it is only a fragment, an image, a feeling, a person, a place, or a single sentence. You don’t need to make sense of it right away. Sometimes the smallest fragment is enough to bring the rest back later. 

Rather than immediately asking, “What does this mean?”, we might ask some simpler questions: What stands out to me? What was I feeling? What was the atmosphere of the dream? Which part stays with me most? Was there anything that surprised me, frightened me, amused me, or felt strangely familiar? 

Sometimes, it can be helpful to expand the dream. Stay with an image and see what comes to mind. Imagine returning to the place in the dream. Is there anything there that you didn’t notice the first time? What might happen if the scene continued? What would you say to the person, animal, or figure you encountered? What might they say to you? However, if the dream feels particularly distressing or overwhelming, it may be better to explore it with the support of a therapist rather than pushing yourself to revisit it alone.

And perhaps most importantly, we can pay attention to how the dream makes us feel, rather than only what happens in it. Dreams can be strange, fragmented, and seemingly nonsensical, yet the feelings they leave behind can be remarkably clear. Fear, shame, grief, anger, longing, excitement, tenderness, disgust. We don’t have to dismiss those feelings simply because the story that accompanied them was strange.

Over time, we might notice patterns. Perhaps the same place keeps appearing. Perhaps there is a recurring figure, a particular feeling, or a familiar situation that takes different forms. Perhaps something that once frightened us has begun to change, or perhaps nothing obvious has happened at all.

What do our dreams mean?

There is no dream dictionary here, no universal key with which to unlock the meaning of a particular image. The therapist’s task is not to tell someone what their dream means. What matters is the meaning that emerges for the dreamer, their associations, their history, their feelings, and the particular circumstances of their life. 

And perhaps that is where I land with dreams. I don’t think we need to decide exactly what they are, or whether they are messages, memories, wishes, fragments, symbols, or simply the strange workings of a sleeping brain. Perhaps they are, at times, a little of all of these. 

What seems more interesting to me is what happens when we stop dismissing them and become curious about what they have to say. We don’t have to ‘solve’ them; we can simply open the letter and remain curious about what we find. Perhaps, in doing so, something begins to emerge that could not have emerged through certainty alone. Perhaps that is the invitation of dreams: not to tell us what to think, but to offer us another place from which to look.