Sleep & Mental Health, Part 3: Dreams

Welcome to Part 3 of this mini-series on sleep and mental health. In the first part, I talked about the sleep states and cycles we go through, and why they’re important for our overall health and wellbeing, and in part 2, I talked about how I formulate a client’s sleep history. You can read the full posts here and here if you’re interested.

In this post, I’ll explain how and why I often work with the dreams my clients bring to therapy, and share some of the useful insights that can be gained from doing so. You may be surprised by how much information our dreams can give us, so I hope that this post gives you some helpful things to reflect on.

Without further ado, let’s dive into it!

Dreams

In my previous post, I mentioned that exploring dreams and nightmares is often a significant part of the work with clients, and that this gives us a rich source of information about the client’s unconscious world. It’s also an important part of a client’s sleep history, so I will often ask them about it.

Why do we dream?

Scientists have been arguing about this for years, and it seems that there isn’t one definitive answer to this question!

In his book Livewired (which I would highly recommend, by the way, although it’s a bit technical at times), the neuroscientist David Eagleman says that one of the reasons we need to dream is to ensure that the auditory and / or visual parts of the brain don’t experience a “hostile take-over” while we’re sleeping.

Essentially, our brains are evolving and updating with new information and neural pathways (links between different bits of the brain) all the time, and if we stop using a particular bit of it, other parts of the brain will take over, which will heighten those areas.

For example, if someone goes blind in adulthood, the part of the brain that was dealing with sight won’t be needed in the same way, so it will often get taken over by the part of the brain that deals with sound instead. This is why it’s very common for people who have lost / were born without a particular sense find that other senses are heightened significantly; it’s a kind of compensation for what’s unavailable.

From developing a greater understanding of this process, scientists believe that one of the reasons we dream is so that our senses get used while we’re sleeping, so that when we wake up, we don’t lose them for lack of use. This would have been especially important when humans were still hunter-gatherers, and would have needed to tune into the senses in the night if there was a threat from animals or other humans.

What kind of information is useful to gather about dreams?

To be honest, I would argue that absolutely everything about dreams will be useful information in some way! There are, however, some key things I find particularly insightful when working with dreams:

• People, places, situations & scenarios: If your dreams give you a strong sense of being linked to any of these in particular, this can be especially helpful to unpack in therapy. This is because our brains are unable to create images from nothing, particularly faces, so even if you don’t “know” a person who features in a dream, you will have seen them in the real world, if only for a split second.

• Any themes & patterns: When you keep a record of your dreams, it’s easier to identify patterns and themes that emerge in them. This could be: recurring dreams where the same broad scenario plays out, but specific details change each time; in the colours, light and images that feature in the dreams, or even the feelings that come up for you during the dream itself or when you wake up.

• Stand-out details: Some of the “classic” details that may be significant from dreams are things like staircases, doors, people, places and images. This doesn’t mean that any of these particular details will necessarily be significant to you, but rather that it’s useful to notice anything that does seem significant in the details of your dreams.

• Feelings during the dream, on waking up, and when retelling it: The feelings that come up for you as you dream, when you wake up, and when you retell it are usually incredibly useful. This is because you will have felt those feelings when your neo-cortex (the part of your brain that deals with logic and memory) is almost completely offline, so “reasoning” is less likely to have had a chance to override them. If you can connect with these feelings, you are more likely to be able to track them back to the cause.

• Any recurring dreams / images / other details: If you find that you’re having the same dream over-and-over-again, and / or that they feature many of the same details each time, it may be that your brain is convinced that there is something that is unresolved about it. The recurrence is likely to be happening as a way for your brain to try to make sense of it and get the resolution it seeks.

How do you work with dreams?

There are a number of ways that I work with clients’ dreams in therapy. I may invite a client to keep a dream journal to record any dreams they can remember, and bring it to the session to reflect on what they notice. We can use this as a way to identify links, themes and patterns, and to process any feelings in response to them.

Often, I’ll invite the client to tell me the dream in the present tense, then in the past tense, and to see if they notice any similarities or differences in the experience of telling it in each way. We can then explore any feelings that come up for them in response to this, and begin to unpick any themes and patterns, and significant details.

Sometimes I’ll use a technique that is often part of Gestalt therapy, which involves inviting the client to first tell me the dream in the present tense, and identify any key figures or objects within it, and to then retell the dream from the perspective of a particular figure or object (“be” the tree, door, monster, etc). Working in this way can give a client a different way of thinking about the dream, as well as processing their feelings more effectively.

Do you have any tips for exploring dreams?

Keeping a dream journal is often particularly effective for exploring dreams. Ideally, it will be a physical journal in the form of a notebook of some kind that you can keep beside your bed, rather than an electronic one. This is so that you can note down any details you can remember if you wake up during the night, without activating your brain too much with the light from an electronic device.

If you can get into the habit of writing down and / or drawing anything you can remember about your dreams, how you’re feeling as you wake up, and the quality of your sleep, you can begin to build a picture of what’s going on in your unconscious.

Although dreams can sometimes be frightening and disturbing, they are useful, and it’s worth paying attention to them because they can provide us with lots of valuable information and insights.

Therapy is also a great place to explore dreams, so if you’ve noticed that you’re dreaming a lot and / or that they leave you with lots of feelings when you wake up, it might be worth contacting a therapist to see if you can explore this further.

I hope that this series has given you some useful insights into the links between sleep and mental health, and some of the ways therapists can work with these things in therapy. I’d love to know if this resonates for you, and if you have any other tips and reflections, so feel free to connect with me and share if you’d like to.

As ever, if you’re struggling with your mental health and think I might be the therapist for you, there are a number of ways that you can get in touch with me about the possibility of working together. You can contact me using the form below, via email to emma@emmapooleytherapy.com, or find me on Facebook and Instagram @emmapooleytherapy.