Dreams are not irrelevant by-products of the psyche. They are not random. No matter how strange, frightening, funny, cryptic, or absurd they may be sometimes — they are also often meaningful, and remarkably useful.

Think of them less as puzzles to be solved and more as poems or mythic films about you, your life, and your potential. They operate in a realm of image, symbol, metaphor, intuition, and feeling that is quite different from the rational, concrete world we navigate day to day. They are one of the most direct expressions of “the unconscious” available to us — a language that runs beneath and alongside our waking narratives, often carrying what the conscious mind has not yet found words for.

Ironically, many people tend to dismiss dreams because of how odd and different they are compared to day-to-day life. And yet, they then struggle with aspects of day-to-day life. They may tend to struggle with the same patterns over and over, never stopping to think that maybe that “different and weird” realm of the dreams may contain the key to helping them do something different in their waking life!
The continuity hypothesis suggests that dream content meaningfully tracks waking psychological life. Studies show that as people heal in therapy, their dreams change in measurable ways: nightmares decrease, problem-solving increases, and the dreamer's capacity to act with agency within the dream itself grows stronger. Dreams, it turns out, are a kind of ongoing psychological report.

What Some of the Research Proposes

Pesant and Zadra (2004) found that working with dreams in therapy can raise clients' self-awareness and boost their commitment to the therapeutic process — itself one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes. Eudell-Simmons and Hilsenroth (2005) found that dream work also provides clinically valuable information that clients may be unwilling or unable to share through ordinary conversation — making it especially useful when the therapeutic relationship is still developing. A recent meta-analysis by Bhatt and colleagues (2023) found moderate effect sizes for session depth and insight gains across eight studies of cognitive-experiential dream work with over 500 clients.

From the Jungian tradition, Roesler's ongoing Structural Dream Analysis research has produced noteworthy findings: in therapies judged successful by both therapist and client, a clear and measurable upward movement in dream patterns was observed over time — the dream ego becoming increasingly capable of meeting challenges, solving problems, and engaging creatively with difficulty. No such developmental arc was found in dream series from individuals who had never received therapy. These findings provide empirical support for what depth practitioners have long observed: that the inner life, as expressed in dreams, reflects and tracks the process of psychological growth.

How Dream Work Unfolds in Counseling

In the counseling relationship, dreams can illuminate what the waking mind has not yet found words for: unresolved grief, emerging growth, inner conflict, or the quiet movement of the self toward greater wholeness. Dream work is woven into the process when it arises naturally and when a client is curious and willing to engage it — it is never imposed.

The approach Chris uses is collaborative. A dream is not interpreted at a client; it is explored with them. The client's own associations, embodied responses, and lived experience are always the primary authority on what a dream means. An experienced guide can help deepen and extend that inquiry — asking questions the dreamer might not think to ask, tracking recurring symbols, noticing what the dream seems to be reaching toward — but the meaning ultimately belongs to the dreamer.