Dreamwork Coaching

In a dreamwork coaching session you explore a dream as a part of you guiding you towards being more yourself. Dreamwork recognizes that you contain a wisdom greater than your ego, a wisdom that expresses itself in dreams.

Dreamwork coaching is about actively engaging with this unconscious wisdom and integrating it into conscious awareness in a movement towards greater personal wholeness and integrity. As such, dreamwork is the final stage of a dream—it transforms the gift of autonomous dreaming into deliberate psychological growth.

The Process

In dreamwork coaching, we use your dreams as the starting point for exploring what’s alive in you that needs to be brought to conscious awareness and action. Through a structured process of questions, you’ll explore associations with the characters, places and feelings in a dream, you’ll make connections with past experiences, explore the energy and the childhood resonances and face the presence of resistance and fear. It’s your dream and all that matters in the dreamwork is the meaning and direction you get from the dream. I don’t provide interpretation.

Each dreamwork coaching session includes an hour-long dream exploration and pre- & post-session activities.

My Dreamwork Journey

My role as a dreamwork coach is based in my wonder and appreciation for the wisdom of the autonomous stories that emerge in us. As an artist, I work in creative dialogue with my unconscious, dancing with symbols, allusions, hints and poetry. For most of my life, I’ve been afraid of my dreams. But my stance towards my dreams shifted at mid-life when I realized, through dreamwork, that what I’d feared was a beautiful gift pointing towards self-awareness and growth.

Since 2018 I’ve been intensely involved in dreamwork. This includes training with Andy Fisher and graduating from the year-long This Jungian Life Dream School. For more than four years I participated in often weekly, peer-led dream groups of men and women from across Canada and the United States during which we explored hundreds of our dreams. My dreamwork coaching approach is an integration of traditional dreamwork with coaching techniques.

Today, dreamwork is an anchor in my life, providing an ongoing source of direction and insight.

Common questions about dreamwork

Q: I don’t remember all of my dreams, often just an image or two. How can I do dreamwork?

A: Very brief dreams, or snippets of a dream, often contain the most potent meaning. An analogy is that a one-sentence aphorism can contain the same essential message as a 300-page novel. Even a single image or word can be a great starting point for a dreamwork coaching session. If you pay more attention to your dreams, your dream poet will become more vocal and you’ll remember more of your dreams.

Q: What if I feel uncomfortable about something in my dream?

A: Feeling uncomfortable with parts of your dream is a natural and inevitable part of dreamwork. In fact, it’s the gold not the problem. Dreams are about the integration of all the parts of ourselves, including parts we don’t like (shadow). Your discomfort points to something that’s emerging and asking for your conscious attention. You’ll discover there are no bad parts. When we dream we weave together these parts into a vibrant whole: the losses and hopes, sadness and joy, the painful past, searching present and longed for future. 

The Biology of Dreams

I use a biological (or embodied) frame for understanding dreamwork. Homeostasis is a term that describes how your body works to maintain a healthy state, for example temperature and blood sugar levels. You are doing homeostasis right now, all unconsciously. Dreaming is part of your body’s homeostasis. And just like the sensation of hunger which indicates that you need to eat, a dream is a form of inner communication that asks something of you, whether a change in attitude or a stepping into what you fear.