Ask into that felt sense: what did that just open up in you?Ī good question from trauma work and focusing, to keep the emotion processing manageable: is this feeling mine alone or is it bigger than me? Some dreams can be about collective and/or intergenerational trauma.

Watch for signs of striking an emotional chord, and when you do, slow down and invite the dreamer to drop in deeper. In the dream, a nurse was able to bring one of the bodies back to life, and when I asked the dreamer to become the nurse, she started sobbing – the sadness in the dream was located in another dream character.Īs you invite experiential exploration, visit all the corners of the dream, and hidden and contrary places. For example, in a dream I worked on where the landscape was dark and littered with corpses, the dreamer felt calm. Sometimes the feeling is hidden in a dream element or character. How do you find the emotional core of dream? Sometimes the dream is simply steeped in the feeling, and all you need to do is re-enter, revisit and engage with the dream images. So when you are working with dreams, follow the feelings, and invite the dreamer to immerse in them, fully if possible, partially if necessary. This is why experiential dreamwork is so important, and why all modern dreamwork methods contain experiential elements. Focusing creator Eugene Gendlin said that nothing can change until it is fully felt. They are in our dreams because they want to be integrated and transformed. In my experience, the core of every dream is emotion - sometimes big emotion, sometimes underground feelings. This is a hallmark symptom of posttraumatic stress injury. This is especially true of trauma and protracted grief – these feelings are big and take time to integrate, and they can be so overwhelming the related dreams become nightmares that wake the dreamer up. We can do some this processing in our dreams, but if the same images or themes recur, then we may need to do some deliberate daytime processing as well.

Emotion is what tags the memory as important, and until we undergo some kind of process to integrate these emotional memories, they will stay alive and infiltrate our dreams.Īs a psychotherapist, I have found that dreams also bring up unmetabolized feelings because they need to be experienced and processed before the body can let them go fully. It is a big phrase for the way our memories are updated. Memory reconsolidation is a helpful notion here.

One theory of the purpose of dream emotion is to tag specific events that are important to us so they can be woven into the web of associated memories, and therefore, available when we need to retrieve them. For example, he found that in the aftermath of trauma, people would often dream not of the trauma itself but of an image that depicted the magnitude of their feelings, a tidal wave for example. Dream researcher Ernest Hartmann famously called dreams ‘picture-metaphors’ for the dreamer’s most prominent emotion. Many theories of dreaming suggest that emotion is what generates dreams, and that one of the reasons for dreaming is to process feelings. Emotion is key to understanding and working with dreams.

Mood dreams meaning