One of the things I love most about dreams is how unique each and every one of them is. Everyone experiences their dreams in slightly different ways, and thus dreams have a nearly infinite array of uses and applications. Dreams can inspire you to create art, show you where your lost keys are, or even diagnose an illness for you.

But there are some things dreams are amazingly good at, almost across the board. The list below are these things, from my experience. In a culture that often considers dreams to be boring and meaningless, and where few people spend much time at all considering the content of their dreams, it can be difficult to find the motivation to cultivate a dream practice.

This breaks my heart a bit, since in my work with dreams I’ve witnessed over and over the immense power and potency of dream material, and its ability to be utilized in truly amazing ways. So even if you only have a slight curiosity about one dream you had, I invite you to consider that this curiosity has the potential to truly change your life. Here are the most supportive things a dream practice can offer you.

1. Reconnecting with the Emotional/Feeling Body

I have not been able to determine the exact origin of the term emotional body, but after a quick google search I believe this article best describes the concept as I understand it. Basically, we all have an aspect of our experience that is “what it feels like to be us”. This experience can have physical and non-physical dimensions. It helps us bridge and the gap between the perceptions of the body and the thoughts of the mind. From a very young age, many of us have been taught to suppress or disconnect from the emotional body, or we detached from it because of traumatic experiences. Have you ever felt like you were more emotional in your dream than you are in real life? This is the experience of your emotional body, when your rational mind is suppressed. Your dreams will teach you how to reconnect with it and open the door to a whole new way of experiencing your life.

2. Discovering What Source is To You

As we open to connecting to our emotional body, we open up the channel between our experience of waking life and the ultimate source of our lives. Dreams have taught me to never to dictate to anyone else what shape and form that source (or spirit, or divine, or deity) may take for them personally. Dreams have also taught me that developing your relationship with that source is essential to your ultimate wellbeing. If you’re someone who is curious about spirituality, calls themselves agnostic, or feel like you’ve been searching for a spirituality you can relate to, your dreams are an excellent tool to utilize. They reveal a spiritual path that is deeply individual and unfolds at precisely your pace, using the symbols, figures, and images that speak specifically to you.

3. Developing Courage

It’s always worth being clear: often, dreams are scary or uncomfortable. But fear is not the demon that it is always made out to be. Fear is often simply an opportunity for courage. Dreams give us ample opportunities to cultivate and nurture our ability to be brave in the face of difficult obstacles. It all begins when we have the courage to feel the way we feel. Dreams will often depict our fears and anxieties not to terrorize us but to teach us valuable lessons about their root causes and how they can be faced. When we develop courage, we develop the ability to live a heart-centered life of integrity and deep alignment with our truth.

4. Healing Trauma

I think of healing as a spiral path of infinite depth. There is always progress, repair, increasing wholeness and there is always more available to walk. Our trauma opens a portal, through which we have the opportunity to reclaim the most true and vulnerable parts of ourselves. We begin to walk this path the moment we believe that healing trauma is possible, and if we can ground ourselves in this belief, our dreams will be there for us each step of the way.

5. Cultivating Intimacy

So many of us wish to have closer, more intimate, more vulnerable relationships with the people in our lives. But these desires will not be fulfilled until we cultivate a more ideal relationship with ourselves. And not just the part of ourselves that interacts with the world–but our deeper, more internal parts. Our dreams offer us the chance to get to know the inner self. When we honor our dreams, we honor the deepest feelings inside of us. Once we learn how to do this, the external relationships we long for will naturally unfold.

If you are looking for more evidence that your dreams are powerful and worthwhile tools for your overall well being, there is plenty to be found. You could consider that indigenous cultures across the globe have always revered and uplifted dreams as a powerful tool for reflection and force for change in community. You could study depth psychology, and the writings of Freud and Jung and Hillman and Woodman, who all recognized the deeply beneficial psychological effects of working with our dreams. 

But I would bet that at the end of the day, you are only truly going to be convinced that your dreams can help you if you experience it for yourself, with a dream you had. So what have you got to lose? If you’re ready to explore and want to learn more, click here to find out about my one on one sessions, or here to purchase The Dreaming I, an interactive dream journal.