Dream Therapy 101: Self-Care Before Your Feet Hit the Floor
These days we’re all about mindfulness, intentionality, and self-care.
And while we love a good massage, yoga sesh, or our toes in the sand — you need to know that there’s so much more to self-care if you’re aiming to achieve true mindfulness and live out an intentional life designed by Y.O.U.
Dream therapy will bring your self-care to a whole new level, full of more rewards than you knew possible.
Dream therapy can help you harness the power of your dreams to design the life you’re craving.
You can get rid of those limiting beliefs.
You can get to know yourself on a much deeper level.
But let’s get into what dream therapy is and how you can use it to discover yourself.
We’ll cover:
What is Dream Therapy?
Why Should I Do Dream Therapy?
6 Benefits of Dream Therapy
How To Get Started with Dream Therapy
WHAT IS DREAM THERAPY?
Dream therapy is the technique of exploring and analyzing your dreams to unlock your subconscious.
It’s a life-changing fusion of mindful sleeping, intentional dreaming, and wakeful dream recall.
And dream analysis is by no means the new kid on the block — it’s an ancient practice dating back to early Chinese and Mayan cultures. Today, over 70% of psychoanalysts use dream work as part of their therapy program.
Everyone is thought to dream between 3 and 6 times per night, and it’s believed that each dream lasts anywhere from 5 minutes to a whopping 20, which means you’ve got plenty of dream therapy material, even if you don’t usually remember your dreams.
There are many forms of dream therapy. However, you can discover for yourself the meaning behind your mind’s stories that are spun night after night in your dreams.
WHY SHOULD I DO DREAM THERAPY?
Dream therapy can be the key to becoming whole and knowing yourself completely.
Unlocking your subconscious mind and the stories that your brain plays on repeat is a huge factor in getting to know yourself. There may be stories your brain has been telling you that have created limiting beliefs, blocking you from realizing your full potential.
You can change those stories through intentional dream work.
There may be stress areas you’re unaware of hiding in your dreams. Until you discover and deal with them, they’ll have a grip on your waking hours, your relationships, your work — your entire life.
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are both known for their work in dream analysis. While Sigmund Freud thought dreams expressed repressed, forbidden wishes, Carl Jung, Freud’s protégé, took a different approach. Jung thought dreams were an open expression of the subconscious. He wrote this about dreams:
“They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise … They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.” (Collected Works 17, paragraph 189)
In other words, Jung believed that our mind tries to communicate with our ego through dreams. Our dreams are stories with important meaning woven into them. We need only to take the time to investigate those meanings.
While dream analysis in therapy can be helpful, as we become more in tune with ourselves, we can do our own dreamwork.
You can begin to do dream therapy at night as your head hits the pillow and in the morning before your feet hit the floor.
FUN DREAM FACTS
Sigmund Freud isn’t the only one who was interested in dreams. People’s (and pets’) dream patterns have produced a heap of fabulous facts - here are a few of our favs:
The first dream dictionary originates from Ancient Egypt.
We forget up to 95% of all our dreams shortly after waking up.
During a lucid dream, parts of the brain that are typically inactive during sleep show increased activity.1% – 15% of people sleepwalk.
About 51% of respondents believe that we express inner fears and anxieties in our dreams.
About 53% of Americans dream about falling over and over again.
Some of the greatest inventions originated in dreams.
18% – 63% of people claim that they’ve had a precognitive dream (dream about the future).
After reading these intriguing facts, why wouldn’t you want to do dream therapy?
6 BENEFITS of DREAM THERAPY
As we mentioned above, dream therapy enables you to know yourself fully.
Once you truly know yourself, you’re on the road to becoming who you’re meant to be. On the road to discovery, you’ll find more amazing benefits to analyzing your dreams.
1. Self-awareness — During the day, you may block out your subtle thoughts and emotions, blanketing them with more logical, socially accepted thoughts. When you begin to do your own dream therapy, you allow yourself the space to recall your dreams in a non-judgmental way. Once you do that, you’ll become more aware of your true feelings around an issue, toward a person, or about yourself.
2. Process emotions — It often feels easier to stuff our emotions, carry on, and sweep those feelings under the rug. However, once you’re working through recalling your dreams, you’ll experience freedom. The freedom that comes from understanding your buried emotions that pop up in your dreams. And that freedom allows you to recognize, accept, and process those emotions.
3. Spark creativity — Dreams allow you to throw off your inhibitions and get those creative juices flowing. Doing your dream work will enable you to target creativity while dreaming and recall those ideas once you wake up. Larry Page was a 22-year old graduate student at Stanford when he dreamed about the idea of downloading the entire web, and just like that, Google was born.
4. Problem-solving — Our minds can problem-solve through dreaming. Tapping into the subconscious part of your mind where you’re less hindered by your logical brain function allows you to come up with a previously hidden solution.
5. Learn a skill — Ever struggle to get a handle on a new skill? Try as you might, you just can’t seem to get your head around the new concept until one day, after waking from a dream, you’ve got it!
Jack Nicklaus told a San Francisco reporter in 1964 that he changed his golf swing after a dream — “I was hitting them pretty good in the dream, and all at once I realized I wasn’t holding the club the way I’ve actually been holding it lately. I’ve been having trouble collapsing my right arm, taking the club head away from the ball, but I was doing it perfectly in my sleep. So when I came to the course yesterday morning, I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today.”
6. Stress & anxiety relief — Intentionally doing your own dream therapy can relieve stress and anxiety by spending time in mindful dream recall and thought about stressful dreams. Identifying the underlying emotion of the dream takes away its power, reducing stress.
In a study by Malinowski, J. (2017), 95 participants submitted dreams to be analyzed and were asked a series of questions about their dream. Next, they were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to assess their tendency toward thought suppression. The result? High thought suppressors dream more of their negative waking-life than lower thought suppressors, resulting in higher anxiety and stress levels.
HOW TO GET STARTED WITH DREAM THERAPY
You’re ready to experience dream therapy’s impact on your well-being and infuse your life with more balance and intentionality, right? We’ve got the steps for you to follow to direct your body and your brain to the path of mindfulness so that you can control your dream life.
Establish a Better Bed-Time Routine
Adults generally need about 7 hours of quality sleep per night, and if you’re serious about dream therapy, you’ve got to start with establishing your bedtime routine.
Here are our top tips:
Try to go to bed at the same time each night
Skip the nightcap — sure, that glass of wine may relax you at first, but alcohol is known for interfering with the sleep cycle.
Make your bedroom temperature comfortable.
Establish a routine to prep for sleep to signal to your body to wind down (ex: diffuse lavender oil, turn off all screens 30 minutes before you’re ready to go to sleep, stretch, and practice taking slow, deep, calming breaths).
If you sleep with your phone in the room (and most of us do), now’s the time to turn off all notifications. You don’t need that midnight email interrupting your quality sleep!
Turn off all lights — no night lights or glowing screens that could disrupt your sleep.
Affirmations
Once you’ve moved through your bedtime routine, it’s time for your affirmations. First things first, when you’re new to dream work, you must train your brain to recall your dreams. So begin with this affirmation — “I will remember my dreams tomorrow morning.”
Repeat this as you keep your eyes closed or focus on a single focal point. It could be the navy blue corner of a painting on your wall or those yoga pants tossed over the back of the chair. Your chosen object isn’t important, and you’re simply training your brain to recall your dream by clearing the clutter through focus.
You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll see progress in the area of dream recall.
Process As Soon As You Wake
As soon as you wake up in the morning, take time to process your dreams. Keep your eyes closed, or focus on your focal point from the night before, take a deep breath, and relax. Let your dreams come into your consciousness. No pressure here. You’re training your brain to recall your dreams.
Keep a Dream Journal
Once you’ve spent a few moments processing and recalling your dreams, it’s time to get them into your dream journal. The act of journaling your dreams not only helps you keep track of your dreams and increase your recall, but it allows you the opportunity to process and diffuse the emotions tied into your dreams.
As you journal, ask yourself these questions about your dream:
What were you doing?
Where were you?
List people, places, creatures that were in the dream.
How did you feel in the dream?
How does thinking about the dream make you feel as you write?
Does anything about the dream seem linked to things going on in your life right now?
Your dream journal should be kept next to your bed and can be a custom dream journal, a simple notebook from Target, or an app on your phone.
An app like Wakefully can help you unlock the power of your dreams through A.I. dream interpretation. Imagine having a dream therapist right in your pocket!
In fact, 76% of surveyed users of Wakefully Dream Coach, an A.I. Dream Analysis Messenger Chatbot, found that the dream analysis resonated and rang true with them. In addition, 80% felt they gained deep insight or a fresh perspective on something they’re currently struggling with in their life.
Now that’s cool.
Identify Recurring Themes
As you continue to journal, note the recurring themes in your dreams. What might they mean? What emotions might be locked in your subconscious that keeps popping up in related dreams? How do these relate to your waking life experiences and circumstances at the time of the dream?
When you identify those patterns, you’ll identify areas in your life needing your attention so that you can continue your journey of self-awareness growth.
DREAM THERAPY GIVES YOU THE POWER
Harnessing the power of your dreams can energize your life, soothe your soul, and wrap you up in the fullness that comes with knowing and accepting yourself completely.
Dream therapy is a method backed by science to help you tap into emotional subtleties that might stay hidden otherwise. And without that knowledge, other lovely forms of self-care like massages, hikes in the wilderness, and quiet meditation may leave you ungrounded.
Wakefully is a digital dream coach that helps you understand, remember, track, and even design your dreams. Now that’s the dream self-care we’re talking about.