What Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You
Most of us think about dreams as something to decode or interpret. It's normal to wonder what our subconscious might be telling us.
We ask questions to draw meaning:
Why does my dream have people from my past hanging out with people from my present?
Why did it feel so real when I fell in my dream?
Why was I running but not moving?
At Our Kind Therapy, we take a clinical perspective to demystifying dreams. One of the approaches we take to dream work is through the lens of Gestalt therapy. Gestalt is an experiential approach, meaning the focus isn't on analyzing or explaining, it's on feeling and experiencing something directly in session. Applied to dreams, that means we're less focused on what a dream means, and more interested in what it's like to actually be living it.
Every part of the dream is a representation of you
In Gestalt therapy, nothing in a dream comes from outside of you. The house, the stranger who won't speak, the car with no brakes, even the weather in the dream - all of it is you, or some part of you that's been overlooked.
So in session, instead of talking about the car, you might talk as the car. What does it feel like to be something moving fast with no way to stop? People are usually surprised by how deeply this lands. The feeling stops being some abstract thing you're trying to figure out and just becomes familiar.
Why it has to be experiential
If you’re told what your dream means, you've been given an idea, not a shift. Ideas don't tend to move much on their own. That's why we ask clients to go back into the dream, in the present tense, like it's happening right now instead of something they're remembering. Not "I was walking through a hallway" but "I am walking through a hallway." That nuance is what keeps the feeling alive instead of turning it into a story you're recalling.
It can feel a little odd - speaking as your childhood bedroom, or as the ocean, or as someone who barely showed up in the dream at all - but it’s a way to tap into a deeper sense of self.
When the dream doesn't make sense
One thing clients bring up often: the dream felt totally random, nothing about it connects to anything going on in their life.
Gestalt dream work posits that it was never supposed to make logical sense. Dreams don't think the way we do when we're awake, and trying to force one into a neat storyline usually just flattens whatever was actually there. So instead of hunting for a plot, we pay attention to what's happening in the body. Where there's tightness? What image do you keep coming back to? It’s a practice of noticing a feeling with no clear reason attached to it yet.
A few things tend to help here:
Pay attention to sensation before logic. If something in the dream stirs up a feeling in your body, that's worth staying with, even if you can't explain why.
Let it stay unresolved. Not every dream wraps up into a clean insight in one session, and it doesn't need to.
Take the disconnection seriously too. Sometimes the parts of a dream that feel furthest from your life are pointing right at the part of you that's been kept furthest away.
The idea is to become familiar with the feelings the dream stirs up, notice how parts of you might be represented in dream land, and explore them even when they don’t make sense.
Returning back to it
Dream work in Gestalt therapy isn't a one-time decode. It's something you keep returning to, staying curious about, and letting speak in its own language. Doing that enough brings a stronger sense of self-knowing.
Curious to explore how dream work can deepen your healing with experiential therapy ? You can learn more about my approach and book a consultation on my bio page.
Written by Our Kind Therapist Hillari Levine, MHC-LP
