What Does Dream Analysis Consist Of?

And it’s one of the many modalities psychotherapist Annie Armstrong Miyao explores with her patients. Through guided experiential exercises, she provides a theoretical orientation and skills based largely on the work of Dr. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

“I help a person circle around a dream, using the symbols to begin to understand the symbolic language of the dream so that they can then extract the meaning,” she said. “Dreams are almost like windows into certain parts of ourselves that we might not be fully present in our waking lives. Our dreams help us process our experiences and help us create memories. They also point us toward things that might need a little attention or care.” 

Armstrong Miyao believes that we often dream about things bigger than just our small experiences; it’s the idea of the collective unconscious. “Dreams offer some wisdom that lives within us from our unconscious, the same way that a creative process or inspiration of something from deep within us is brought into consciousness,” she added. “It’s like, look at this, pay attention.”

Dream analysis is for anyone since everyone dreams. “Throughout the history of humanity, countless cultures use their dreams to better understand their experience in the world and are used as medicine,” noted Armstrong Miyao. “At the very least, looking at your dreams, you are being curious about yourself, which is a big part of the psychotherapeutic process of what’s going on with me. Why am I feeling this way? I find dreams to be really helpful because sometimes it’s hard to articulate exactly what’s going on with us. We can’t intellectualize or rationalize things, but our dreams give us symbolic representations. It’s really creative and I find the work can be deep, like plant medicine. Little shifts in perspective can come from it.”

But the work is really never done. “Dreams are like memories,” she said. “They come back at certain points or you have a period of time where they’re really vibrant, and you’re working through something. The more you dream, the more you work on your dreams, the more your dreams have that positive feedback loop.”