Not everyone remembers their dreams, and those who do will often say their dream “was weird” and leave it at that. An ancient proverb reminds us, “A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened,” and in today’s culture, we might compare an unremembered dream to leaving an important text or email unread.
If we recognize that dreams are not merely dreams but—as both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed—portals to the unconscious, filled with signals, messages, and meaning in the form of symbols, we can appreciate how our dreams provide us opportunities for growth, including for managing our feelings. You can discover a lot about yourself through dream interpretation, especially by exploring the dream’s symbols, as well as the feelings and emotions they contain, which reflect what psychologists technically refer to as your “affect.”
Dream Therapy Helps You Understand Your Thoughts and Emotions
In contrast to emotions and feelings, which are generally more conscious, personal, and specific to a particular event, “affect” serves as a signal, reflecting the broad, generally unconscious experience of an internal feeling or state before it is consciously registered. Affect manifests in our outward expression of emotions and feelings, reflected in our nonverbal and verbal behaviors. Dreams can powerfully reveal our affect.
Meanwhile, “mentalizing” is a psychological capacity that connects with our affect. It refers to the ability to perceive and understand behaviors in oneself and others as underlying mental states, such as our feelings, thoughts, and intentions. Describing the process of thinking about thoughts and feelings, it expresses how we make sense, implicitly and explicitly, of subjective mental states. The capacity to reflect on mental states, known as the “reflective function,” is one expression of mentalization. The process of thinking one’s feelings and feeling one’s thoughts is an example of mentalization, which is more complex than most people realize.
What does this have to do with dreams? Have you ever dreamed that you fought with your partner, only to wake up the next morning still mad at them? If so, you’ve experienced how dreams can affect your mood. It’s called “affect continuity” and has been documented by research.1
Moreover, Jung described a process of “compensation” in our psyche: a kind of biological, homeostatic, self-correcting process that supports wholeness by regulating psychological processes, including feelings. Suppose you have a colleague who is infinitely polite and patient amidst work stressors. In their dreams, they may act rudely and impatiently or be frustrated.
Compensation posits that their psyche may be producing this dream material so that they pay more attention to how such feelings and behaviors can inform their waking life. Compensation explains why you have dreams that contain images and feelings that are challenging for you to express in your daily life. Recent studies have found that sleep and dreams play a role in processing difficult waking experiences and life stressors, which support emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience. Dreams provide a natural outlet for processing unresolved feelings, which increases self-knowledge, insight, and mood.2, 3
How Therapists and Therapy Sessions Can Benefit Dream Interpretation
As a depth psychoanalyst, I often work with dreams. One patient had trouble processing a breakup. His girlfriend’s disorganized attachment meant she pushed him away and pulled him close in an emotionally chaotic way. The confusing pattern kept him hooked, and when she ended the relationship, his brain looped through all the good feelings from these times rather than pausing to reflect on when she pushed him away. He strategized about asking for a second chance until his dream helped him connect his thoughts with his feelings and his feelings with his thoughts, a process that, as his therapist, I actively guided him through. While dream work can be explored alone, a therapist’s professional training and reflective stance can be tremendously helpful for exploring and interpreting dreams.
In the dream, the patient saw his ex-girlfriend and knew that she was anxious, upset, and struggling. My patient approached her, put his cheek against hers, and said, “Let me help you.”
Very firmly, the ex-girlfriend pushed him away and said, “No.”
Before analyzing the dream symbols, we first turned to affect. I wanted to know how the overall dream and specific aspects made him feel. We used this dream to support his affective development, including his capacity to activate, label, modulate, and tolerate his affect.
“I felt bad,” he said. “It upset me that she didn’t want my help.” I asked him to distill his feelings and not settle on “bad.” He labored to finally reply, “I felt hurt, rejected, and powerless.” By asking him to label his feelings, we engaged in developing his capacity for mentalization.
The dream was one step removed from my patient’s waking life, and that distance allowed him to think and feel about his thoughts and feelings. He was able to “think his feelings,” and feel his thoughts, rather than just feel his feelings about their good times. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by grief, we could parse out what he felt and why by engaging with his dream together.
Upon reflection, he realized that feeling hurt, rejected, and powerless were frequent emotions with his ex-girlfriend. She would often “put on a show” and pretend to feel something entirely different, which led him to question what he was feeling. His girlfriend coined herself an “intimacy junkie,” and he convinced himself that they had an intimate relationship despite their emotional distance. Approaching this complicated and painful dynamic through the dream’s symbolism felt safer, and his defenses eased up, allowing him to mentalize their dynamic in a way he couldn’t before.
By working with his dream affect, which expressed the thoughts and feelings he could not think or feel in his relationship, his capacity for mentalization and reflective function developed, and his mood and behavior changed. He saw the dynamic with his ex-girlfriend and realized she couldn’t give him what he wanted. That helped him feel and process his sadness, enabled him to curb his impulse to beg her to take him back, and marked the beginning of genuine healing. Thinking about his feelings and feeling his thoughts encouraged reflection, and he made better choices. In this way, dreams can develop the capacity for mentalization and reflective function, which can foster therapeutic progress and support people with their healing journeys to become more fully themselves.
