What is Dream Work?
(And Why Your Soul Might Already Be Trying to Reach You)
This is part of my ‘What Is?’ series, where I share the tools I use in my private practice. What is Spiritual Direction. What is Dreamwork. What is Mediumship. What is Astrology. These are stories, the ways these practices entered my life and eventually became my work. You can read the firsts of this series, What is Spiritual Direction? and What is Mediumship?, right HERE and HERE.
When I was in congregational ministry, I started something called a Dream Covenant Group. It was part of our small group ministry, born from the wisdom of Spiritual Direction I was learning at the time. I had done some dream work in my training and thought it might translate. To my delight, it did.
It was impactful work. Reverent work. People came with scraps of memory and strange night stories. They sat in circles of trust, wondering what the Dream Maker might be offering. And they were moved by the dreaming’s depths.
But it wasn’t until I had a dream about Steve Perry that I truly fell in love with the practice.
Yes, that Steve Perry. The voice of Journey. In my dream, we were in a VIP booth in a foggy nightclub. Spotlights danced and several caught me in the eye. I winced. Steve gently lifted his hand and shielded my eyes, smiling warmly at me.
That was it.
The whole dream.
But here’s the amazing thing: I hadn’t thought of Steve Perry since I was a kid. I wore out my Street Talk vinyl when I was nine. But now in my 40s, I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
So I looked him up.
Turns out, he had just reentered the spotlight after years of hiding. He had become a recluse after leaving Journey at the height of his fame and only recently released his album called Traces. After twenty years!
I dreamed this just as he was emerging again. And I was emerging too. I was trying to increase visibility in my work while terrified of being seen. I had been training in mediumship on the side, secretly. I was actively discerning if I would ever share my mediumship with others.
The dream made a kind of symbolic poetry out of what I hadn’t yet named. The part of me that longed to step forward. The part of me afraid of the light. The part of me who needed someone, some inner voice, to gently shield her eyes while she adjusted to being seen.
That’s dream work.
Dreams are never random. They are psychic compost: rich, strange, symbolic, deeply spiritual. They’re not fortune telling, though they sometimes offer glimpses of where we’re heading if we stay the course. They rarely speak in literal language, but they always speak with wisdom. If we can stay with the image, we start to see just how much our deepest selves want to help us.
In my practice, I use both Jungian and projective dream work. When you bring me a dream, I ask to join you in it. There isn’t interpretation. Instead, I tell you what stands out if it were my dream. I ask questions. I help you hold the dream up to the light and see what flickers. We look at symbols, at feelings, at tensions. We talk about shadow, archetype, dream ego, and active imagination. Sometimes I use Tarot or astrology to mirror what the dream’s already pointing toward.
And here’s what I’ve learned: dreams love the dreamer. Dreams come with such a profound love for us. They want to speak where the waking mind cannot. Their messages are always invitations into deeper knowing. Dreams are in service to our individuation and care deeply about our well-being.
In the documentary No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (a documentary that shares the stories of detransitioners [and where Jungian Analyst (ie an extremely well-educated Dream Worker) Lisa Marchiano shares her wisdom]) , one of the detransitioners shares that her transition began after a dream in which she was a boy. She says she woke up feeling so good and took that as a sign that she was a boy. But what if she’d had a guide trained in the symbolic language of dreams? That image of being a boy could have pointed to a part of herself asking to be known, such as agency, protection, clarity, or voice. A skilled dream companion might have helped her explore those meanings. Instead of taking the image literally, she could have worked with it as a living symbol. How could this dream have been speaking to her wholeness and not any form of fragmentation?
That’s what dream work offers: the space to ask what the dream might mean rather than what it seems to say.
But we live in a literal world. An ideological world. A world that wants things clean and clear and quick. Dream work is none of those things. It is liminal. It is slow. It asks you to stay "fuzzy" in your gaze. And it gives back what you’re willing to wonder about.
Recently, I had a dream about my daughter. You may be aware, she has medicalized a transition. In the dream, my husband was cradling her in a library. She had a head cold. I wanted to take her to the pediatrician, but he already had. I was deeply annoyed. I do that, not him. In my annoyance, I went off to find a “spell cookie” to cure her.
Dreams are funny like that. But they’re also sharp. That dream helped me see that I was still trying to manage her healing my way. That my husband had his own kind of caring for our daughter. And that I could trust him. That our different approaches weren’t threats. We talked about it the next morning. It was one of the most healing conversations we’ve had around our daughter’s journey.
That’s what dream work can do. It can bring what’s underneath into the light. Gently. But deeply.
Dream work isn’t therapy. Nor is it advice-giving. It belongs to something older. Wiser. A soul-language. A kind of remembering.
And it’s available to you.
Every single night.
If you’ve had a dream you can’t shake, or if your dreams have gone quiet and you want to know why, I invite you to book a one-on-one dream session with me. We’ll listen together. We’ll ask what the Dream Maker might be offering.
And if you’re local to Northeast Ohio, I have a Dream Circle forming this fall in Lakewood, OH at Centering Space. We sit in group Spiritual Direction using the projective method and help one another tend the images and questions that rise in the night.
Your dream life is already reaching out to you. You don’t have to go searching for the truth. You just have to agree to listen.
Book a Dream Work Session
Join the Fall Dream Circle at Centering Space