Personal Dreamwork Isn’t Enough

If you only consider the personal level, you’re not getting the most out of working with your dreams

You might have recurrent or disturbing dreams, or dreams that are vivid and simply don’t make sense to you. You might have an inkling that your dreams are important, but you don’t know what they mean or how to relate them to your life.

I help dream-savvy and dream-curious folks wanting to understand the meaning of their dreams get a fuller, more complete understanding of their dreams.

Folks can be plagued by the question, “What does my dream mean?’ We want to relate the dream to our personal lives, and get clarity around confusing or intriguing dreams, and especially nightmares. Traditional modes of personal dreamwork can be enormously helpful here; and yet if we stick to the personal level, we miss out on getting the most out of working with our dreams.

There are three levels of dream work: the personal, the mythic, and the animist. By engaging in all three levels, we experience a more complete understanding of our dreams—one that emerges and evolves over time.

Why sticking with the personal level only doesn't work

There are some real benefits to this level of dream work, such as noticing and disrupting patterns you’re stuck in, becoming aware of emerging themes in your life’s story, and you often get a ‘good enough’ answer to the question, “What does this dream mean?”

But there is a downside. By sticking with the personal level alone, you might find that your life’s story isn’t placed within a larger narrative or context. You might intellectually feel satiated, but it can feel like you’re not quite scratching the itch—you’re missing something big about the dream, or about yourself.

When you bring in the mythic level of dream work, you begin to notice collective patterns or themes that you may be picking up on. You place your experience in the larger collective context. You might feel less alone as a result.

And when you bring in the animist level of dream work brings about relationships: you’re no longer simply asking, “what does this dream mean,” you’re hosting a visitor. This opens up enormous possibilities for nervous system regulation and attunement, exploration of dream themes from the figures themselves, and allows the dream to evolve. And when the dream evolves, surprising things happen. New details emerge that were missed before, which often adds more meaning and satisfaction.

That's why I’m suggesting a frame that works with all three levels: the personal, the mythic, and the animist. We need all three levels because they each anchor each other.

If do more of the same:

You might start ignoring your dreams altogether, not experiencing any relief in the strategies you’ve tried, which are probably plentiful. If you have nightmares maybe you’ve tried “sleep hygiene” or relaxation strategies, to no avail. Maybe you have a nightly routine of putting on a podcast or TV shows to blunt the nightmares or tried sleep aids. And yet, difficult and disturbing dreams persist. They’re tapping you on the shoulder, demanding a kind of attention from you that you don’t know how to give. Your sleep quality gets worse over time, and you start to dread bedtime.

Or maybe you don’t turn away from your dreams, you keep trying to answer the question, ‘What does this dream mean?’ by sticking with the personal level. And maybe you’ve found some answers—you’ve used a dream dictionary or ran your dream through AI, you’ve connected a dream symbol to your personal history, or you’ve made a connection between a dream theme and a difficult work situation. All of this is fruitful! And also:

You might simply stay on the same trajectory, continuing to be bedeviled by your dreams, and feel like you’re missing an important piece of the puzzle of your life. You might think you’ve answered the question, “What does this dream mean?” yet it falls flat or feels like it doesn’t quite scratch the itch. It doesn’t connect you to the wider collective experience or place your story among the stories of our time. And it doesn’t help you build a relationship with your dream material.

In my view, the way forward is to develop a regular practice of connecting with dreams (and other imaginal experiences) on all three levels: the personal, the mythic, and the animist. In doing so, you develop a living relationship with the dream images: hosting them; attending to what they have to offer you personally; what they say about the circumstances of our times—our collective experience; and also, what they may offer on their own behalf.

When we act on the wisdom gained from these explorations, the question “What does this dream mean?” is answered in new and unexpected ways. The answer also evolves and changes over time, just as we do.

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