Dreaming Is Free: Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy
Dreaming Is Free: Dreams, Symbol and the Relational Imagination
Written by Brad McLean
When the US punk band Blondie sang “dreaming is free” in 1979 their message about dreaming offered us an idea of dreams as bright, memorable and expansive. The song carries the suggestion that, whatever the constraints of our ordinary lives, imagination always remains available to us; we can picture, remember, fear, desire and wander in ways that do not require permission or payment.
Our dreaming is perhaps the most intimate expression of this freedom. Without invitation and mostly without an explainable plot, the mind produces a landscape of people, places, feelings, memory fragments, bodily sensations and implausible, impossible events.
We might be in a childhood home that has acquired new rooms; conversing with someone who has died long ago or find ourselves trying to catch a train that will not stop. Dreams have us hiding, flying, searching, being watched, arriving too late, or discovering something precious. While the material of the dream often feels strange to us, the dream itself comes from somewhere within us but paradoxically, it is not entirely in our control. Such tensions are part of the value of dreams.
An Inner Landscape Freely Available
To say that dreaming is free does not mean that dreams are trivial, simple or necessarily pleasant. Dreams may be joyful, erotic, absurd, moving, repetitive, frightening or deeply unsettling. Nor does it mean that every dream conceals a single message waiting to be uncovered via our clinical expertise. Instead, dreams offer a freely available inner landscape: a continuously generated field of images and affect that may contain traces of our experiences, relationships, anxieties, wishes, conflicts and developing sense of self.
A dream may not tell us what to think but it may instead invite us to notice. At their best they can bring into view emotional knowledge that has not yet found words in waking life.
When it comes to dream reflection, we want to ask what feeling stays with us on waking? Which image will not leave us alone? Who is present, absent or transformed? What seems familiar, even if the scene itself is impossible? Such questions do not reduce a dream to a code. They allow us to dwell with it. In this way, dreams are not simply problems to be solved. They are experiences to be encountered.
From Private Dream to Shared Meaning
Dreams are profoundly subjective. No one else can have precisely my dream, with my history, associations, emotional memory and relationship to its images. Yet dreams do not need to remain isolated within the individual.
When someone brings a dream into psychotherapy, supervision or a carefully facilitated group, it enters a relational field. Other people may respond to the atmosphere of the dream, find themselves affected by a particular image, or notice questions and associations that the dreamer had not considered. The dream becomes a meeting place not because the group knows the dreamer better than the dreamer knows themselves, but because meaning can emerge between people. This is one of the most compelling features of group dream work. A dream can evoke something distinct in each listener, and those responses may become useful material for shared reflection. The task is not to seize ownership of the dream, impose an interpretation or claim authority over its “true” meaning. The task is to make room for multiple possibilities while remaining accountable to the dreamer’s experience.
A group may discover that the dream has touched something personal in several people: a feeling of exile, the experience of being observed, the wish to escape, an old fear of being forgotten, or a hope for renewal. These resonances do not prove what the dream means. But they can enrich the field of inquiry and help the dreamer encounter their own material from new angles.
Dream Work as a Relational Practice
This is why dream work in psychotherapy is not merely an intellectual exercise in interpretation of symbols. It is a relational practice. A dream is brought to another person at a particular moment in a relationship. The choice to tell it - and the way it is told – is meaningful. Is the dreamer anxious about being judged? Are they seeking reassurance, recognition, help, distance or a response to something that has occurred between therapist and client? Does the therapist feel curious, confused, protective, bored, drawn in or excluded? These responses are not distractions from the dream. They may be part of the dream’s relational life in the room.
A relational approach therefore asks not only, “What might this image mean?” but also, “What is happening as we speak about this dream together?” Dreams can bring unconscious expectations and patterns of relating into a form that can be felt, explored and thought about. They may give us a symbolic language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate directly.
This is also why humility matters when it comes to dream work in psychotherapy. The dreamer’s own associations remain central. As my own analyst tells me, the dreamer is the owner of the dream and its meaning. The clinician or group member can offer an impression, a question or a tentative possibility, but should resist becoming the person who claims to know. A useful stance might be: “I wonder whether this image could have something to do with…” rather than “This dream means…”
Making Meaning Without Forcing It
There is a parallel here with psychotherapy itself. Much therapeutic work begins with material that is fragmented, uncertain or difficult to organise: an emotional reaction, a recurring relational difficulty, a bodily feeling, a troubling memory, a silence, a fantasy or a sense that something important is present but cannot yet be said.
A dream offers this kind of material in concentrated form. It may appear random, yet it has its own emotional logic. The work is to stay with that logic long enough for associations, memories, feelings and relational meanings to gather around it.
This requires tolerance for uncertainty. Quick interpretation can feel satisfying, but it may shut down the very process that the dream has opened. By contrast, patient curiosity allows an image to become more alive. A locked door might remain a locked door for some time; it may eventually connect with a particular relationship, a developmental memory, a current impasse, a defensive strategy or a new possibility. Or it may continue to work quietly in the imagination without yielding a neat conclusion.
The point is not to find an answer but to develop the capacity to think, feel and reflect in the presence of what is not yet fully known.
A Series on Dreaming in Psychotherapy
In the coming Contemporary Approaches to Dreams in Psychotherapy
series we will be exploring dreams in a broad and inclusive way through a range of contemporary clinical lenses: psychodynamic, Jungian, Transactional Analysis, relational, trauma-informed and group-based approaches. The intention is not to promote a single method of dream interpretation or comprehensively cover an approach in a formulaic way. It is to help participants become more confident in receiving dreams with curiosity, care and clinical sensitivity and to develop a multiple perspective orientation to dreams therefore feeling more informed about different ways of thinking about and working with dreams.
Across the series, we will consider dreams as neurological phenomena, affective experiences, symbolic communications, possible expressions of unconscious fantasy, and events that occur within relationships. We will also survey specialised approaches to working with nightmares, disturbing dreams and dream material connected with PTSD and trauma. There will be discussion, some experiential exercises in which confidentiality, consent and emotional safety are central to the work.
Dreaming Is Free, Meaning Is Made
Perhaps Blondie’s phrase endures because it names something both hopeful and true. Dreaming is free: it arrives without our scheduling it, and it offers us an inner world that cannot be reduced to the practical demands of the day. In a clinical context, a dream might be freely given, but dreams are not automatically easy material. Dreams ask for a form of listening that is spacious enough to hold ambiguity, respectful enough to avoid intrusion, and relational enough to allow meaning to emerge between people. Dreams become most fruitful not when we treat them as private puzzles or universal codes, but when we approach them as living symbolic experiences. In the consulting room, in supervision, or in a reflective group, a dream can become a shared object of attention - one that invites imagination, association, feeling and conversation.
Dreaming may be free. Meaning, however, is made slowly, tentatively and often in relationship.
Online February 2027 - October 2027
with Brad McLean CTA, MSc
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