Dreamwork Therapy
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Jungian Dream Analysis & Dreamwork Therapy in Los Angeles
Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You Something
How fascinating it is that we spend roughly a third of our lives dreaming, yet treat it as a funny, random happening amidst the night. We dismiss our dreams as nonsense, forget them by breakfast, or scroll past them in favor of the “real” world. But what if your dreams are the most honest part of you? What if the images that visit you at night carry wisdom that your waking mind hasn’t been able to access?
I entered Jungian Analysis when I was 21 years old, and have explored hundreds, if not thousands, of my own dreams in the years since. That experience taught me something I carry into every session with my clients: respect the unconscious. Respect the mystery of all that is yet to be understood about ourselves and the realm we exist in.
We focus so much on outer life: careers, relationships, responsibilities, appearances. But what about inner life? Your inner life has the potential to bring you the richest material for your growth and consciousness. Dreams are one of the most direct pathways to that inner world. A dream has the ability to awaken us, warn us, support us, or just visit us like a long lost friend.
As a psychotherapist offering dreamwork therapy in Los Angeles, I consider this one of the most stimulating and exciting parts of the therapeutic process. Not every therapist works with dreams. But for those who are drawn to this kind of exploration, it can open doors that no amount of talking about daily life ever could.
What Is Dreamwork Therapy?
Dreamwork therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses your dreams as a central tool for self-understanding, emotional healing, and psychological growth. Rather than interpreting your dreams through a fixed dictionary of symbols, we explore them together, listening for what they mean specifically to you and your life.
In my Los Angeles practice, dreamwork is grounded in the Jungian tradition of dream analysis. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, believed that dreams are not random. They are purposeful communications from the unconscious mind, carrying messages about our emotional state, our unresolved conflicts, our unlived potential, and even our connection to something larger than ourselves.
Dreamwork therapy is not about predicting the future or decoding hidden messages with a symbol chart. It’s about developing a living relationship with your unconscious, learning to listen to the part of yourself that speaks in images, feelings, and stories rather than logic and language.
What Is Dreamwork Therapy?
The Personal and the Collective
One of Jung’s most important contributions was the understanding that dreams operate on multiple levels. Every dream contains personal material, images and feelings connected to your individual life history, your relationships, and your current struggles. But dreams also contain collective material, universal symbols and patterns that Jung called archetypes. These are the shared images of the human psyche: the shadow, the mother, the wise old man, the child, the journey, the descent, the transformation.
When we work with a dream in session, we hold both levels. What does this dream mean for you personally? And what might it be saying about something deeper, something that connects you to the larger human experience?
What a Dreamwork Session Looks Like
You don’t need to come with a perfectly remembered dream. You don’t need a dream journal, though keeping one can be valuable. Sometimes a single image, a feeling upon waking, or a fragment is enough to work with.
In our exploration of dreams, we may ask:
- How is this dream personal for you and unique to your psyche?
- How can we understand this dream on a collective level?
- What feeling does the dream leave you with?
- Does the dream mirror any of your current or past waking life experiences?
- Is there a recurring dream that is trying to make something known?
- How can you take the dream image with you in your day to day life?
- How can you live the dream, bringing the images to life through some creative means of expression?
- How might the dream be connecting you to your intergenerational or ancestral trauma?
We don’t rush to conclusions. We sit with the dream. We let it unfold. The meaning often reveals itself not through analysis alone but through the feeling that arises when the right understanding lands.
What Dreamwork Can Help With
Dreams don’t just visit us randomly. They tend to intensify during periods of emotional difficulty, personal transition, or psychological growth. Many of my Los Angeles clients come to dreamwork because something in their dream life has become impossible to ignore.
Recurring Dreams
When the same dream or theme keeps returning, it’s usually because the unconscious is trying to get your attention about something unresolved. Recurring dreams often stop once the message they carry has been understood and integrated.
Nightmares and Disturbing Dreams
Nightmares are not your enemy. In Jungian psychology, they are often the psyche’s most urgent communication. Something within you is demanding attention, and the intensity of the dream reflects how important the message is. Working with nightmares therapeutically can transform them from a source of terror into a source of insight.
Anxiety and Stress Dreams
Dreams about being chased, falling, showing up unprepared, losing teeth, or being lost are among the most common. Rather than dismissing them, we explore what they reveal about your current emotional state, your fears, and the pressures you may not be acknowledging in your waking life.
Trauma Dreams
For those who have experienced trauma, dreams can replay painful events, sometimes literally and sometimes through symbolic imagery. Dreamwork provides a safe, contained space to engage with these images without being overwhelmed by them. It can be a powerful complement to other forms of trauma-focused individual therapy.
Dreams During Life Transitions
Career changes, relationship endings, births, deaths, moves, and other major transitions often produce vivid and meaningful dreams. Your psyche is processing the transition, often faster than your conscious mind. Dreams during these periods can offer guidance and reassurance.
Creative and Spiritual Dreams
Some dreams feel numinous, filled with a sense of awe, beauty, or profound meaning. These dreams often emerge when the psyche is ready for a new level of growth or consciousness. They may connect you to archetypal energies, spiritual imagery, or a sense of purpose that your daily life hasn’t yet reflected.
Shadow Work Through Dreams
Your shadow, the parts of yourself you’ve rejected, denied, or hidden from, often appears in dreams as threatening figures, embarrassing scenarios, or uncomfortable situations. Learning to recognize and engage with these shadow elements is one of the most transformative aspects of Jungian dreamwork.
Who Dreamwork Is For
Dreamwork therapy is for anyone who is curious about their inner life and willing to explore what lies beneath the surface. You don’t need to be “good at” remembering dreams. You don’t need any prior knowledge of psychology or Jung. You just need to be open.
In my practice, dreamwork appeals to clients who:
- Are drawn to depth, symbolism, and meaning
- Feel that something important is happening in their dreams
- Want more than surface-level therapy focused only on symptoms and behavior
- Are going through a significant transition and sense their dreams are processing it
- Experience recurring dreams or nightmares they want to understand
- Are interested in Jungian psychology, archetypes, or the unconscious
- Want to connect their inner life with their outer experience
- Are working through grief, trauma, or existential questions
- Have a creative or spiritual orientation and want therapy that honors that
Dreamwork can be a standalone focus of our sessions or woven into the fabric of broader individual psychotherapy. Many of my Los Angeles clients bring a dream to session when one feels significant, without every session being exclusively about dreams.
My Background in Dreamwork
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with License #MFC 104017, trained at Antioch University Los Angeles, with over a decade of clinical experience. But my relationship with dreamwork began long before my clinical training.
I entered Jungian Analysis at age 21 and have personally explored hundreds of my own dreams over the years since. That experience shaped who I am as a therapist. It taught me to respect the unconscious, to sit with mystery, and to trust that the psyche has a wisdom of its own.
Dreamwork is not something I learned from a textbook and applied. It’s something I live. It’s a practice I bring to my own life, my own growth, and my own process of becoming more conscious. When we work with your dreams together, you’re working with someone who has walked this path deeply and personally.
This personal engagement with Jungian dream analysis, combined with my clinical training in psychodynamic and depth-oriented psychotherapy, makes dreamwork one of the most authentic parts of what I offer.
Learn more about my approach on the About page.
How We Explore Dreams Together
One of the simplest and most powerful things you can do to support dreamwork is keep a dream journal. Keep a notebook beside your bed. When you wake, before you reach for your phone, write down whatever you remember, even if it’s just a feeling, a color, or a single image.
Over time, patterns emerge. Symbols recur. Characters return. Your unconscious begins to trust that you are listening, and it gives you more. The journal becomes a living document of your inner life, one that we can draw from in our sessions together.
You don’t need to interpret your own dreams. That’s what our work together is for. The journal simply captures the raw material.
step 01
Capture Dreams Immediately
Keep a notebook by your bed and record dreams as soon as you wake. Even a single image, emotion, or fragment can become meaningful material for exploration.
step 02
Notice Recurring Patterns
Over time, recurring symbols, themes, emotions, and characters may emerge. These patterns often reveal important aspects of your inner life and personal growth.
step 03
Build a Relationship With the Unconscious
Regular dream journaling helps strengthen dream recall and fosters a deeper connection with the unconscious mind, allowing its messages to become clearer over time.
step 04
Bring Dreams Into Therapy
Your dream journal becomes a valuable resource we can explore together, helping uncover insight, deepen self-awareness, and support meaningful transformation.
Dreamwork Therapy in Los Angeles & Throughout California
In-Person: My office is located at 11949 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230. I welcome clients from Culver City, Venice, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, Beverly Hills, and the greater Los Angeles area.
Online: I provide virtual dreamwork therapy sessions throughout California via secure, HIPAA-compliant video. Dreams don’t require a physical room. Many clients find that the comfort of being at home actually helps them connect more deeply with dream material.
Fees: Dreamwork therapy sessions are $225. I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation. I’m an out-of-network provider and provide superbills for insurance reimbursement. Many California PPO plans reimburse 50 to 80% for out-of-network therapy. I accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, cash, check, HSA, and FSA.
Session Structure: Dreamwork is typically integrated into weekly 50-minute individual therapy sessions. Some clients focus primarily on dreams. Others bring a dream when one feels significant alongside other therapeutic work.
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FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions About Dreamwork Therapy
Curious about dreamwork therapy? Explore answers to frequently asked questions about dream interpretation, Jungian psychology, recurring dreams, and how dreams can support personal growth and emotional healing.
Jungian dream analysis is a method of exploring dreams developed by Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Rather than using a fixed symbol dictionary, Jungian analysis treats each dream as a unique communication from the unconscious. We explore the dream's personal meaning to you, its emotional tone, its symbolic images, and its potential connection to universal archetypes. The goal is not to decode the dream but to develop a deeper relationship with your inner life.
Not perfectly, no. Even a fragment, a single image, a feeling upon waking, or a vague sense of what happened can be enough to work with. Over time, especially if you begin keeping a dream journal, your dream recall tends to improve. The unconscious responds to attention. When it knows you're listening, it gives you more.
Recurring dreams typically signal that something in your unconscious is seeking resolution. The repetition is the psyche's way of saying: I haven't been heard yet. In therapy, we explore what the recurring dream may be pointing to, whether an unresolved emotion, a life pattern, or a deeper need. Often, once the message is understood and integrated, the recurring dream changes or stops entirely.
Yes. In Jungian psychology, nightmares are not simply bad dreams to be avoided. They are often the psyche's most urgent communication. Working with nightmares in therapy allows you to face the images that frighten you in a safe, contained space, understand what they represent, and transform your relationship with them. Many clients find that nightmares decrease significantly once they begin engaging with their dream life therapeutically.
Online dream dictionaries offer generic, one-size-fits-all meanings for dream symbols. "Water means emotions. Snakes mean transformation." But your dream of water or snakes is unique to you, to your personal history, your emotional state, and your psyche's particular language. Therapeutic dreamwork honors that specificity. We don't apply a formula. We listen to what the dream means in the context of your life.
Dreamwork is a form of psychotherapy, or more precisely, a practice within psychotherapy. In my Los Angeles practice, dreamwork is integrated into depth-oriented individual therapy. You're not just analyzing dreams in isolation. You're using dreams as one powerful pathway into understanding yourself more deeply, alongside exploration of your relationships, your emotions, your history, and your body.
No. You don't need to hold any particular spiritual beliefs. Dreamwork is grounded in psychological tradition, specifically the Jungian understanding that the unconscious mind communicates through images and symbols. Whether you experience that as spiritual, psychological, or simply interesting is entirely up to you. The work is effective regardless of your framework.
Dreams often intensify during periods of anxiety or depression. Working with those dreams can reveal what the psyche is struggling with beneath the symptoms, sometimes more directly than talk therapy alone. Dreamwork doesn't replace other therapeutic approaches to anxiety and depression, but it can deepen them significantly. Many of my clients find that their dreams illuminate the root of their distress in ways that surprise them.
There is no fixed timeline. Some clients bring a specific dream or recurring pattern they want to explore over several sessions. Others engage in longer-term depth work where dreams are a regular part of the therapeutic conversation over months or years. We'll check in regularly about what feels right for you.
Call me at (818) 207-4443 or send a message through the contact page. We'll schedule a free 15-minute consultation to talk about what you're looking for and whether dreamwork feels like a good fit. You don't need to have a specific dream ready. You just need to be curious.