DREAMS: WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?
Dreams are often treated as if they belong to a separate domain from ordinary life, something obscure, symbolic, or ultimately inaccessible. In contemporary culture, they are frequently reduced either to neurobiological byproducts or to puzzles requiring interpretation. But within psychoanalytic thinking, dreaming has been understood less as a hidden code to decipher and more as a form of psychological work. In this view, dreams are not important because they conceal meaning, but because they reveal something about how experience is being processed, or failing to be processed, within the mind.
Wilfred Bion proposed a particularly influential way of thinking about this. For Bion, dreaming was not limited to what occurs during sleep. He described dreaming as an ongoing mental activity through which emotional experience becomes thinkable. Experience does not automatically arrive in a form that can be understood or reflected upon. Emotional life often begins as something unprocessed: sensations, anxieties, fragments of feeling, or states of confusion that have not yet been metabolized psychologically. Dreaming, in Bion’s sense, is part of the mind’s effort to transform these raw emotional experiences into something that can be borne, thought about, and eventually integrated into one’s psychic life.
When this capacity is disrupted, experience may not become available for reflection at all. Instead, it may be evacuated through action, repetition, withdrawal, or various forms of psychological deadness. In this sense, difficulties in living are often connected not simply to conflict or repression, but to an inability to dream one’s experience adequately. The issue is not merely that something unconscious exists, but that it has not yet been psychically worked upon in a way that allows it to become meaningful.
Thomas Ogden extends this idea further by describing therapy itself as a space in which dreaming can begin to occur again. He writes not only about nighttime dreams, but about “undreamt” and “interrupted” dreams, experiences that have not been emotionally lived through sufficiently to enter into symbolic thought. From this perspective, therapy involves more than insight or interpretation. It involves helping a person regain the capacity to dream their experience psychologically rather than remaining trapped within forms of repetition or emotional concreteness.
This changes how dreams are approached in therapy. A dream is not treated simply as a symbolic message waiting to be decoded. Its value lies in the way it provides access to aspects of emotional life that may not yet be available through ordinary reflection. Dreams often present emotional truths in a form less organized by rational explanation or self-consciousness. They may reveal anxieties, wishes, internal conflicts, or modes of relating that remain difficult to encounter directly in waking thought.
At times, the significance of dreamwork lies not only in the content of the dream itself, but in the individual’s relation to it. Some people recount dreams with vividness and emotional immediacy, while others dismiss them quickly, forget them entirely, or experience them as strangely inaccessible. These differences can themselves become meaningful within the therapeutic process. The capacity to remain with dream material, to think about it without prematurely closing it down, often reflects a broader capacity to tolerate emotional experience more generally.
Dreams can therefore function as a particular kind of access point within therapy. They may allow something to emerge indirectly that cannot yet be spoken directly. This does not mean that every dream contains a hidden revelation, nor that therapy requires elaborate symbolic interpretation. More often, dreamwork involves staying close to the emotional atmosphere of the dream, noticing its movement, its absences, its repetitions, and the forms of feeling it makes possible.
What becomes important is not mastering the meaning of the dream, but allowing oneself to think in contact with it. In this sense, dreaming and reflective work are closely connected. Both involve the gradual transformation of emotional experience into something that can be lived with rather than evacuated or avoided.
Therapy, at its best, is not only a place for discussion or explanation. It is also a place where previously unthought experience may begin to take symbolic form. Dreaming represents one of the mind’s most fundamental ways of carrying out this work. To attend to dreams within therapy is therefore not to move away from reality into abstraction, but to move closer to the emotional realities that often organize experience outside of awareness.
Written by Klaudia Badr, PsyD