I work with dreams frequently.
There is much I can say about dreams but simply dreams serve to practice new ways of acting and behaving, emotional processing, and memory formation.
Contrary to the common myth that dreams need interpretation, dreams tend to interpret themselves, or more accurately: reveal their meaning, when they are looked into and worked with directly in the ways that I have learned to work with them.
Dreams can be re-entered in waking life. This has been practiced by Jungian therapists for a century.
I have learned to take this a step further and involve the use of the body, emotions, and action. And to assist the client in working with the imagery and learning from it directly.
For example, I may help a client struggling with addiction to enter a “drug dream” or using dream where this person went about their ritual and was about to relapse but woke up. In a way this is the psyche wrestling with their new stage of sobriety and it’s ensuing struggles. I would assist the client in exploring not using or throwing away the paraphernalia.
Or a client with a history of abuse may have a reoccurring dream of a person or thing after them. They can bring this dream back to the here-and-now of the session. I will techniques such as bring my voice into the waking dream or an imagined person of whom they may feel safe and protected to be able to stand up to this haunting thing or person and it may powerfully reveal what it’s about.
There are many ways to work with dreams in a session other than interpreting them.
What is powerful about dream work in this way is that it can help the therapy process to get unstuck. Many times dreams go deeper to what is needed to change than even the deepest conscious work can touch on.
For more on dreamwork in a self-help way:
David Bell, LCSW-C 