Dream Map: A Dream Work Therapy Exercise for Images, Feelings and Links

About the technique

Clara Hill’s cognitive-experiential model treats a dream as a product of the dreamer’s own concerns rather than a code to be cracked with a symbol dictionary (Hill, 1996). It moves through three stages. In exploration, the client re-experiences the dream and describes each image, its feelings and its associations. In insight, client and therapist build meaning from those associations, linking images to waking life, past experience or parts of the self. In action, they consider what the client might do differently, sometimes by imagining a changed ending to the dream.

It is one of the few approaches to dream work with a sustained research program. Hill’s edited volume gathers process and outcome studies in which sessions using the model were rated as deep and led to gains in insight (Hill, 2004), and an independent review concluded that dream work can be a useful clinical tool and offered guidelines for its use (Pesant & Zadra, 2004). Most studies are small and use volunteer clients, so the evidence is moderate rather than strong.

It suits adults and teens who bring dreams or are curious about them, individually or in groups, once there is enough trust to explore. Meaning must come from the client, and cultural and spiritual understandings of dreams deserve room. Recurrent trauma nightmares call for a targeted treatment such as imagery rehearsal therapy rather than open-ended exploration (Morgenthaler et al., 2018). Avoid this work with clients experiencing active psychosis, where dream and waking experience may blur.