The first step in directing both your personal and professional development is to increase your Self-Awareness. An excellent source for additional “inside information” about yourself and your life can be found in dreams, including nightmares. Whether or not you remember them, everyone has 4-5 dreams a night and there are techniques to increase recall and to focus your dreams on problem solving.

If you are interested in learning more about this centuries old resource, Dream Interviewing is a fairly recently developed interpretation method that Dr. Flowers has used in both psychotherapy and teaching. She considers this approach as close to “evidence based” interpretation as anyone has come to date, since the information required to interpret the dreams comes exclusively from the dreamer. Any expertise involved is focused on asking skillful questions to help elicit relevant facts, feelings and judgments.

Dream Interviewing is conceptually simple but like most skills, it takes practice to become proficient. Nonetheless, while you learn, even a partially understood dream can help you gain insight. If you remember that all dream interpretations are theories or hypotheses, and should be thought through like any other possibility, not followed blindly, you might find this approach to self-awareness quite helpful.

Those of you who are particularly interested can read further and practice on your own, or work with another “dreamer” friend that you trust, and/or in private consultations or workshops.

Dr. Flowers also runs a free Dream Interviewing Training Seminar, one evening a month in San Francisco, California for psychiatric residents and other therapists, counselors or early career psychiatrists. Contact her for details if you are eligible and wish to attend.

NOTE: Guidelines to help remember dreams are available on the downloads page.