Trauma and Dream Work: Mending Tears in the Fabric of Time

Working with dreams in the context of trauma can open unique avenues for healing, in particular for patients who report feelings of numbness or a loss of meaning in their lives. Dream exploration can make facing aspects of trauma and dissociated experience more tolerable than explicitly addressing them at a conscious level. It can also reignite the capacities for reflection and meaning making disrupted by trauma. Dreams also reconnect patients to aspects of their history that can provide context for and meaning to experiences from which they have come to feel emotionally disconnected. Finally, dreams offer a way of regaining the capacity to connect with wishes, hopes, and desires that have become difficult to access because of trauma. In this article, the authors present case examples of patients with trauma and discuss how therapists worked with dream material to unlock new possibilities for these patients’ lives.