This is not your typical "hocus pocus" approach to dream analysis. We provide an evidence based approach to understanding your dream world. Our dream analysis services are rooted in Gestalt Dream Work (we are certified Dream Work Practitioners). We work hard on helping you understand what dreams are, how to understand what your dreams are trying to tell you, and how to integrate this understanding into your life.
In the Gestalt approach of Perls (1992), all dream elements are understood as projections of the accepted or unwanted aspects of the dreamer’s personality. […] Gestalt dream work is sometimes viewed as a somatic approach, in that dreams are explored through the dreamer’s bodily sensations during a session (p. 493f).
In Gestalt dream work, the dream is understood as a kind of ‘development support’: something existentially important takes place in it. Perceptions, sensations, feelings and experiences from the previous day are integrated into the already existing elements of the Gestalt of experience. According to this, the dream offers an opportunity to bring to light elements which are not yet integrated and thus opens up the potential to integrate them into the personality. Freud once called the dream the Via Regia, the royal path to the unconscious - and I believe that in reality it is the royal path to integration. I never know what the unconscious is, but we know that the dream is definitely the most immediate production there is for us. There is no expression more spontaneous than the dream (Perls, 1969). Gestalt theory and Gestalt dream work can, by their integrative concept, allow the thought that the unconscious per se (in a dream) can occur simultaneously with the superconscious or the ego instances: integration can occur.
In this vein Gestalt dream work also assumes that everything that occurs in the dream is an aspect of the dreamer. This means that dreams can have several meanings and ultimately only the dreamer can understand the dream and know what the dream is about (Feder, 1992). I like to claim - as a rather rough definition - that dreams are feelings (and thoughts) in moving pictures. In line with ‘modern’ dream researchers such as, Ernest Hartmann, who as a psychoanalyst has contributed to many studies to illuminate the dream (Walker, 2018), or the brain researcher Matthew Walker, who at the University of Berkeley studies brain structures that are active while dreams occur and also myself, we all adhere to the same thesis, although each of us use different words to describe it: The dream is a ‘little psychotherapy’ that we undertake every night to integrate new experiences into the background of the Gestalt of experience and of our individual perception of the world. The essential goal of Gestalt dream work is that we find our way back to our own strength by accepting split-off aspects of our personality (Feder, 1992; Hartmann-Kottek, 2000).