Working with Dreams and Nightmares encourages the participant to become more closer connected with their own individual dream life.  The focus of the teaching/learning experience is to create a deeper intimacy with one’s own dreaming state that includes a Jungian therapeutic principle of ego and archetypal connections.  These connections include the ability to bring into the dreamwork cultural aspects.  Most often we dream of those we know—family, friends, former lovers. Then the archetypal appears in the dream. How do we move with these dream images? It does become a dance of ego and archetype and the movement of integration in service of being in the life, living fully.

Active Imagination gives us the way to explore our dreams.  Dreaming is a creative act that invites any number of ways of seeing: Seeing differently. This is what Active Imagination offers the dreamer. Ways to deepen into the unconscious as well as the wake state, to see and act into new ways of being. It is through the dreaming of what we call nightmares that we experience not only fear and anxiety but also deeply emotional ways to remedy this suffering.  Nightmares are the bridges to implement change through the connection between the unconscious and ego consciousness.  These night dreams are wonderful guides to discovering an understanding to ourselves that we would never otherwise know: Sacred knowledge and the Self.

What you will Receive:

• 4 Live Interactive Webinars (via Zoom) with Q & A (listed in Pacific time)
• Recommended Readings and Resources
• A Verified PGI Digital Badge — stackable toward certificate and degree pathways
• 4 CECs

This Course is ideal for:

• Psychotherapists who wish to learn more about Jungian dreamwork.
• Student psychology clinical practitioners.
• Dreamworkers from non-Jungian orientations.
• Anyone interested in better understanding their dreams and wishing to work with them.

Course Overview

Week One : Introduction to Jungian dreamwork and Nightmares

The beginning of our work together provides an introduction to classical Jungian dreamwork. We will review some of Jung’s teachings in relationship to his own description of dreams and the dreaming life.  In addition, we will explore the nature of nightmares and their connection with wake state experiences that are oftentimes connected to places that are in need of ego strengthening.

Key areas of focus include:

• The structure and function of dreams within Jungian psychology
• The relationship between ego consciousness and archetypal material
• Nightmares as intensified dream experiences that signal psychic conflict, developmental impasses, or unmet needs for ego strengthening
• The role of affect, fear, and anxiety in nightmares and their connection to waking-life situations

Clinical and experiential emphasis will be placed on understanding nightmares not as failures of the psyche, but as urgent communications that invite attention, containment, and conscious engagement. Participants will begin developing a framework for holding dream material ethically and symbolically, both for themselves and for others.

Week Two: Exploration of selected nightmare(s) of C.G. Jung

In module two we will spend time looking at Jung’s own nightmares. Through this part of our work together, we learn how to be assured that nightmares are natural and a way of the archetypal Self directing us from a deeper place than simply ego consciousness.

Topics explored include:

• Nightmares as expressions of the archetypal Self guiding development beyond ego control
• The difference between ego-driven meaning-making and symbolic amplification
• How archetypal imagery emerges during times of personal, cultural, or collective upheaval
• The reassurance nightmares provide when understood as purposeful and meaningful

Participants will reflect on how Jung’s own dream experiences model a respectful, dialogical relationship with the unconscious—one that does not rush interpretation but allows symbolic meaning to unfold over time. This module strengthens clinical confidence in working with disturbing dream material and normalizes nightmares as part of the individuation process.

Week Three: Cultural dreaming: Family, friends and lovers

Cultural dreaming allows us to look at family and cultural group dreams that are reoccurring or appear to want a deeper understanding in an integrative manner.  This often points to looking at early childhood experiences and parental complexes.

Key learning themes include:

• Cultural dreaming as an expression of collective, familial, and ancestral dynamics
• The role of parental and relational complexes in recurring dream imagery
• Early childhood experiences and their symbolic reappearance in adult dreams
• Differentiating personal memory from archetypal pattern

Participants will learn how dreams may serve as integrative bridges between personal history and cultural inheritance, offering insight into how unconscious loyalties, wounds, and identities shape psychic life. This module is particularly relevant for clinicians and practitioners working with intergenerational trauma, cultural identity, and relational patterns.

Week Four: The Personal Unconscious and working with Dreams through Active Imagination and Journaling

We will work with Active Imagination as a way to see how new revelations can happen, to provide increased meaning for moving in life with oneself and with others. The intention is to show how Active Imagination provides the creative avenues for deepening the dreamlife.

This module addresses:

• The theoretical foundations of Active Imagination
• How to safely and ethically engage dream figures and images
• The role of creativity, embodiment, and imagination in psychological healing
• Journaling as a method for tracking symbolic development and psychic change

Participants will experience how Active Imagination creates a living dialogue between ego consciousness and the unconscious, allowing new meanings, attitudes, and ways of being to emerge. The course concludes with an emphasis on integration—how dreamwork supports greater wholeness, vitality, and relational presence in daily life.

Learning Objectives (4 CECs)

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1) Explain ego states of attention within a dream.

2) Explain active imagination from a personal unconscious point of view.

3) Apply active imagination principles to clinical dreamwork.

4) Describe archetypal dream imagery as connected to mythology and psychological complexes.

Course Addendums:

Brewster, F. (2024). Race and  the Unconscious: An Africanist Depth Psychology Perspective on Dreaming

Chodorow, J. (Ed). (1997). Encountering Jung: Active imagination.  Princeton University Press. pp. 1-20.

Jung, C.G. (1974).  Dreams.  (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.) Princeton University Press.

Bluestone, S. (2002). The world dream book. (1st ed.). Destiny Books.