To a psychologist, dreams are more than an electrochemical process. Each one is a precious seed that can be nurtured and fertilized so that it will sprout, grow, and bloom to give fullness and understanding to our waking hours.

Therapists feel that dreams are the secret portal through which the psyche pours vital information into consciousness as a way to keep emotional balance during waking life. Dreams are a way for us to work out the difficulties that are suppressed rather than experienced during the day.

In my private healing practice, I’ve discovered that it isn’t always the traumas that we have fully experienced that block us. It’s often the traumas or difficulties that we did not allow ourselves to experience fully, or that we have suppressed, that create barriers in our lives.

Dreams can be one way to release those repressed emotional barriers.
One time in Hawaii when I’d hurt my foot running into a large stump, my mentor, the kahuna, told me to place my foot against the stump and put the pain back into it. As I put my foot against the base of the tree, I was astonished to feel a release of pain and a soothing wave of relaxation fill my foot. I thought it was kahuna magic. In a primordial way, it made sense: the tree stump had given me the pain, so I gave it back.

When I mentioned this incident to a psychologist friend, he said, “You’re so dumb! You can’t put pain back into a tree stump. What you were doing was allowing yourself to experience the pain that you were suppressing. By reenacting the situation that caused you the pain in the first place—by putting your foot to the stump—you felt and released what you didn’t allow yourself to feel when it first happened. By suppressing physical or emotional pain, you often sustain it. When you allow yourself to feel it totally and completely or become ‘one’ with your pain, there’s no separation between you and it. It disappears.”

To relive is to relieve, and dreams are a safe way to relive and relieve the feelings and sensations that you don’t process or experience during the day.