Using Journaling to Understand Your Dreams

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being with us. My name is Rebecca Kokendurfer with the Power of Journaling and Journaling.com. I have a wonderful guest for you today. And she's written down some introductions and I'm gonna just use my phone to kind of almost read it to you because it is so good. We're gonna be talking about dreams and how to use journaling. To analyze your dreams, to find the deep nuggets of wisdom and advice that are contained in the dream.

All right, so when you are asleep at night, when we stop interacting with the world around us and are open to our unconscious sight. Dreams come to us with wildly complicated emotions and stories. But why? Uh, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung discovered that these messages are bringing us very valuable information about ourselves. They're giving advice in a way that it's coming from our deepest, mysterious, and unknown self.

Dreams show us that deep inside there is a precious source of wisdom about who we really are, our most true selves, and that this wisdom wants to help us heal old wounds. and live our best and happier life. Nancy Cook has been helping people with this for years. She's coming to us from Holland. Thank you so much, Nancy, because of the time change. She teaches in Switzerland and her resume is so rich. I'm gonna ask Nancy.

to um introduce Nancy, if you would introduce yourself kind of briefly and tell us a little bit about Um how your background pertains to this idea of journaling to access your and understand your dream. Okay, thank you. I'm so pleased that you invited me, Rebecca. I love speaking about these things.

Yes, um my I I've had a complicated life and interesting career changes. I started as a biochemist, research biochemist, physiologist. And then at a certain moment I realized I needed to focus on becoming a s a Jungian analyst of all things. That was really clear to me. I was was fell in love with Jungian psychology. So, you know, for about 30 years ago, I started retraining everything and then slowly but surely became a certified Jungian analyst.

Um and to become a Jungian analyst, we have to do many, many hours of our own analysis, which means many, many hours of analyzing our own dreams. We can't become an analyst if we have all kinds of things creeping around in our shadow side, which is you and I were speaking about the shadow. And um so I have a lot of experience and years of experience working on my own dreams and seeing how they can really come to life and be very practically helpful on it in daily life really. And then

I work with Dreams also, of course, for now about 28 years as a full-time um analyst and psychotherapist. And the reason I love to work with Dreams is that the dreams are coming from a part of us That isn't our conscious self that's trying to keep everything under control and make things right the way it's supposed to be. Dreams come spontaneously.

And in that way they can tell us things about how we're doing in life when we don't even know ourselves. So as an analyst, I can watch somebody's dreams a little bit. and let them know if things are going better for them or they're going to go better, that kind of thing. But yeah, so it's a very rich, rich subject. But um yeah, and it's just really central to Jungian psychology to understand that. Within our own unconscious there is the

machine or this thing that produces these really intensely beautiful stories or horrible stories or whatever, but they're very real. And that um, you know, with working with people for so many years and myself, I've seen That there's a ter there's a tremendously helpful voice in our dreams. But understanding how dreams work and what it means for us. It takes a lot of work because it's the language of the unconscious which means

Our dreams don't speak to us in logical, reasonable language. It uses pictures and images and symbols and archetypes. And so we have to learn about all those things, what they might mean. When um COVID first started, I had a symbolic dream that um there were all these young people at a park. And, you know, and that they were safe and I was not safe outside the park, but I wasn't allowed in the park because I was too old.

And of course that tied in with at the time when we were in the lockdown where, you know, the young people appeared to be safe from COVID, but it was the older people who were in danger. That was one of my first dreams. I thought, oh, I can see the symbolism in that. And then another time I had a dream um my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

And I had this dream where my aunt who raised me and my sister and people who had already died came to me in this dream and they were cardboard cutouts. They were just kind of this flat cardboard cutouts. And then my sister was a part of them as a cardboard cutout. And she did end up dying from the breast cancer.

So like you said, coming from, you know, the deep unconscious. And can you let's start a little bit too by uh um I'd love to hear just a little bit more about what is the difference between the subconscious. Subconscious here and then deeper unconscious here. And then who makes who or what makes these dreams? That's a really good question. Of course, that's kind of a philosophical religious question.

theoretical, but we can imagine anyway. Well, so most people in our society are very familiar with Freud's ideas about these things. And Freud's psychology really kind of seeped into the general

population. So a lot of popular ideas about psychology these days are really stemming from Freud. But Freud had a kind of a really simplistic view of the psyche. Yeah, he liked things to be clean and tidy. and young loved messes. And so what he thought about and what the sub he made the term subconscious and he felt like Our mind is doing this automatic thing of taking things that it doesn't like or it feels ashamed about or it's worried and pushing it into our subconscious.

And so in that way, the subconscious is this like, you know, repository of bad stuff. And so maybe when we're sleeping, stuff comes out of the subconscious. He also thought that when we're sleeping, the reason we have dreams is so our sleep won't get interrupted. So it's a very mechanical, sort of simplistic view of things. Now, what Jung realized is that

There are all these things that happen from out of our unconscious. It's not just a vat that's holding something. And we can say, yeah, what's happening out of our unconscious? First of all, what is the unconscious?

The unconscious just means everything that isn't our focused or wide awake ego function. That's the ego function of consciousness. When and so it's everything. It's this, it's all of our whole life experience. It's our instincts from the time we're a baby, it's um you know, how do how all the information about how we're supposed to behave as humans, those are archetypes.

So it when I say that it's doing something, we can see it's doing something. He did actual experiments about that and showed that in the word association experiment. But we can say it's doing something just by going to sleep. And as soon as we're not here anymore, I mean if you and I just gave a uh seminar on the creative unconscious and and creativity and people trying to get in touch with their creativity. If you think about what happens in one dream. I mean this is coming out of us.

you know, wildly complicated and and remarkable. So then The unconscious does things and there are movements in it. I'm a physiologist and a biochemist. And so Jung's ideas also were that our psyche is kind of regulated like our body is and and those are so it's doing things. It's more like an organ than a just a And I know that you believe that journaling is one of the best ways to access this. But I'm still wondering, I'd still like to hear a little bit more. Why should we trust Our dream.

You know, why is it worth our time to analyze our dreams? Because I know you're gonna take us through, you're gonna show us how to use journaling. um to kind of record our dreams, maybe even to analyze uh analyze them. But I would still just like to hear a little bit more about why is that worth our time. You know, how why is that worth our time? How is that helpful? Well, it it's helpful. I mean, it that's again, that's a huge question.

Uh if you just look at the clinical evidence of s of a century now of Jungian dream interpretation. you will see that you looking at dreams and interpreting them is an extremely powerful way of helping people heal themselves. It's how people also become more themselves and individuals. So the thing about dreams is in doing psychoanalysis or therapy, the dreams coming from the individual. As an analyst, I'm not figuring out what that person needs.

or telling them what they're going to need or telling them they have this or that problem and they need to fix it and how to fix it. I'm letting the psyche of them come to me and show me in stories what the problem is. And you will see that. So if somebody has a terrible father and they grew up with a big wound in their

their sense of father, then they'll have dreams about really harsh, terrible fathers. But those dreams will start giving information about what that person can do to st help heal that old wound. So I think if we The problem with really making experiments about dream interpretation is that very we re we feel that dreams are sacred and wildly private because when we have them, we're asleep.

We're not there editing them and you all probably had toilet dreams and maybe pornographic dreams, but anything comes up in our dreams. So it's difficult to publish dreams. You have to have a very special situation where somebody has already been analyzing them for a long time and comfortable with publishing their deep dark secrets that come up in their dream. Are lucid dreams important? Lucid dreams bring mean that you can alter what's happening in the action while you're having a dream.

No, I'm really against lucid dreaming because it means that you think that your ego function, which is your consciousness, should really have a part in the story when the unconscious is just trying to tell you something that you don't know already.

So I don't you know, I think I mean I don't know how people use lucid dreaming in a way maybe that's nice, but As far as using dreams for our own psychological growth and healing, lucid dreaming is just introducing a kind of an inflated way of dealing with the unconscious as opposed to being very respectful and witnessing it. I like that. So in other words, we're getting past that ego mind part of us.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, and that's important that and that that you know, we have to really submit to our dreams. Everybody knows dreams can be. really scary. They can be humiliating. I mean, my goodness. Through the years I have people come and they sit down in the chair in my office and they say, I don't want to tell you this dream, but I know I have to.

And then that will be because there's something really strange or pornographic or ugly or yucky or whatever. So but then you have to you have to accept that because there's still The unconscious doesn't edit stuff out. It doesn't care what we think when we're aware.

What about when you have a dream where you you know you're you're screaming but no sound comes out? You're so afraid. I think that's a common one, but no sound will come out. What what does that mean? Well, it means in a way we could say, well, what would that be a symbol of? What's that a metaphor for?

If we're in life and we're screaming and no sound comes out, it means we're not being heard. You know, it could be the outside people aren't hearing us, or we don't know what words to use to have people communicate. But more likely, I think, is if you look at sleep research and the brain, when we're asleep.

Our body and everything is l like let's say we're walking around in a dream. Well, the motor cortex in our brain is making us walk around. And that's why if you have, you know, sleepwalking, you get up and walk around. But so the so that we won't get up and walk around, the brain has this thing that turns off the motors and says, don't move, you know, just stay in bed and sleep, even though you're walking around.

And so a lot of the sense of I can't move or I'm trying to run or I can't scream, I think comes from this sort of almost awake. phase where the actually the you know our our ability to move and it make sound and everything has been cut off by the brain so that we'll stay asleep. Oh, interesting. What about dreams about flying?

Oh, that can be everything from wonderful to terrible. I mean, of course, how it feels can be wonderful or terrible. And also what it might be a metaphor for can be wonderful or something really difficult. So you could imagine if somebody has a really skewed self-image and they just think they're you know, God's n answer to humans and they run around and they feel that they're just b above everybody else, they would probably have flying dreams.

Although the dream is gonna say fly all you want, but something bad's gonna happen now. And so in the dream you'd have a problem. So we we talk about flying in dreams as that can be a dangerous sign that we're getting too inflated. Can also mean that we're full of emotion and that's not bad. It's also or I've seen it in people who

Are going through a really rough time in their life and just this sad thing after another happens and cancer and divorce. And then they have a dream about getting on this beautiful ship, you know, kind of weird spaceship and going up and flying through the along close to the earth and it's all really beautiful. And then you think, okay, well that's a compensation.

that that going up and and leaving the earth behind is really necessary for that person to feel that during the night because during the day they're just you know scrambling down and suffering.

I I had a dream that went on for years and I was up in this attic sitting at a small kind of card table. And um every night I would there was a like a pencil or a pen on top of the table and my job was to move it with my mind. So night after night after night I wasn't able to roll the pencil. But one night I was able to roll the pencil off of the the table and the dream stopped. I never had that dream again after that. What was that?

Well tell me, tell me what does that mean? So you have to use your mind in a way to do something miraculous, like move something. And in and so what would you think that would mean? You know, I'm part of mine, I'm such like a sci-fi person. I'm such a sci-fi nerd and you know, all those superheroes and stuff like that. Maybe I just wanted I think I wanted to have telekinetic powers.

And so I would practice, I would practice up in this attic every night trying to just all you have to do is move the pencil. And then I would use my telekinetic powers to close the door. But I just thought it was fascinating that once I was able to move the pencil with my mind, you know, stop. Yeah, so that so so dreams can be telling us what we might need to do to solve a problem. I mean, I think it's also about using an extreme focus.

to do something with a pencil, right? So the dream might be saying you need to be writing your PhD thesis. you're doing right now or things like that. Um, you know, we can always look at it as a kind of a what is it a symbol of, you know, moving a pencil with our mind. Yeah. And I think that's why we're when we get into this

journaling is it sounds like what you're saying is that we're almost the best interpreters of our dreams. So people come to you, you have a private practice and you help them, but I'm hearing you say that what does the dream mean to you? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is the danger of, you know, you online and everywhere in books and all through the history. I mean, oh my goodness, it's the oldest art in the world of dream interpretation, you know.

Um, and it's really easy to say that this or that thing in a dream symbolizes this or that. Um and it's very easy to oversimplify what might be happening in dreams. And so You know, what I think my message would be first of all what a you know, what a tree is in one person's dream might not be what a tree is in your dream. I mean tree is pretty general, but still

You know, one person is a forester and the other person lives in the city. It's two different things that that tree. It's meaning something different. So we only, you know, it's it's it's highly unique. And that's also the value of dreams and the value of spending time with them and journaling them. We're actually getting to know ourselves in all kinds of ways that we're not aware of. So Yes.

Yeah, um pardon me. I've heard you say that um journaling is the best way to work with So can you Absolutely. You tell us why that is and then then give us some concrete steps. Okay. So kind of teach us, if you will, teach us. Okay, now this is how you use journaling to work with your dreams. And I like that phrase, work with your dreams.

Um, okay, so start us off with why is journaling, why do you think journaling is the very best? Because when you spoke to me, I could see the words very best in capital letters just from your voice. I I know, I was so glad to actually find you and think, Oh, she loves journaling too. So yeah. Good, yes. So why is that? And then then I'm without me interrupting you, I'm gonna just let you give us some steps. Teach us how to do that, please. Okay, okay, great.

Journaling, of course, it means many things, but W one of the most important things when we want to work with parts of ourselves that we're not familiar with or that are coming Outside of our from our dreams or weird things that we think of during the day. They come in, we can't capture them very easily. You'll notice also if you wake up in the morning and a dream is very, very clear, and then you just look at your phone for two seconds and it's completely gone.

So there's a sense of if you know that dreams are coming from the unconscious and they'll go right back really fast. I mean, so that's one of the practical things that you can do to remember your dreams is take little notes or something. But journaling means that you actually are capturing, it's like catching a big fit. You know, it's like pulling something up from the unconscious that is being shown to you, but is also maybe dreamy or strange or you would forget it really easily.

Um, so so journaling is really putting something down in concrete form. And as far as working with our imagination and our creativity and our creative energy to do anything to make a PhD thesis. We need, excuse me, we need to access our imagination and our creative energy and then we need to catch it and nail it down. And so that's uh partly what journaling does. And then it allows us to go through all the steps of working with the dream. And so should I

Yeah, thank you. So what I hear you saying here is that it can be helpful to have some kind of a sleep journal next to our bed. And then when we wake up in the morning, just write down, you know, right away, did you dream last night and what did you dream? Now what I have met people before who say, I never dream. What does that

That means they don't w well we know from sleep research that everybody dreams. There's no question about it. And it's not only REM sleep, it's not only rapid eye movement. We might dream off and on all through the night. Everybody dreams, it's just a matter of remembering it. And so when I work with people who come and they really want to do more of this work with directly with the unconscious and they say they don't dream very much.

then we do things to help them remember the few dreams that they have. And if it's something valuable for them and they get interested and excited by it, then they start having more dreams. So, you know, in my seminar about the creative unconscious, I say it's like a garden. If you tend to it, it will grow. The same thing with our dream. if we start rem it's almost like a muscle too that we can you know remember dreams better the more we do it. But yeah, so next to bed a a um a journal. Um

Some people I have some people who in the middle of the night tell me their dream, you know, and and to their phone they record it. And so I have to listen to that person. saying, oh I can hardly understand what they're saying. But they capture their dreams that way and that's useful too.

But if we, you know, that's a lot to ask. If we um or even having a journal next to the bed can be a lot to ask when we're super busy. You know, how am I gonna sit down and try to write something down? The kids are supposed to be a school. If we can just scribble down two or three words, you know, let's say, you know, tower, golden. fire then and and we can come that will trigger us to help remember the dream later.

We can also use the recording on our phone, just to again say something really general or that oh an image that could really stands out in a dream. And that's again it's like you know, you have to catch the fish. So you can use those little things as a hook to get the dream back to your memory later. I know that there are a lot of creatives who will ask for some specific information before they go to bed.

like for the title of a book or the title of a song. You know, so they're asking their, um, are they asking their unconscious or and or the lower sub wait, it's subconscious, it's conscious on the top. We don't we don't even include subconscious. That's not in the Jungian universe. That's n that's not. Okay. So you're asking your deeper self. I'll just play it safe and call it. Perfect.

You're asking your you know deeper authentic self, like, can you tell me the title of the book? I'm gonna I've got a piece of paper here by the side of the bed and when I wake up tomorrow morning, what is the perfect title for this book I'm working on? Does does that work? I know a lot of creatives do that. Does that work?

Well, first of all, we know, and this has also been shown in sleep research, in really wonderful experiments, you know, you can sort of train somebody to do like a video game just before they go to sleep. and see how how well they score. And then you let them sleep and then you wake them up after and you try to teach them again. They'll they'll know it much better. And it's and so it's really clear that when we're not um focused on something.

And we've started to learn something that it gets worked on in in our mind and our you know, whatever the unconscious, whatever you want to call it. So our mind and our, well, I'll just call it unconscious again because it's not our conscious, you know, cognition and thinking about stuff. is is working on problems. So um we can trust that. And that's why in a creative process too, we need to just trust that if we don't have any clue right now what we're supposed to do.

We just keep working on it and then it you know, it will come to us more and more will come to us. W as a Jung as a pure Jungian, w you know, a lot of what we think about is how to really um honor and respect the unconscious. So we don't give it an assignment when we go to bed. It's like, it's like, no.

You know, you're not gonna ask the ask God to tell you what the, you know, the title of your story is when you wake up in the morning. I don't mean to say that our unconscious as God, but it's something bigger than us that we need to honor because it's doing all this stuff for us without our asking. And even the asking would be coming from that ego mind. Exactly. And the idea that you're talking about is just stay open. Just stay open because the deeper, wiser part of you knows

what it is that you need to know, what it is you need to do, the lessons you need to n to know. And so just give it the rein. And then your job is to as much as you can. Either do a voice recording when you wake up in the morning or write it out if you have time or just a few words. So let's say that you've been doing that for a while.

Um you say for the next couple of weeks, every morning, I'm going to I'm gonna I'm gonna write in my dream journal. And he maybe I could say didn't dream last night, didn't dream last night, didn't dream last night. Oh, then this night I dreamed that. I suppose that's one way. Or you could just wait like, ooh, I just had a deeply symbolic dream. I'm gonna, you know, write that down or record that as soon as possible.

So let's say you have now a collection of these recorded dreams in your journal or in your recorded journal. Right, right. Written them down. Yeah, you've written them down in a paper journal or you found some place on your phone that you record them. Well, yeah. Yes, that's true. But put it into words, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so now you have this. What do you do with that information?

Okay, so that's huge. And that's so interesting. And that's of course what I I've been learning for 30 years and what any analyst learns for, you know. What do we do with dreams? How do we work with them? What do how do we get information from them? And again, I don't interpret people's dreams. They tell me the dream and I say, well, that sounds like this or that. And

And I remember you told me last week that your father, you had a problem with your father and there's a mean father in the dream. Do you think it's related? And if it's related, the person will say, yeah, that's actually related. So we're just sort of reflecting back and forth. Now you could imagine how that really would help people. It's very hard for us to take a dream that is basically it would be like You know, we're lit when we're asleep and we're dreaming, we're having a real experience.

You know, water's coming into the living room, you know, this this wind is blowing through the windows, we're afraid, something happens. When we wake up in the morning, that was a like a real event, you know, created in our imagination. Somebody said Uh well, what is the symbolic and metaphorical meaning of that? It's like, well, what what kind of stupid question is that? It it was a real thing.

So when when we work with dreams, we do have to sort of start trying to translate it into language that's like a symbol or a metaphor for something. That's the language of our unconscious and our midbrain. So um but that's difficult. So that that's that's part of the task. I do notice that sometimes, like you said, I'm just having dreams where I'm moving.

Um either I watched something scary and now I'm having a scary dream. Or there was a sound outside my window and now I'm dreaming about this. It was triggered by something else. But then sometimes I have those dreams where I go, oh, that's symbolic.

So for example, that dream when my dead relatives, my beloved dead relatives came back as flat cardboard cutoffs, was that dream trying to and my sister was joined them, wasn't that dream trying to warn me that, oh, your sister's not going to make it? No, that's really, really, really good question. Now, if we go to bed and we're having a terrible problem in life, and then we dream about it and we're scared to death, we can wake up in the morning and think,

Why did my wiser self just torment me with something I'm already being tormented by all day long? I don't need to go to sleep and be upset again about this thing.

So I believe a hundred percent that our dreams are actually trying to help us. So if we're dreaming about something, it's usually that the dream instead of saying you should be scared and this is you're in danger of blah blah blah or something bad's gonna happen, the dream is saying something like You're terrified of this particular thing and you don't know what to do with it. And then the dream will give you more information about how you might become less terrified.

But a lot of times it's just sort of reporting to us things that we don't I mean, how many of us during the day remember those moments when we start getting really worried or upset about something and then forget it again? Or these weird thoughts come into our mind and that of course that's what your thesis is on too, weird thoughts. But um yeah, so yeah. So do our dreams ever tell us the future?

Well dreams can be I think th in my personal experience and also with all of my clients through the years, dreams can we can dream about something that happens in the future. And it but were they should never be used as a predictive tool because they're We but your in your experience we can dream about things that happen in the future. Yeah. How do we do that?

Well, yeah, that's a big really good question. I don't know, but we we you know, one way to think about it is to say, well When we get out of the our conscious ego, which is our awake self and our think clear thinking and cognition, and you know, there's black and white and the universe is divided up into clear orderly structure, whatever.

When we get out of that mode, out of our ego functioning, which is brilliant and we need desperately, but when we get out of it, then the rules of the ego function don't apply anymore. So maybe when you're really in the depths of the unconscious, the order of time is not the same as it is when we're in the awake ego function.

or a place or things like that. So that's one way to think about it. It's a huge topic and really fascinating. There's some wonderful uh physicists and people that are working on the problem of synchronicity in You know, where in the psyche things like time don't exist and all of that kind of stuff. I'm not an expert there at all. I'm a physiologist, I'm not a physicist.

But um yeah, I think it can happen. And so it would be the same kind of question we can all ask ourselves. What is it? How does it happen that somebody might when they're awake also see something in the future?

You know, you m just referred to the ego mind as brilliant and necessary, but you know, I've been trained so much that I'm I always feel a little bit broken for having an ego mind that it's something Did that something I have to leapfrog over? No, this is this is really, I'm glad you're saying this. Look, this is this is a mixed metaphor. The way the word ego is used in these kind of the spiritual traditions and the movements of nowadays.

And it's not even really v a really adequate way to to talk about real Buddhism. is something really different from what we're talking about in Jungian psychology or what psychologists or depth or psychodynamic or psychoanalytic or anybody We're not talking about the ego as some kind of bloated part of ourself that wants to take control of everything. We're talking about it as a function. And so when we're born, we don't have a strong ego yet because we're completely unconscious.

And so as we c as we go through our early childhood and our whole adult life, we're building up more and more of a sense of self-control and consciousness and awareness of what's around us. And that's all done and builds up this ego function, which is our consciousness. You just need to think of it as awake. Consciousness. And of course we we can't be healthy humans if we're not

Conscious. That's that's our gift. So so the ego mind, is it the lizard brain part of us that isn't as developed and is just so, you know, immature and reactive? No, no, no. I don't want to even talk about ego mind. I don't like the term. Okay, okay.

Because it's such it's just a huge confusing thing that everybody kind of jumps up when they hear the word ego and and and yeah, it's just E you know, so though ego mind is maybe a kind of expression used in modern spirituality in some forms of Buddhism, but mm. And the way that ego is used in psychology is something completely different. So we don't mix those metaphors because Okay.

Really confusing for people. Yeah. I mean, I'm saying it like that too because we do feel guilty and it's like, oh You know, uh I shouldn't be so focused. I shouldn't be thinking clearly or whatever. I don't know. Okay. I just I do find it helpful sometimes. No, whatever whatever the term is, that when I'm looking at something, I can just kind of feel and I can tell, ah, this is coming from my higher.

wiser best self. And then I can tell too it's like that's why for me I'd use the word, oh now this is coming from like my lower scared, maybe ego mind self. Let's just stay with scared and leave ego out of there, right? Yes. This is just coming from my you know, no, it's really good. In other words, this is coming from my higher self. This is coming from my scared self. Thanks for scared. It frightened something.

The scared is so important. And this is important for your thesis also that how are what happens to our mind when we're upset and emotional and scared. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's valuable. Okay, now let's sum it up for people. Okay, Nancy, this is fantastic. Thank you for letting me take you all over the place. Um I appreciate it. I'm very interested in this topic. For people who are watching this video and listening to the podcast, what would you say are the biggest takeaways?

from this conversations, maybe the the most important things you would like them to know so that they can receive this information in some kind of a transformative way. Right? You know, may may may this information transform, you know, my life for the better. And if that was if that was the um invitation, how would you answer that?

I would answer that by saying our dreams are a gift and it's a part of us that's wiser and trying to help us heal psychological wounds, understand life better. It's not trying to give us a hard time or scare us. But it's not easy to interpret them. And it's a really good idea to get help with that because you need somebody else from outside of you reflecting a bit. That would help a lot. However, we also know that

just really living with your dreams and really experiencing what's happening in them, the emotions, the images, and making them more real for yourself can be very healing also. And so I would recommend to people to um to journal about about their dreams and with a kind of really open mind about I don't know what this is about, it's private. And it's weird and I but I'm learning from it. And then there are ways then once we have a dream to kind of try to get

ideas about what it's about. But an individual, we if we dream of like you just said, if if you dream about something that's really striking, you may already say, Oh yeah, well that has to do with my sister's approaching death. So And then next time you dream something like that you could say, Oh, so So we can we can work with our dreams and it's um

And even, you know, if we even if we stay confused about them or just feel overwhelmed that there's so much material, if we're getting them down in a journal, it means that we're kind of capturing in a fairly unique part of ourselves. And a part of ourselves that's very creative, you know? And so if we can tap that creativity in other ways, then that's just only a good thing.

Yeah, that would be another interview for us to do. How to use dreams to enhance your creativity. I have a feeling you'd be very good at that. Yes, that's thank you. That's a really good topic. Yeah. Oh, this is wonderful. We are out of time today. Um, listeners and viewers, thank you so much for your time today. My name is Rebecca Kokendurfer with journaling.com and the power of journaling, and I have been here today with Nancy Koch.

And Nancy, how can people reach out to you and find out more about your work? Um, you can maybe go to my just to my website. I'm also on Facebook. My website is nancycookph.com. And um and then I'm also reaching out a lot with all of my uh workshops and programs. So send me an email at my uh website and you'll get all my information. Okay, so just go to nancycookph.com, send you a message, and that way they can find out about your workshop. All of it, yeah.

I I will definitely be doing that. I think it sounds fantastic and I'll bet you're an excellent Oh, thanks. I love it. Thank you so much for having me. Yes. Thank you very much. All right, listeners, thank you so much. I look forward to being with you again soon.