The Radical Intelligence of Dreaming

Why dreams may be one of the mind’s most powerful processes for emotional integration

In a nightmare that haunted her, Carol dreamt she was walking beside a river carrying a newborn baby. The setting is lush and peaceful, with apple trees gracing the riverbank. She proudly shows the baby to her mother. The baby’s father (who, oddly, she does not know) and his father are there too. They are conferring on what to name the child. The atmosphere is warm, almost ceremonial: a new life is being welcomed and given a name.

But then her mother notices the baby has stopped breathing.

Carol looks down and sees the infant gasping desperately for air. Panic surges through her as she runs to find help. The baby tries so hard to breath her head pops off! The dream ends there, leaving Carol shaken by the image and left with the desolate sense that something precious has been lost.

Carol offered this dream during an embodied experiential dreamwork class, and we began exploring it together. As is my way when exploring dreams, we did not rush to interpret. Instead we re-entered the dream environment, feeling into the beauty of the river, the presence of the apple trees, and the tangible support of the family members gathered there. Carol felt into these elements one by one, allowing the sense of safety and connection to infuse her body.

As we deeply engaged in this slow, supportive process, Carol paused. Something had shifted. She now knew exactly what she needed to do: give the baby mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “She needs my life force in her,” Carol said. Allowing the dream to carry forward, she laid the blanket on the ground, knelt beside the infant and gently breathed into her mouth. With each breath the baby began to change. Her body grew chubby and strong. Her cheeks filled out. Her eyes opened, bright and alert.

The nightmare had spontaneously transformed.

This dream session brought many shifts and insights over the following days and weeks, including access to a calmer way of being when faced with distressing situations and a sense of ‘lineage repair’. The state shifts experienced in a session like this seep into waking life in both subtle and profound ways.

(The full transcript of this session is available in my book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork, Routledge, 2025.)

What was most striking about this moment was how the change emerged naturally. We did not need to invent a new dream ending, although this is a well-supported way to work with nightmares. Once the dreamer was able to gather and embody the resources already present within the dream, the sense of what needed to happen next simply emerged with force and clarity.

Dreams as ongoing emotional integration

Many people wake from a vivid dream with the lingering sense that something important has just happened. The feeling may fade quickly as the day begins, yet for a moment there is a tangible recognition that the dream carried an important message, often one that feels just out of reach. Because dreams often host strange imagery and unusual justapositions of time, place and character, they are often dismissed as nonsensical, random artefacts of the sleeping mind. If you do sense a depth of meaning in your dreams, you may not know how to tap into it. You might assume you need special knowledge or dream decoding books to discern what the dream is about. Neither are true.

I have spent much of my professional life carefully tending dreams, both my own and those of the people who come to me for help with nightmares, recurring dreams, or questions about dream meaning. I have come to see dreams as neither random noise nor cryptic puzzles. Rather, I see them (among other things) as part of an ongoing process of emotional integration.

The creative genius of dreams

I continue to be struck by the creative ingenuity of dreams. Night after night, dreams render detailed, living images drawn from the emotional concerns most alive in us, signals from the body, fragments of recent experience, and elements drawn from the vast archive of human history. Some of our dream images lie far beyond what we can consciously conjure or recall.

These disparate elements are woven together into evocative dream imagery that can feel startlingly precise. A landscape appears that captures the atmosphere of a sticky life situation. A dream stranger embodies a particular quality we need but have not yet claimed. A dream element shape-shifts in a way that signals something in us is ready to change. So often, the dreaming mind makes connections that the waking mind has not yet recognized.

Dreams are also fluid, and malleable. When we engage dreams experientially, they respond in real time to our emotions and intentions. The complexity of what dreaming accomplishes each night is extraordinary, and science can offer only a partial understanding of how this happens.

I have guided, witnessed or experienced hundreds of transformative dream experiences like Carol’s. This work has taught me that dreaming possesses a remarkable and integrative intelligence. Because the vast majority of our dreams are forgotten, we can infer that they do their work whether we remember them or not. But when we engage with the ones we do recall, we get a glimpse of the amazing dreaming mind at work as it deftly reorganizes how emotional memories and experiences are held within us.

Collaboration, not control

When we respect and honour this intelligence, it changes how we approach dreaming. Instead of trying extract interpretations (a classical approach) or control dreams (via lucid awareness or advanced technology), I believe a more fruitful approach is to collaborate with our dreams. Experienced lucid dreamers have told me that attempts to dominate the dream environment can be exciting at first, but ultimately exhausting, as sleep itself can become busier and more goal-oriented. Ultimately, lucid dream experts find being awake in their dreams to be richer and deeper when they relax their control and allow the dream to unfold more naturally.

My work with nightmares illustrates this principle. Many people search for ways to stop their disturbing dreams. They may try things like medication, sleep avoidance or imagining their dream differently. While many things can help, but I have found that until the underlying emotion has been met rather than avoided, the distressing dreams continue. I see these dreams as the mind-body’s attempt to process overwhelming experiences. When we approach nightmares with curiosity and support rather than avoidance, the emotions that were unapproachable can be metabolized, and then the dream itself begins to shift, or cease to visit.

Dreams are fluid and responsive

In my own work with nightmare treatment and dream therapy, I typically invite people to re-enter their dream landscape and begin with a search for supportive elements. When they find and embody helpful elements, dream images that once felt fixed and terrifying can begin to soften or transform. Then the dream moves forward in a way that was not previously possible, as Carol’s dream so aptly illustrates.

These changes reveal something essential about dreaming. They are not static narratives, but rather stories of experience that respond to our attention and the feelings we bring to the process. If we felt mainly fear as we were dreaming, and instead revisit the nightmare with curiosity and emotional staying power, we can witness its transformation in real time.

Long before modern sleep research began exploring the functions of dreaming, contemplative traditions had already recognized this flexibility. In Tibetan dream yoga, for example, lucidity is only the beginning of a series of practices designed to cultivate freedom within the dream state. Dreamers learn to move through dream environments, pass through solid objects, fly, or meditate while dreaming. These practices increase cognitive flexibility and insight.

Learning to listen

If dreams truly embody a kind of radical intelligence, then the most important skill we can cultivate is not interpretation but listening. True listening opens us to the nuance and complexity of our dream images and elements. We can expand our consciousness by entering their unique and larger perspective. This change within us impacts our experience of dreaming and alters the dream itself. When we learn to open and listen to our dreams, they reveal themselves as living processes that continue unfolding long after we awaken.

This is why I speak of the radical intelligence of dreaming. Dreams rarely provide simple answers, but they do possess an extraordinary capacity to reorganize experience. They generate remarkable imagery that can guide us toward deeper understanding not only of ourselves and our life situation, but also of the wider world and a fuller range of consciousness.

If you are curious about how dreams work, how nightmares can transform, or how to approach dream meaning in a way that deepens rather than flattens the experience, these are questions I explore regularly in my writing and teaching. Through embodied experiential dreamwork, I have seen how even the most troubling dreams can become pathways toward integration and healing.

I invite you to bring curiosity, and an open heart and mind, to the dreams that visit you each night. They may already be doing far more for you than you realize.

Your thoughts are much appreciated. Please share any questions you have, or experiences you’d like to share. Watch this space for more on experiencing dreams, including free articles on how to understand and engage with your dreams, plus guided dream explorations and live sessions for paid subscribers.