How Our Night Dreams Help Achieve Our Career Dreams

Sometimes we get stuck in our career. We don’t know what we want to do with our lives. Or we aren’t getting the promotions we think we deserve. Or we are trapped in a job we complain about so much that our friends avoid talking to us because they are tired of hearing about it. We may have lost our confidence or any sense of purpose in our lives. We find ourselves unable to see a way forward.

But we do have guides leading us out of our career eddy — one that appears in the dark of night. Western culture tends to ignore the wisdom of our nighttime dreams. Rather, our culture teaches us that information and knowledge come from analysis, data, and research. But other places and times understood that our dreams also impart insights that help us to live our best lives. In ancient Greece, dreamwork was an important part of health and healing. The Greeks believed that the gods sent us our dreams with information about how to heal.

Our nighttime dreams can help us to achieve our career dreams if we learn to understand their language. The images and figures that visit us at night can provide us with direction if we are feeling lost from our path. They can also expose the barriers keeping us from achieving our goals. Our dreams have an uncanny way of pointing out how we are getting in our own way.

For instance, Stephanie was trying to get a skincare business off the ground. Although she was passionate about the business and had a strong sense that it was her calling, she was struggling to make much progress.

One night she had a vivid dream, which left her feeling anxious:

I was standing on the end of a pier surrounded by birds. They were eating bread, and I was concerned that the bread was in whole slices, even though the birds didn’t seem bothered by it. They were managing just fine. I bent over to break up the bread into bite-sized pieces for them. My bag, which was full of a lot of valuable things, fell into the water and sank. I nearly fell in, too.

At first glance, it’s hard to imagine what birds eating bread might have to do with running a successful skincare business, but when we spend just a few minutes working with the dream, we find these birds reveal a lot about Stephanie’s frustrations.

Scholars and practitioners have proposed various ways to work with dreams. One of the things that most of them agree on is our need to honor the dream and to appreciate the wisdom it offers. It is also important to recognize that dreams choose to visit us, we don’t consciously create them. It’s as if they have a life of their own, and perhaps they do.

In terms of working with dreams in the context of career, I’ve found it useful to take the approach that each figure in the dream reflects a part of us. Each person, creature, or thing may reflect aspects of ourselves, often ones that we are ignoring in our waking lives. For instance, that friend in our dream who we admire for her creativity may actually reflect our own neglected creative talents. Or that person who shows up in our dream who really irritates us because she blames everyone else for the problems might be suggesting that we need to be taking more responsibility for our own lives.

Even though Stephanie’s bird dream was short, it was full of wisdom. I asked her what part of the dream was the most significant for her as it is only the dreamer who really knows the dream. She noted that it was the feeling that she needed to help the birds when they really didn’t require her assistance. I asked her where that might be happening in her own life. She said that lately, she’d become aware of how much time she’d been spending helping others with their careers instead of spending her energy on her own business goals. Her friends were certainly important to her, so she wanted to continue to help them, but she needed to rebalance her time. And, like the birds in the dreams, often her friends didn’t really need her help. They were doing just fine with their whole pieces of bread.

In Western culture, women are often socialized to put other people’s goals and needs ahead of their own. They are taught that their own ambitions need to come second to the people around them. Often, we don’t consciously realize that we hold this belief. It is something so deeply ingrained in us.

And sometimes it’s easier to focus on other people’s problems and challenges as it allows us to avoid facing the ones in our own lives.

And this is what dreams sometimes do-they point out the things we’ve been avoiding facing. Stephanie experienced this in a dream that followed a few days later.

I was driving my car and realized that the road was beginning to narrow, but I figured my car would fit okay. It barely fit for a while, and then the road began to narrow even further. I kept driving ignoring the fact that it was getting too narrow for me to keep going. I scraped up the sides of my car until I finally ended up crashing it into a barrier.

Cars in our dreams often represent how we are moving forward in our lives. In discussing her dream, Stephanie was aware that she needed to become more focused on her marketing strategy, as well as to be more strategic (and tighter) with her resources. She needed to move forward in a different way. The way she had been working was not going to work for the road ahead.

The dream seemed to be guiding her to pay attention to the changing road in front of her. She needed to recognize the changes that were coming and to adjust as necessary.

After working with her dreams, Stephanie felt clearer about how to move forward in her business. She knew what she needed to do. Her dreams didn’t totally surprise her, but they moved the concerns that she had in the back of her mind to the very front. She became more thoughtful in balancing her goals with those of the people around her. And she made some changes in how she was running her business to ensure it would reach the next step.

Thus, these strange, apparently non-sensical dreams were surprisingly full of wisdom and common sense. Working with dreams is an ongoing process. They continually provide us with direction and guidance and are one of the best tools we have for career success.