Dreamwork in the Age of AI
Choosing Relationship Over Isolation
These days, everyone is talking about AI. Even in various dream communities, AI has infiltrated the ways in which we think about and analyze data and how to interpret it. You can put a dream into AI and have an interpretation in seconds. It can seemingly identify symbols, offer psychological associations, connect your images to archetypes, and give you a whole range of possible meanings. Sometimes what comes back can even feel insightful, like the AI chatbot really knows you. But to what extent is this helpful? How can I integrate the benefits of what AI has to offer without giving up my agency and the greater potentials held within human connections?
One thing that I think is important to understand is that ego consciousness interprets while the unconscious generates. Ego consciousness is the meaning-making, categorizing consciousness. This part of us can be present in the dream, and it is definitely a huge part of our waking life and how our brains function. It wants symbols to correspond to things. On the other hand, the deeper unconscious doesn't necessarily communicate in that language. It communicates through images, memories, bodily sensations, emotional intensities, contradictions, archetypal patterns, etc.
For me, a dream is not an answer waiting to be found. It is a primitive and natural experience, a part of our biological make up. Remember, human beings have been dreaming since before the written word! So the dream comes with all that I describe above and sometimes things we don't yet have words for. It may disturb us or fill us with longing. It may bring something or someone super familiar into a completely unfamiliar landscape. It may show us something we don't want to see, or something we didn't know we were longing for. Because of this, I don't think the most important question we can ask of a dream is, “What does this mean?” What is more interesting to me is what happens when we stay with an image or moment a little longer, when we slow down in the vessel of a 1:1 session with another human being who is both witness and companion in our journey toward receiving the material our dreams have to offer. The dream can become revelatory simply because we get out of ego mind and allow the dream to be received emotionally, spiritually, intuitively and revelatorily.
I think of it this way: emotionally, we receive what the dream evokes in feeling; spiritually, we remain open to awe or sacred significance; intuitively, we allow knowing that isn't primarily analytical or conceptual; and revelatorily, we allow the dream to reveal something to us.
This is one of the reasons I believe there is such value in working a dream one-on-one with another human being. When I work with a dreamer, I am not trying to get to an interpretation as quickly as possible. I work with clusters of dreams and hold the threads from dream to dream, session to session. I often want to slow things down. I want to stay with an image and see what happens when the dreamer feels into it and shares about it. I want to ask a question and wait. I want to notice what happens when the dreamer suddenly laughs, becomes quiet, changes their tone, or says something they hadn't realized until that moment, when they have that ah-ha moment. Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a session isn't an insight, it's that we have stayed with something long enough for it to begin revealing itself. Often it's an unexpected or overlooked quality or understanding.
There is something about being witnessed by another human being that is difficult to replicate. To be witnessed is to have our experience held in the presence of another human being, and that presence can itself be healing. When you bring a dream to another person, you are bringing something that happened in the privacy of your own inner life. You are allowing someone else to enter that experience with you. There is something sacred about one human being witnessing another without trying to fix, interpret, or explain away what is happening. Perhaps one of the oldest spiritual truths is that we are changed in relationship, not just through information offered, but through being seen and accompanied even in the deepest and darkest of places.
As a Natural Dreamworker, I can be present when something unexpected emerges, and I can stay with you when the dream takes you somewhere painful, beautiful, funny, or powerfully alive. And it is also true that the dream doesn't exist separately from the life of the person who dreamed it. A dream is not simply a collection of symbols that can be lifted out of the dream and assigned universal meanings. The images are emerging within a particular human life. There may be trauma there, but there may also be radical joy. There may be grief, anger, longing, sexuality, fear, creativity, new beginnings, old wounds, complicated relationships, or experiences the dreamer has not yet found a way to understand. The work is not to force all of that into an interpretation. It is to allow the dream and the life of the dreamer to begin speaking to one another. Many of my clients love the 90 minute session. It give us adequate time to explore what's happening in your world-side life as well as what's happening within the dreams, your inner life and the possible intersections between the two. One thing I've noticed too in working with individuals over longer periods of time is how nuanced the work becomes. Our psyches are complex, our histories are complex and so our dreams can feel complex, rich and deeply layered. We don't stay in the surface layers. As we descend, we find deeper and deeper meaning in the material, which comes through as a kind of resonance or reverberance through our intuitive body. It comes in through our shared understanding of the larger field of our journey over time. Symbols are interpreted at a very surface level.
This is also why I believe slowing down matters so much. We live in a culture that increasingly rewards speed. We can ask almost any question and receive an answer immediately. AI is extremely good at this. But Natural Dreamwork offers the opposite. It asks us to linger in uncertainty, to let an image remain strange, to tolerate not knowing, and to resist turning an experience into information before we have actually experienced it.
Sometimes I think the real danger in having AI interpret our dreams isn't that it will necessarily get the dream “wrong.” It is that it may give us something that sounds right too quickly. It too easily links to our intellectual capacities at the expense of our intuitive, sensate, and heart wisdom. We recognize “ourselves,” the known part of ourself, in the interpretation and stop there. But what if the explanation, even an interesting one, prevents us from discovering something less obvious and much more personal and nuanced? What if what appears to be the meaning of the dream is only the beginning?
I believe the central question regarding AI and how we use it in our lives is the extent to which we wish to give up human relationship to be in isolation with something “artificial" (there is a reason that the powers that be want to re-brand it as "super" rather than "artificial"!) Will we allow it to take over our therapeutic and spiritual spaces, replacing the intuitive wisdom that human connection offers?
If you have a dream that keeps returning to you, a dream you can't quite shake, or simply an image you feel drawn to explore more deeply, I invite you to bring it to me. We can slow it down together, listen to what is emerging, and see where the dream wants to take us.
Laura Smith-Riva is a Natural Dreamwork practitioner, teacher, and practicing Druid whose work focuses on dreams as a pathway to self discovery, creativity, and personal transformation. She guides individuals and groups in exploring dreams as meaningful experiences rather than symbols to be decoded, integrating nature-based spirituality and contemplative practices. She is also an artist and writer inspired by dreamwork and the natural world.
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