Dream Journal on Mountain Dreamer Counseling

How to Work with a Relapse Dream

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A somatic approach to tricky dreams in recovery.

This method came out of my research and the dream group I ran for several years in a partial hospitalization program for substance use. The relapse dream came up over and over in group dreamwork: the dream where you use your drug of choice again, or decide to take a drink even though you’ve committed to recovery.

Relapse dreams can leave dreamers dysregulated, and the body craves an outlet to sequence the lingering emotions. Left unattended, it feels like a loop that never gets to close.

Now Enrolling: A Six-Week Dream Group in Boulder, Starting October 13

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’m opening a small group this fall, and there are a handful of spots in it.

Six Tuesday evenings in North Boulder, starting October 13. We work with dreams the way I work with them in session — not by decoding them, but by going back into the image and finding out where it lives in the body.

When	Tuesdays, 6:45–8:45 PM
Dates	October 13 – November 17 (six weeks)
Where	Yoga Pearl Studio, North Boulder
Cost	$650 for the full series
Payment	Payment plans and sliding scale available

Sign-up begins with a short check-in call — a real conversation, not a form — so we can make sure the group is a good fit for where you are in your process.

Women Remember More Dreams

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Women report remembering more dreams than men. It’s one of the sturdier findings in dream research — when Schredl and Reinhard pooled roughly 175 studies, the pattern held. The gap opens around adolescence, runs widest in our twenties, and narrows again as we age.

Hold it loosely

The gap is an average, not a rule. It’s also small — plenty of men out-remember plenty of women, and if you wake with nothing most mornings you are well inside the ordinary range.

How to Do Dreamwork on Your Own

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Most people assume dreamwork requires someone else in the room. It doesn’t. Some of the deepest work I’ve done with my own dreams happened alone, in bed, before anyone else in the house was awake.

Here’s how to begin.

First, what we’re not doing

We’re not looking anything up.

A dream dictionary will tell you that a snake means transformation. It cannot tell you what your snake means, in your body, on this particular morning — and that’s the only meaning that will do anything for you.

Three Percent of Reality

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I keep returning to something Dr. Dan Siegel said in an interview with Natalie Kuhn:

Physics estimates that 97 percent of what exists is called dark matter and dark energy. Dark, meaning we in our human form cannot tap into it. We can’t sense it. We can’t so far figure out a way to measure it. We don’t understand it. So we live in bodies that allow us, in this form, to make sense of 3 percent of reality.

Your Dreams Are Right There

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Last week I took my three-year-old camping in the mountains for ten days. (Yes, you read that right.)

Somewhere in there I noticed my dreams had changed. They were more vivid. And I was waking with them still intact — not fragments, but whole dreams, easy to reach.

Maybe it was sleeping closer to the moon. I’d like that to be the answer.

But I think it was something much more ordinary.

Our Dreams Are Non-Binary

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A note on the spectrum of gender: our dreams are non-binary. The subconscious is too expansive to be limited to two choices.

Jung spoke of the anima and the animus — the feminine and masculine parts of us speaking through the dreamworld. But he also gave us syzygy: his word for the anima and animus as a pair, the two held together as one unit rather than set against each other as opposites. Even in his own framework, they were never meant to stay separate.

How to Use the Lunar Dream Map

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The Lunar Dream Map is a circular wheel for tracking three things at once: your dreams, your body, and the moon, across one lunar cycle. It grew out of my own morning practice, and it’s the tool I hand to almost everyone I do dreamwork with. Here’s how to use it.

The three rings

The wheel has three rings, moving from the outside in:

The outer ring is for dreams. Each morning, jot down a dream — even just a title, an image, a feeling. “The barn is on fire.” “Swimming with my grandmother.” You don’t need the whole story.
The middle ring is for the date.
The inner ring is for the body. A word or two about how you woke: tender, buzzing, heavy, rested, wired. This is the somatic half of the practice, and it’s the half most of us skip. Don’t skip it.

Around the outer edge, you’ll see the moon’s phases — new, first quarter, full, last quarter — so you can see at a glance where the moon is as you chart. And in the very center, there’s a space to name the cycle for yourself.

Welcome to the Dream Journal

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve wanted a quieter corner of the internet to think out loud about dreams and the body — somewhere between the therapy room and the page. This is it.

Here I’ll share reflections on somatic dreamwork, the nervous system, the cycles we move through, and the practices I return to again and again. Some entries will be short — a single dream image, a body-based practice to try when you wake. Others will go deeper.

We Don't Dream Like Men

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

One thing became apparent as I began to weave the body into my dreamwork: we don’t dream like men.

We have monthly cycles that shift our hormones and shift our dreams. We have the power to gestate humans, which changes our sleep and the makeup of our dreams. We move through postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause — each one a portal that changes how we sleep and how we dream. All of these cycles shape the content and the texture of our nights, and learning to read those shifts is, I think, a quietly radical act.

Dreams Are Not Nonsense

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

When I was living in Chicago, about to turn thirty, I began recording my recurring nightmares — what I now know to be a symptom of my post-traumatic stress. They were confusing, shame-filled, dysregulating, and very women-centered in their themes.

I sought out a well-known “medicine woman” psychotherapist, the one all my fellow yoga teachers adored. I came into her office tearful, a total mess, and shared my dreams with her — and she promptly said, “You know dreams are just nonsense, right?” and offered me an Akashic records session instead.