Your Psyche Doesn't Wait for Your Next Appointment
How dreams can become part of your EMDR process
There's something that happens when people commit to doing deep therapeutic work. Before the first processing session even begins — sometimes in the days leading up to it — something shifts. A restlessness. A dream that lingers after waking. A memory that surfaces out of nowhere during an ordinary afternoon.
This may feel like anxiety — and in some ways it is. But anxiety doesn't always mean something is wrong or that danger is approaching. Sometimes it's the feeling of something long-held beginning to surface. Something in you is leaning in.
The decision to finally address something painful or longstanding doesn't stay neatly contained to your therapy hour. It reverberates. Parts of you that have been waiting — sometimes for a very long time — begin to stir in anticipation. And one of the ways that shows up is in dreams.
What I tell clients at the start
When I'm working with someone preparing to begin EMDR processing, I mention this early. As we gear up toward the deeper material, pay attention to what starts showing up — not just in your waking life, but at night. Dreams that feel particularly charged, disturbing, vivid, or strangely moving are worth capturing and bringing into our next session. They're often an early sign that something in you has already begun the work we're about to do together.
This isn't something most people associate with therapy anymore. Bringing a dream to a session can feel old-fashioned, or overly symbolic, or like something that belongs to a different era. But the way I work with dream material has little to do with interpretation. I'm not trying to decode it or assign meaning to each figure or image. I'm interested in the emotional charge — what the dream felt like, where it lives in the body, what it's still carrying when you wake up. In that sense, I approach a dream the same way EMDR approaches any experience: by following the emotional thread rather than the narrative logic.
After a processing session
The other moment when dreams matter most is after a session, not before.
EMDR processing doesn't end when you walk out of the room. Something that's been held in the nervous system for years — sometimes decades — has just begun to move. That movement continues. In the following days, things may surface that feel loosely connected to what you worked on: a stray thought, an unexpected emotion, a memory you haven't visited in years. This is normal, and generally a sign that processing is still underway.
Dreams are part of that. At the end of each session I'll usually say something like: in the coming week, pay attention to what surfaces — during the day, and at night. If you have a dream that's particularly powerful, disturbing, or memorable, capture it somehow before it fades and bring it in. It often points directly toward what wants attention next.
Sometimes those dreams are difficult — parts of you continuing to work through something unresolved. Sometimes they're surprising in their clarity or even their beauty — a felt sense of something shifting, or an image that carries a quality of resolution or arrival. Both are worth bringing in. Both are telling us something.
What we do with them
When a client brings in a dream, I'm not reaching for a symbol dictionary. What I want to know is: what moment in the dream carries the most charge? Where did you feel it? What's still alive in your body right now as you describe it?
From there, the dream becomes material — not unlike any other memory or felt experience. In some cases, particularly with recurring nightmares or dreams rooted in traumatic experience, EMDR processing can be applied directly to the dream itself. In others, a dream that carries an unusual sense of peace, safety, or strength can become an internal resource — something to return to during more difficult processing work.
Meaning isn't absent from this process. It has its own place alongside the somatic and emotional layers. But the meaning I'm interested in is the kind that arises from within you, not something I bring in from the outside. If, as we work with a dream, something clicks into place — a recognition that feels unmistakably true — that matters deeply and we stay with it. What I try not to do is introduce that meaning myself, or hand you a framework for what your dream figures represent. Dreams are intimate. The meaning that counts is the meaning you recognize, not the meaning you're given.
Why this matters
Most people who come to EMDR have already tried other approaches. Talk therapy. Journaling. Years of trying to understand something that still won't move. EMDR works differently — it engages the body and nervous system in a way that insight alone can't reach. But the work doesn't happen only in session, and it doesn't happen only while you're awake.
Your psyche is working on your behalf, around the clock, in ways that don't always announce themselves clearly. Dreams are one channel through which that work surfaces. When you know to pay attention to them — and when you have somewhere to bring them — they stop being random noise and become something more like correspondence. The deeper part of you, reporting back.