I generally dream a lot. If I wanted to, I could write down detailed dreams from every night. Also, I often take naps during the day (because I have to get up super early for my therapy sessions) because I work at home and I also dream a lot during these naps.

I've always dreamt a lot, also before starting therapy but I don't remember that I would have experienced any feelings in the dreams. But now I do, to the point that my dream world is quite distinct from the real world. Whereas in the real world I have struggled a lot (and still struggle) with understanding what's my place in the world and if and where I belong in relation to people then in my dreams all these issues are gone, everything is smooth clear in terms of the world and the other people in it. This is a feeling I have only felt in my dream and never in my waking life.

My therapy is psychoanalytic and my T would be more than happy if I could bring my dreams to therapy sessions. However, I believe we have a little mismatch with my T in terms of how we think/believe the therapy should proceed. What he tells me about how he thinks the psychoanalytic therapy works sounds somewhat useless to me. I proceed following my intuition. Although he is consciously saying something with his words (which I reject), he is unconsciously able to follow me. The result is that I can intuitively understand that there is process but I'm not quite sure how is it really working. But that's not a problem to me because I think many important things cannot be explained in words (like how poetry or art is created etc).

Anyway, contrary to what my T would want, I don't bring dreams to sessions. But, somehow my dreams illuminate to me the process that has somehow taken place. I just woke up from a dream where for the first time I saw that I truly grieved my mother. The dream showed me that I can grieve my mother and how I can do that. I stood in front of a church and there were sold candles and other small things to light/put for the deceased people. I stood there and thought for all the people there who had lost a loved one and I felt great pain for them, until I realised that this pain is mine and I've had a huge loss too. That I have lost my mother and that I had tried to get from her what I needed and I never succeeded. I cried until my head ached so much at which point I woke up and the feeling started to fade away because I have never felt that way towards my mother in real life.

The context with respect to my mother is that she is still alive but I have mostly cut her off from my life. We do not have a mother-daughter relationship and really have never had. I have never loved her and never missed her, don't recall wanting affection from her even as a small child. I just wanted to be left alone. I felt embarrassed that I had her as my mother and I did not want to be seen together with her. I have struggled a lot of how to grieve what I did not have, especially because it did not make sense to me to have this grieving related to this particular person. But now suddenly, this dream just showed me on a feeling level that this is possible and how to do it and it was a very powerful experience.

It's not the only such experience. I have had such powerful dreams before as well, illuminating to myself about my feelings that I have not been able to feel in waking life. I have no control over this process but I'm amazed that it can work this way. There is no obvious connection to therapy but on an intuitive level I know it's there.