Why Are Dreams Useful To Coaching?

Dream material contains a lot of elements - elements from present or past waking life, like current concerns; text, spoken word, and images; characters, places, and events; memories, emotions, and physical sensations.

Regardless of where these elements come from, be it an undigested bit of beef or the Divine,
they are strung together in unpredictable and potentially evocative ways.

For example*:
A client comes to the coaching session feeling down and unmotivated. He has brought a recent dream to the session and is invited by the coach to share.

Client: "I'm in a place with a swimming pool, the room is vast and echoey, and a bit scary. The scene shifts to an outdoor shallow pool. Three gifts wrapped in blue paper and blue ribbon fall from I don't know where but fall into the pool and float."

The coach could begin with asking the client what feels most meaningful to him. In this case, though, the client seems to invite feedback

The coach could go many places with this dream in light of the client's presented issue of feeling down and unmotivated (for instance maybe the goal needs to be scaled back from a "vast" level to a more manageable "shallow" level, and/or changed from indoors (enclosing) to outdoors (more open)).

Here, the coach senses significance and opportunity in the gifts, and asks: "What do you think about those wrapped gifts?"

Client: "They seem to be mine."

Coach: "Do you have any sense what's inside them?"

Client: "It wasn't clear to me in the dream."

Coach: "Would you be willing to go back into the dream and check out what those gifts that are yours might be?"

That last question is a powerful one, that uses the client's own words and own dream content. The awkward construction is purposeful, to emphasize the fact that the gifts belong to the client.

A next step could be investigating the "why this dream, now?" question, connecting the client's uncovered gifts to the presenting issue of feeling down and unmotivated.

Notice the coach does not do any sort of interpretive work at this time - e.g., "water in dreams means x, y, z;" the coach maintains a presence of authentic curiosity and respect for the client's dream material as uniquely and wholly theirs to work out.

(*names, details changed to preserve confidentiality)