For both students and practicing counselors, this book fills the gaps that exist between many current academic programs and practitioner’s needs for focused training on how to better assist clients with dream interpretations. Its main focus is on dreams concerning family members and other major figures in the dreamer's life with whom he or she interacts. Readers will first learn how to understand and use their own dreams, and then how to apply this in order to facilitate their clients’ interpretations of dreams. They will be amazed and fascinated by the issues, emotions, and problem-solving suggestions that are often revealed as they guide their clients' use of a personalized dream interpretation method developed by the author. Through the use of a detailed case example of a client and her dreams, the author shows how each step of this method can be applied and carried out in practice and is easily integrated with contemporary psychotherapies, especially cognitive behavior therapies.

A Dream-Guided Meditation Model and the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams presents a model for meditation that counselors can use with clients regardless of gender, race, national origin, religion, age, or marital status. Using the model, readers can, if they wish, learn to interpret nighttime dreams. Even readers who choose not to learn to interpret their dreams may find that the meditation model assists with dream guidance.

In A Guide to the World of Dreams, Ole Vedfelt presents an in-depth look at dreams in psychotherapy, counselling and self-help, and offers an overview of current clinical knowledge and scientific research, including contemporary neuroscience. This book describes essential aspects of Jungian, psychoanalytic, existential, experiential and cognitive approaches to dreams and dreaming, and explores dreams in sleep laboratories, neuroscience and contemporary theories of dream cognition. Vedfelt clearly and effectively describes ten core qualities of dreams, and delineates a resource-oriented step-by-step manual for dreamwork at varying levels of expertise. For each core quality, key learning outcomes are clarified and resource-oriented, creative and motivating exercises for practical dreamwork are spelled out, providing clear and manageable methods. A Guide to the World of Dreams also introduces a new cybernetic theory of dreams as intelligent, unconscious information processing, and integrates contemporary clinical research into this theory. The book even includes a wealth of engaging examples from the author’s lifelong practical experience with all levels and facets of dreamwork. Vedfelt’s seminal work is essential reading for psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, and even psychiatrists, and could well be a fundamental textbook for courses at high schools, colleges, universities and even in adult-education classes. The book’s transparent method and real-life examples will inspire individuals all over the world who seek self-help or self-development – any reader will be captivated to discover how knowledge of dreams stimulates creativity in everyday life and even in professional life.

With a warm and passionate writing style, author David Hutchinson demonstrates the process of becoming a counselor and developing key skills from start to finish. He provides real-world examples and relflection activities, helping students feel less intimidated. The book covers all the key counseling skills learned in a skills/methods course, including skills for engaging a client, tools for engagement, lab practice activities, listening skills, developing empathy, and more advanced skills such as assessment, goal setting, and action planning. The accompanying DVD exemplifies many of these skills through application and the Counseling skills manual provides expanded exercises to help student master these skills.

Working with dreams in therapy can help clients establish a focus and reach core issues quickly, and can play an important clinical role in both brief and long-term therapeutic relationships. This accessible volume integrates the latest research on sleep and dreaming with a cognitive-experiential psychotherapeutic perspective, providing a comprehensive guide to dream interpretation. In clear, jargon-free prose, elucidated by extensive case material, the author presents a three-stage model of dream interpretation based on the premises that dreams reflect waking life, that their meaning is best understood in a collaborative effort between client and therapist, and that both cognitions and emotions are important in this process. An Appendix contains a reproducible, self-guided manual on dream interpretation featuring step-by-step instructions and worksheets. This Appendix is an ideal resource for therapists to use with clients.

Comer and Gould's Psychology Around Us demonstrates the many-often surprising, always fascinating-intersections of psychology with students' day-to-day lives. Every chapter includes sections on human development, brain function, individual differences and abnormal psychology that occur in that area. These "cut-across" sections highlight how the different fields of psychology are connected to each other and how they connect to everyday life. Every chapter begins with a vignette that shows the power of psychology in understanding a whole range of human behavior. This theme is reinforced throughout the chapter in boxed readings and margin notes that celebrate the extraordinary processes that make the everyday possible and make psychology both meaningful and relevant. The text presents psychology as a unified field the understanding of which flows from connecting its multiple subfields and reinforces the fact that psychology is a science with all that this implies (research methodology, cutting edge studies, the application of critical thinking).

Existential Psychotherapy and the Interpretation of Dreams, by Clark Moustakas, presents a fresh model for the effective integration of dreamwork in humanistically oriented psychotherapy. The existential-phenomenological emphasis opens channels of conscious awareness that enable people in therapy and in everyday living to awaken to their own visions, hopes, and dreams. The internal shadows and fires of individual consciousness come to light in therapy and in dreams and invite self-resources and self-directions for change in self-growth and in significant relationships. An Existential Model is presented in detail as a guide to effective psychotherapy. With slight modification, the Model is also applicable to an understanding and interpretation of one's own dreams as well as the dreams of people who are in therapy. Through existential awareness and reflective thinking, the reader is encouraged to discover constructive challenges and paradoxes that connect dreams with waking life and lead to the discovery of creative possibilities for work and living. The existential approach to psychotherapy and dream interpretation is explicated through examples of phenomenological interviewing, use of description in lifting out horizons and core meanings, and analysis of core themes that intimately embrace the self. Existential philosophy recognizes mystery encompasses the unknown and unpredictable and asserts that regardless of past suffering and impoverishment, the potentials for health and well-being are within reach. The Existential Model offers a practical methodology and a set of guides for achieving these goals and finding a future that moves beyond the restraints and rejections that have resulted from choosing the wrong path for identity expression and selfhood. The person is the central catalyst for decision and action and retains control over her or his own destiny.