Dream Minding: The Secret Language of Sleep

A renowned psychotherapist’s fascinating guide to using your dreams as an inner resource to find a more fulfilling life

In her practice, psychotherapist Annie Armstrong Miyao sees patients who are feeling lost. Some face anxiety, drastic life shifts, looming decisions, or trauma, others simply want to better understand themselves. They look to her for solutions. Through working with her patients, Miyao saw that the answers lie within each of us, and through dreams, we can access the wisdom that we seek. She uses dreams as one of the most powerful therapeutic tools to find true purpose and fulfillment. Dreams synthesize information we’ve taken in during the day, and they can be used as a portal of insight to identify and tend to issues that often elude us. We can use our dreams, and our reactions to them, as our guiding path.

Miyao parses and processes dreams with her patients to help them through their waking lives. She calls this practice—using dreams as a vessel to live more peacefully and wholeheartedly—dream minding. From Lou, a career-driven wife and mother whose dream of a trapped canary taught her to quell her controlling tendencies, to Ida, a twenty-something art gallery assistant whose dream of a framework of a house taught her to navigate life transitions, and more, Miyao chronicles real-life patient stories to show us the transformative effect of using dreams to heal.

Dream Minding teaches us how to use our dreams—our own internal signals—as a compass to understand our complex emotions and navigate life with a sense of direction, purpose, and well-being. Dreams call to you every night. In Dream Minding, you can learn to listen to their call.