That said, having listened to Sandra Oh describe the work as being close to “religion”; a practice which involves a “constant peeling of the onion” that is “very demanding” in a video for Time magazine, I was also a little trepidatious. How intense was this going to be?

As part of the prep for the session, Cara asked me to write a dream log of the ones I wanted to work with, written in present tense as though I was still inside them. I decided to go with a recent dream I’d remembered and an old recurring one that had always baffled me.

When we connect over Zoom one evening, Cara is a warm, calming presence. A former dancer and somatic movement instructor, she got into this work several years ago after meeting a psychoanalyst at a body work training session who was trying to spread the word. “I was dreaming a lot during this time, so I was interested. After having a session with her things started to click for me and I found myself reaching out to her asking to train in it.”

She’s keen to hear about my past relationship to dreams, too; have I wondered about them before? I tell her I’ve ended up down Google rabbit holes looking for a dream’s “meaning” after one has stuck with me but mostly felt disheartened when the explanations don’t connect with me. I learn this is because dream work is really more about deciphering the emotions and imagery a dream brings up, rather than looking for a literal translation. Cara thinks of the source behind a dream as a “dream director” (you might think of it as the unconscious).

As woo-woo as it sounds, attempts to understand dreams in this way are as old as the human race itself. Ancient Egyptians thought dreams were messages from the gods; the Greeks believed they were prophecies. Much of the theory behind dream work rests on Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work on the subject, set out in the late 19th century, and Freud was similarly interested in them.

“This is what happened when I tried dream work, Hollywood’s latest obsession”