Exploring the Unconscious with the Hudson Valley's Dreams Doctor

Feeling stuck, irritable or anxious? Dissatisfied with mainstream therapy? Hudson Valley psychologist Jonathan Hyland, the Dreams Doctor, would love to help you decipher how the underlying unconscious experiences in your life are impacting you and how to harness and work with them to make your world a better place.

The unconscious can be a wonderful ally and an excruciating enemy, a source of inspiration or a saboteur. Visionaries, from Freud and Jung to Joseph Campbell, began to delve into the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, but the work was largely derailed by the growth of pharmaceutical psychology and behavioral fixes like cognitive behavioral therapy.  But the help those things can offer is nothing compared to the rich healing that can take place when we put in the work it takes to decipher what’s going on under the surface, to make friends with our own minds and tap into archetypal insights.

“We all experience a constant stream of feelings and images that make no surface sense, and we typically try to push those aside so we can focus on what is right in front of us, which is often some aspect of what’s become a very ego-saturated culture,” says Hyland. “If we take time to look at and integrate that experience, it’s a rich source of information. Anxiety, irrational fears, heaviness—those all result from unlived experience, and digging behind the discomfort instead of pushing it down is hugely beneficial.” 

Hyland developed his method during a journey that began in theatre and led through his own anxieties and out the other side, picking up his Ph.D. in depth psychology along the way and applying the principles of Carl Jung’s “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections” to his own situation.

He found it refreshingly effective and has refined a deceptively simple technique: Bring him your dream, he’ll give you some homework, and the process initiated will help you unlock wellsprings of therapeutic insight and energy that can change the rest of your life.

Using the vocabulary of archetype and myth and the power of dreamwork and active imagination, Hyland has been able to help himself and a diverse and growing client base engage and unpack and thrive.
“If you’re struggling with an unconscious experience without a vocabulary or a framework, it can become anxiety or just a massive block,” he says. “Instead of trying to medicate or to problem-solve on a behavioral level, we can describe that behavior and let it speak, and the results can be dramatic.”

Intrigued? Want to know more about how it works or begin the process of figuring out what you’re really trying to tell yourself? Hyland offers free 30-minute consultations at his office in Hudson, on the phone or via FaceTime that will help you decide whether depth psychology is what you’re looking for.

For more information, reach out to Hyland at [email protected].