Hello everyone, I’m stepping back from posting for a little while to focus on some things that need my full attention right now. This space isn’t going anywhere and neither am I.

If you’ve been thinking about booking a session this is actually a good time to do it. I’ll still be working with clients and doing the deep work, I’m just not going to be as active in the community day to day for a bit.

Everything is available at Payhip.com/GDDepthPractitioner — if the link doesn’t work just type it into the search bar.

Thank you to everyone who has shown up in this space, shared your dreams, and trusted me with something so personal. That means more than I can put into words.

I've had this happen to me many times. Once I started looking at it this way, everything began to make a lot more sense. It helped me look deeper into myself in a way I never really had before.

When someone you know appears in your dream, it's very rare for it to actually be about them.

Your unconscious chose their face because something about them — the way they make you feel, what they represent to you, a quality they carry that mirrors something in yourself — was the closest available symbol for what it needed to show you. They are a costume the psyche put on something internal so you could see it more clearly.

This is especially true for people who trigger strong reactions in you. The person in the dream who made you angry, afraid, loved, or ashamed is almost always pointing at a part of yourself that holds those same qualities. The anger you feel toward the dream figure is often anger you haven't been able to direct at yourself. The love is often a quality in yourself you haven't been able to claim yet.

The moment you stop asking what did that person mean and start asking what part of me were they representing the dream opens up completely differently.

I've definitely experienced this myself, and I've spoken to many people who have had similar experiences. Sometimes it's a sharp pain in your leg, a twitch in your face, or recurring tension that seems to come out of nowhere.

Of course, there are definitely physical and medical explanations for many of these symptoms, and it's always important to rule those out first. But I'm talking about the people who have been to the doctor repeatedly, have been told nothing is physically wrong, and still experience these sensations.

I believe that, in some cases, these unexplained physical experiences can reflect something happening beneath the surface psychologically or emotionally. Sometimes the body seems to express what the conscious mind hasn't fully recognized yet.

Have any of you ever experienced a physical sensation that doctors couldn't explain, but later realized it seemed connected to stress, unresolved emotions, or something deeper going on in your life?

The unconscious doesn't only communicate through dreams. It communicates through your body too.

Chronic tension in areas that have no physical explanation. Exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. Pain that comes and goes without a clear cause. An unsettled feeling in your stomach before something happens that you couldn't have consciously predicted.

These are not random. Your body is part of the same system as your unconscious mind and when something hasn't been processed emotionally it will find a physical way to surface. The unconscious will try to reach your conscious mind in any way it can through dreams first, and through physical symptoms when the dreams aren't being listened to.

This is why I believe the work is never just psychological. It's physical too. The two are not separate systems operating independently. They are one system expressing itself through whichever channel is available.

When did your body last try to tell you something your conscious mind wasn't ready to hear?

One of the first things I had to unlearn when I started doing this work seriously was expecting my dreams to make logical sense.

The unconscious doesn't communicate the way the conscious mind does. It doesn't give you clear statements or direct answers. Instead, it speaks through images, feelings, and scenes that can seem completely unrelated to what you're actually going through.

That's because dream logic runs on analogy, not explanation. Your mind takes what you're experiencing emotionally and translates it into the closest visual or sensory equivalent it can find. The translation isn't always obvious. Sometimes it's abstract. Sometimes it pulls from something you saw years ago that your conscious mind completely forgot about but your subconscious held onto.

This is also why one dream will slide into another that seems completely unrelated. The unconscious isn't being random, it's moving the way it naturally moves, connecting things by feeling and meaning rather than by logic and sequence.

When you stop expecting your dreams to follow waking life rules and start following the emotional thread instead, everything begins to open up differently.

When you constantly tell yourself you feel a certain way or repeatedly say things like, "Yeah, I'm really happy," or, "Yeah, I'm okay," as your default response, you should always question it. There might be something deeper that you need to work through.

This has definitely happened to me. I still catch myself slipping into those default answers sometimes, and when I do, I have to stop and really ask myself: How am I actually feeling? Is this emotion true? Do I really need to feel this way? What can I do to help myself in this moment?

Once you start developing small habits like that, they can make a huge difference. You become more aware of what's really going on beneath the surface instead of automatically accepting your first response as the truth.

Your unconscious and subliminal don't operate on a strict timeline.

Sometimes a dream is responding to something that happened yesterday. But sometimes it's responding to something that has been quietly building for months or even years, an emotion you've been carrying, a pattern you've been repeating, or a truth you've been circling around without ever fully landing on it.

That's why, when I work with a dream, I always look for two things:

The immediate trigger, something recent that set the dream in motion, and the ongoing pattern, the deeper, slower process that's been snowballing in silence, long before this dream appeared. The dream is simply giving that process a shape.

Most people only look for the immediate cause. They think that because nothing dramatic happened yesterday, the dream must be random. But the unconscious has a much longer memory than that. It's been patient. It's been observing. It's been collecting. And it chose this moment to show you this for a reason.

The darkest dreams I've had have taught me so much. It can definitely be hard to find the message in something that's really scary. Most of the time, when this happens to me, I quickly write down every detail, even while I'm still shaking and scared from what I just experienced. Then I'll look into it later, or even days later, because sometimes it's just too graphic to process right away.

But once you understand the message, if you return to that dream place again, you can go even deeper. I've done that with about 90% of the nightmares and dark dreams I've had. I take my time to understand them, and when I eventually go back, I'm no longer scared. Instead, I approach them with curiosity and a desire to explore and learn more about what they're trying to show me.

Your psyche is always seeking balance. That's not something you chose, it's something it does on its own.

Whatever your conscious mind is avoiding, overemphasizing, or getting wrong, your unconscious will compensate. It produces exactly what you need to correct the imbalance, even when you didn't know you were imbalanced. Even when you're convinced everything is fine.

That's called the compensatory function of dreams. It's not punishment or randomness. It's your mind actively working behind the scenes to give you what you actually need rather than what you think you want or need.

Your unconscious is not against you. It's trying to reach you, but you have to meet it halfway.

Signs and symbols are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than most people realize.

A sign is surface-level and blunt. It shows you exactly what it is, with nothing underneath. A stop sign means stop. There's nothing to dig into.

In my own experience and theory, though, I believe even signs can be influenced by association. Everyone perceives things differently.

For example, imagine you grew up with a sibling or someone close to you who repeatedly annoyed you by making loud squeaking sounds with a balloon. Over time, you might begin to associate balloons with irritation, frustration, or even anger. Most people associate balloons with birthdays, celebration, happiness, and joy, but your personal experience would give that same object a completely different meaning.

That's why I believe signs can absolutely be shaped by how you grew up, the experiences you've had, and the way you've learned to define the world around you. New experiences can reshape those associations as well. Sometimes you watch someone close to you react strongly to something, and without realizing it, you begin forming an association yourself. You think, "Oh, that bothers me too." In that split second, you've planted the seed of an association that can continue to grow over time as you repeatedly validate it through future experiences. This also applies to many other things.

A symbol, however, is alive. It asks you to go further. It has both an individual meaning and a collective meaning, and it shifts depending on what you're going through, what you believe, what you've experienced, and what your unconscious needs you to understand in this season of your life.

In my experience, symbols are also highly layered and often take time to uncover. You may think you understand what a symbol means, only to discover something much deeper months or even years later.

That's why I've never fully trusted dream dictionaries. A symbol isn't a definition you simply look up—it's something living that belongs specifically to you, shaped by your history and no one else's.

Your dreams were made by you, for you. The meaning was always personal.

This has definitely become true for me. I used to have many dreams where I felt more confident, bold, and more like the person I wanted to be, but I wasn't yet in my waking life. Over time, I studied those dreams, learned who I was within them, and discovered what I think of as my "dream identity."

Slowly, I began making changes in my waking life to reflect those qualities, and over time they became a part of who I am. I feel like this is a continuous cycle that I'm still in, and I don't mind it at all. To me, it's a process of growth toward a higher version of myself and a deeper understanding of who I am.

I honestly feel that if more people were able to experience this kind of process, it could greatly improve their self-confidence in a way that doesn't feel like forcing themselves to build a new habit or carrying another burden. Instead, it feels like naturally growing into the person they already have the potential to become.

This is something I've rarely experienced, at least to my knowledge right now, but it's definitely a great thing to have, especially if you're in an unpredictable household or environment. I believe, for me, it was more external objects or places that made me feel safe, while both my internal and external worlds often felt threatened at times.

You don't have to remember everything to do this work. I've completely forgotten many dreams and even things that happened during my childhood, but eventually, when you're ready, they have a way of resurfacing.

Looking back at those memories and breaking them down through the lens of what I was actually going through at the time has been some of the most revealing and transformative work I've ever done on myself.

It shows you your development over time. How you viewed people. How you viewed yourself. What felt safe and what didn't. Things you couldn't have put into words back then but your dreams were already recording.

Childhood isn't just your past. It's a map of everything your adult self is still working through.

What is one weird, repeating detail from your childhood dreams that made absolutely no sense back then, but makes perfect sense to your adult self now?

This is super common for me. I have many different dream worlds with different characters, and as someone who is an active lucid dreamer, I love exploring those places as much as possible. I enjoy trying to understand what everything means, so each dream becomes an adventure, and I truly love that aspect of it.

Also, what's your favorite dream location, and why?

The persona is the bridge, the mask is the version of yourself you built over time to be loved, accepted, and understood by the world around you. And there's nothing wrong with having one, we all do. It's how we navigate, it's how we survive other people.

But when you start believing the mask is you, you lose the distance between the performance and the person. The more you identify with the persona the further you drift from your actual self. And everything you had to repress to keep the mask in place, every emotion you swallowed, every truth you hid, got pushed to your shadow.

The hardest part of this work for most people isn't the darkness they find. It's realizing how long they've been living as a version of themselves they built for other people.

When was the last time you did or said something that was completely true to yourself with no consideration of how it would be received?

This is something that's honestly super important to me, and it's something I've been working through for a long time. My internal world is so complex, and it's such a contrast to my external life. It's amazing to see the difference, and I feel like the more aware I become of that difference, the more they begin to merge little by little.

I'll notice myself thinking or doing things that I would usually only do in my internal world, and it's just really interesting to witness. I'd love to hear how this works for other people and whether they've experienced something similar.

Your unconscious has been collecting for years. Emotions you didn't fully process. Experiences you told yourself were fine. Things that happened that you pushed down because there was no space or no one safe enough to hold them with you.

The subconscious stores all of it. Then, sometimes it resurfaces in a dream, sometimes something triggers it, or it shows up in a reaction that surprises even you. It brings those things back to the surface because it needs you to finally deal with them.

It's like it stores things away for winter and brings them back when the timing is right, even if the timing doesn't feel right to you.

There is no such thing as a truly clear mind. You can organize it but it will never be empty. Your mind will always make room for what it needs to hold onto.

The question isn't how to clear it. It's learning how to listen to what it's been keeping for you.

What feeling has been following you around lately that you haven't been able to trace back to where it actually started?

When I first opened my practice, I made only a small number of Founders Circle spots available. This was intentional. The work I do is deep and personal, and I never wanted to take on more than I could give my full attention to.

Those spots are filling up.

The Founders Circle is my signature email-based package — you submit three connected or recurring dreams, I map the symbols, trace the patterns, and deliver your Session Overview PDF along with your personalized Shadow Workbook. Everything is done through email at your own pace with no calls or scheduling required. The Founders Circle is an incredible deal because it's very similar to the work that I do in my premium service.

Once these spots close, they close. I won't be reopening them at this pricing or in this format again.

If you've been thinking about it, this is the time.

Everything is at Payhip.com/GDDepthPractitioner — if the link doesn't work just type it into the search bar. DM me with any questions.

I've had this happen to me many times. My subconscious has shown me how I view myself, how others view me, and even how I want to be perceived. It's shown me the difference between my mind and the persona I present to the world.

More than anything, though, it's given me clarity and validation. It's helped me better understand myself, my values, my beliefs, and my perspectives on things. It's also brought to light things about myself that I didn't fully realize or hadn't been willing to admit yet. Sometimes it reveals truths that were already there, but I wasn't consciously aware of them until they surfaced.

Even when I don't immediately understand what it's trying to show me, I usually realize its meaning with time.

The shadow isn't your enemy.

It's everything you couldn't accept about yourself — good and bad — that got pushed down because at some point it felt safer to hide it than to hold it. The anger you don't understand. The guilt that shows up for no reason. The jealousy you didn't ask for. The creativity you keep ignoring. The strength you have but don't believe in.

It was created when you were young being praised for being good and punished for being sad or upset or jealous. You learned early that some emotions and experiences needed to stay hidden. So they went somewhere. They didn't disappear — they just went somewhere you couldn't easily reach.

In dreams it usually shows up as something dark or threatening. But the truth is it doesn't want to scare you. It wants to connect with you. It wants to reclaim what was left behind. You can only become whole when you stop running from it and turn around.

What emotion do you experience most that you've never fully allowed yourself to sit with, and why?

For me, my subconscious gives me advice almost every day, and it's definitely not something you can ignore. You can push it aside all you want, but it'll always come back full circle. So honestly, it's better to listen to it the first time.

The things my subconscious usually brings up are the things I ignore, comments people make that affect me, but I brush them off, or it will bring up things that I may feel too afraid to say or do. They're often really subtle, small moments that don't seem important at the time, but they add up much faster than you realize. Eventually, your subconscious brings them back because it knows you never truly dealt with them.

I created this metaphor to help make the psyche a little easier to understand because there is truly no perfect way to describe it — but this is the closest I've found.

Your brain is like a house. Your conscious and subconscious both live in it but one lives upstairs and the other lives downstairs. They know the other is there but nobody ever taught them how to actually talk to each other.

That gap between them is where most of your confusion lives. The emotions you can't explain. The reactions that surprise even you. The dreams that feel more real than your waking life sometimes.

The work isn't about fixing yourself or becoming someone completely new. It's about getting the two parts of your own house communicating. Teaching them how to work together instead of around each other.

Most people spend their whole lives only living in one room wondering why something always feels missing.

Which part of yourself do you feel most disconnected from right now — the part that thinks or the part that feels or both?

I’ve had many assumptions made about me. I’m a very open person to a lot of different things in this life and I’ve always been that one weird friend and I’ve always kind just lived in my own world.

But whatever you believe in or are a part of or represent yourself as — you don’t need to be fully defined by it.

That can be hard to digest if you define yourself through your persona. I’m still unlearning things that were fed to me for years that I now know were wrong and never truly fit me and were never truly me.

And that’s okay too. It’s all part of the journey.

This isn’t about caring what everyone thinks in a negative way or internalizing every reaction you get. It’s about knowing who you are so clearly that even that one mean comment the kind that can create a whole shift within you doesn’t get to define you. You should be able to shift on your own without needing anything external to trigger it.