100 books like The Dreammaker's Apprentice

This book introduces the reader to Marc Bregman - a postman turned dream interpreter whose approach breaks through intellectual interpretations of dreams to the emotional experience of your predicament in life. Dreams show you the path out of your predicament – usually through connecting with what used to be called “your inner child” but here is redefined as being childlike in your sense of adventure and mystery in life. 

The method shown in this book goes far beyond dream interpretation to using a dream to heal your life, your relationships, your career confusions, and more. The images in the dream are medicine and can be recalled to offer healing in your waking life. Full disclosure – Marc Bregman was my dream therapist for several years, I found him through this book.

This book establishes that throughout history and cultures, dreams have been seen as essential tools in healing mental, physical, and social problems. While many dreams may be “housekeeping” or processing the day’s events, the author persuades that dreams come for a purpose. The author provides in-depth case studies of dreams that transform the lives of dreamers. Dreams offer direction toward finding your own path against collective expectations. One of the case studies in the book shows how dreams guide a 20-year-old college student to make decisions his parents didn’t approve of. Another is a case study of a woman whose dreams guide her to go back to get a college degree late in life.

I picked Dream Work because it is “one-stop shopping” meaning it is a comprehensive and thorough review of many different approaches to dream interpretation. I particularly like the quick tips he offers if you don’t want to delve into theory. For example, he recommends you create a title for a dream which is effective in increasing your insight quickly. He also has guidance for working with fragments of dreams and offers a powerful case study of how one small dream fragment of remembering “pastel” colors opened up a new career direction for a dreamer. While many dreamers find dream fragments to be frustrating he shows how these can be condensed and edited “telegrams.” Other quick tips he offers are asking questions about a dream such as “What might happen if I did this in the real world?”

I included this book because the most important part of dream interpretation is recording your dreams. This journal has space for your to write a title for the dream as recommended in the previous book Dream Work. In addition to writing out the dream, there are boxes to check off the category of dream – from a nightmare to mundane - and a checklist to note the prevailing emotion. There is space to draw images from the dream and a section to reflect and try an interpretation. You can use any of these features and the journal, by offering space and checkboxes, deepens engagement with the dream, and may offer directions you wouldn’t have thought of by yourself.

Once again, Ann Faraday offers practical and easy-to-use dream interpretation advice with a total absence of 'woo-woo.' It consistently reminds dreamers of the importance of personalising their dream interpretation rather than seeking out generic meanings in book form or online. 

Above all, this book truly demystifies dream work and empowers dreamers to believe that they don't need to consult a dream therapist, psychiatrist, or analyst to understand their dreams. They can use simple tools and techniques to understand the meaning of their night vision, their inner therapist, for themselves. 

Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by “inner vision”: what do people think, feel, and experience in extreme states that they struggle to describe to others?

This book is based on such an approach to the question: a palliative care doctor and team gather the stories of people experiencing visions while undergoing the massive transformation of dying. By re-thinking these deathbed visions not as feverish delusions but as insights into human experience, I was deeply moved on multiple levels. You can sense the dying person’s powerful drive to connect with the past and sometimes with the present, which makes the “hallucinations” quite real emotionally. You can also sense how important sharing the stories is to the loved ones in their grieving process. 

This book, written by an actual dream researcher, presents a smart and easy-to-read introduction to the psychology of dreams. Covering topics like the history of dreaming, how dreams are scientifically studied, how to work with dreams for personal insight, the possible functions of dreams, lucid dreaming, nightmares, and what the future of dream research may hold, Malinowski does a commendable job of introducing the reader to a wealth of information about dreams. Complete with personal examples, eye-opening insights, and a thoughtful discussion of ethical questions surrounding emerging dream-related technologies, this delightful book is sure to please those looking for an engaging introduction to dreams.

Of all the dream books I have read, this one is perhaps most in line with my own thinking about how to understand and work with your dreams for personal and spiritual growth. It was also one of the first books to really push dream decoding towards the mainstream, which has also been my passion.

Ann Faraday is a British psychologist who conducted an experimental study of dreams for her Ph.D. thesis. Each chapter is easy to read and process and explores the psychology of dreams and why they matter for self-awareness.

It also offers a realistic and easy-to-apply method for dream interpretation that has helped hundreds of thousands of dreamers all over the world fall in love with the personal growth potential of their own dreams.

I consider this book to be THE book for delving deep into the realm of symbolism and unveiling the hidden meaning behind visions, dreams, memories, myths, and art.

In this classic, Jung explores the more profound—not just pragmatic—aspects of the human psyche. Through Jung’s thought-provoking concepts, I gained significant insights into the unconscious mind. 

Have you ever wondered what happens to our mind as we fall asleep? Or whether we can experience things in dreams that we never experienced in waking life? Jean Marie Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys tackled these and other questions like them in his remarkable 1867 book, Dreams and How to Guide Them. Saint-Denys used his finely-honed skills as a lucid dreamer (knowing that you are dreaming while still in the dream) to investigate dreams from within, exploring their images, memory sources, and inner logic as they unfolded before (or, rather, behind) his eyes. More amazing still, some 150 years later, many of his Saint-Denys’s ideas can still be found in modern clinical and scientific theories of dreams.