Ophelia Reyes

Ophelia has spent twenty years reading Jung and keeping a dream journal before turning it into writing. She reads dreams the way Jung suggested — as letters from the part of you that doesn't lie. Her entries focus on what the dreamer can do with a symbol the morning after: the question to ask, the thing to write down, the thread to follow. Twenty years of her own dream notebooks left her with a firm rule: an interpretation that flatters you is probably wrong, and one that frightens you is probably incomplete. The useful reading is usually the one that makes you quietly uncomfortable in a familiar way. Her entries are built for the morning after — each one ends with a small practice, because she believes a dream unexamined by Tuesday is a dream lost. She writes often about shadow work, about recurring figures who turn out to be retired versions of ourselves, and about why the house in your dream keeps growing rooms. She is warm about the material and unsentimental about the method. What drew her to the page was scale: a private notebook helps one dreamer, but a well-written entry meets thousands of people on the same strange morning, holding the same strange image, needing the same honest first question.

Writes about: Jungian psychology, dream interpretation, shadow work.