A Proposed Methodology for Online Asynchronous Therapeutic Dreamwork

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the acceptance of online “telemental" health as an alternative to site-based service delivery. Concurrently, therapists have adopted various asynchronous virtual mental health resources, such as bulletin boards/forums, delayed chat, and email, to supplement traditional practice. Asynchronous dream sharing, pioneered in the early 1980s, has since supported online conferences and ongoing dreamwork communities. However, the potential of asynchronous therapeutic dreamwork (ATD) still needs to be explored. This article reviews the evolution of asynchronous online dream sharing and proposes that combining it with “co-creative” dreamwork—particularly the FiveStar Method—may generate distinctive contributions while providing greater safeguards than content-focused interpretive methods, due to its phenomenologically descriptive, relational apparoach and process-oriented five-step analysis. We provide an example of an asynchronous dreamwork exchange using the FiveStar Method.