How Understanding Your Dreams Can Support Healing in Military Relationships with Ara Trembly

Episode Summary of “How Understanding Your Dreams Can Support Healing in Military Relationships with Ara Trembly”

Have you ever woken up from a vivid dream and wondered, “What was that all about?” We often dismiss our dreams as “just dreams,” but what if they were actually a window into the parts of ourselves we aren’t yet seeing? In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky sits down with psychotherapist Ara Trembley to explore how paying attention to your dreams can reveal deep emotional patterns, solve life problems, and even support healing in military relationships.

Guest Speaker Bio – Ara Trembly

Ara C. Trembly, M.S., M.A., ACHt is a licensed counselor and psychotherapist with nearly two decades of clinical experience. His work integrates psychodynamic therapy and Christian counseling, grounded in the belief that the God of our conscious life is also the God of our unconscious life. Ara’s areas of focus include dreams and dream interpretation, marital and relational concerns, and the impact of interpersonal stress on both mental and physical health.

In addition to his psychotherapy practice, Ara is a Board-Certified Hypnotherapist and has worked with more than 1,000 individuals using hypnosis as a legitimate and effective mental health modality—not entertainment. He holds graduate training in psychology from New York University and Rutgers University, a Master’s degree in Counseling from Cairn University, and a Master’s degree in Communication from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Ara is the author of The Right Hand of God (2023) and Dreaming God’s Way, and he is a seasoned speaker, writer, consultant, and former adjunct faculty member at Cairn University’s Institute of Higher Learning.

Connect with Ara Trembly: Website | Email | LinkedIn | Book

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Episode Transcript for “How Understanding Your Dreams Can Support Healing in Military Relationships with Ara Trembly”

This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual couples and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast for military relationships with your host, Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go rate review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes.

We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast, and if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

You’re listening to episode 78, How Understanding Your Dreams Can Support Healing in Military Relationships with Ara Trembly.

Meet Ara Trembley

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Ara. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m excited about our topic today, talking about dreams. but I was hoping you could introduce yourself a little bit and the work that you do with dreams.

Ara Trembly: Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here. My name is Ara Trembley. I am a psychotherapist and counselor in practice in Georgia. I do deal with a lot of military families and, a lot of military individuals. And one of the things I do in my practice is I pay a lot of attention to dreams.

And that’s not something that most psychotherapists do these days, but I have found it to be a rich dreams, to be a rich source of what’s going on in the mind, the real window into the unconscious mind, which is where a lot of things go on, that we are interested in and that affect our daily lives.

Dreams are a royal road to the unconscious mind. And I’m always concerned with dreams. I always have been a researcher in dreams. Dreams are one of those things that have always fascinated, poets, philosophers, mystics, psychologists, everybody, and me as well.

Faith and Dreams

And the Bible itself is filled with a lot of vivid dreams that are personally and historically significant, and Jewish tradition holds the Talmud views dreaming as a means by which God communicates with the soul. It’s very important. It’s very much true that the God of our conscious mind is also the God of our unconscious mind.

So dreams are a part of what God has for us and for that reason, I’ve written a book on that called Dreaming God’s Way. And, as I say, it is a biblically informed guide through the fascinating world of our dreams and their meanings in our lives. What we do in the book is talk about dreams and talk about what they are and what they are not.

Talk about how important they are in the various types of dreams that we can certainly get into. And also provide a step-by-step guide to interpreting one’s own dreams, which can be truly fascinating there. There’s a lot there. In a nutshell, that’s who I am. That’s where I am right now and that’s my mission.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Thank you for that introduction and we will include the link to your book in the show notes for anyone who wants to go get that. 

Ara Trembly: Wonderful. Thank you. 

Why Dreams Matter

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, I was thinking, everybody is interested in dreams. Like every faith is interested in dreams. The different types of medical professions are interested in dreams and sleep and how that all goes together. Different types of non-religious spirituality is very tied up in dreams therapists. 

Ara Trembly: Mm. Sometimes. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. Yes. Yeah. It’s such a cool thing.

It was actually one of the pastors in our church, when I was in high school or maybe early college, who first told me about dream interpretation and then mm-hmm. as I was telling you before, in the last few days, I’ve been really learning about Carl Jung, who is also very interested in dreams. And it’s just such a fun topic. 

Ara Trembly: Yes, indeed. Mm-hmm. I agree. 

Ara’s Dream Journey

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: What was it that got you interested in focusing on dreams and the role that dreams play? 

Ara Trembly: One thing that got me most interested is, before I was even in graduate school and studying to be a psychologist, I used to have very vivid and entertaining dreams.

And like you, I started reading Carl Jung because I realized that there must be something to this. There must be some reason this is all happening. And I started reading Carl Jung, who’s views on dreaming and whose methodology is very similar actually to what happens in the Bible.

Which is surprising to some. So I started writing down my dreams and trying best I could to interpret what was going on. That got a lot easier once I got more trained in psychology. And once I started practicing. It was still fun.

Dreams Solve Problems

It was still interesting. It was still very enlightening for me. That’s really the reason I wrote this book because I wanna share that with everybody. You’re right. It is fun, but it’s also, answer some questions for us or help us solve problems.

One of the dreams I cite in the book is that the golfer, Jack Nicklaus, world famous golfer. He was in a tournament and he was having trouble with his golf swing and he couldn’t figure out what was going on. And later on after the tournament played, he went out to the driving range to see if he could figure out what was going on.

And he still couldn’t. But that night when he slept, he had a dream. He had a dream about his golf swing and the dream told him a way that he could correct it. And lo and behold, the next day he went and applied what the dream told him. And it worked beautifully. So dreams have their practical side too, as well as their educational and spiritual side.

Which Dreams to Notice

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. So, how people can use their dreams to help them. mm-hmm. And what kinds of emotional patterns tend to show up in dreams, like the things that dreams really can reveal for people.

Ara Trembly: Actually, that’s a good way to phrase the question. What kind of emotional patterns show up? Because one of the questions I get from people is, well, which dreams should I pay attention to? And which dreams are do I not pay attention to? And the answer is just what you said.

Any dream that has emotional content or that has an emotional effect on you. These are the dreams you should pay attention to because that’s a message from your unconscious mind, telling you, “Hey, this is important. You need to pay attention to this.”

Remember and Record Dreams

It starts with paying attention to your dreams, obviously, and one of the things that sometimes people tell me is,

“Oh, I don’t remember my dreams.”

But really, it’s very easy to remember your dreams.

All you have to do is is as you’re going to sleep or before you’re going to sleep, just tell yourself a few times that ” I’m gonna remember my dreams.” Just suggest that to yourself and you’ll be surprised, because your unconscious mind wants to cooperate. So it will help you to remember those dreams.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: I’ve been doing that the last maybe two weeks. It was sometimes hit or miss if I would remember the dream. I would be aware that I had a dream and I would kind of remember it, and then I didn’t fully remember it.

But then the last two nights, I have very concretely remembered the dreams doing that. 

Ara Trembly: Fascinating. Fascinating. Mm-hmm. Yeah, probably ’cause we had this interview coming up. I don’t know. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. 

Ara Trembly: That’s quite possible. And the key is if you like to write things down, keep a pad and pen by your bedside, or just keep your phone on record.

As soon as you wake up, because those will be the dreams that you remember best, the ones that you have right before you wake up. Just speak into your recording device on your phone and record the dream and you can come back to it later.

If you need to add things, you can always do that later, but that’s a good way to memorialize your dreams so that you can come back to them and you can learn from them.

Interpretation Basics

And then that’s really the key. There are several steps in dream interpretation. Obviously writing them down or recording them is one, but then asking yourself, how does this relate to what’s going on in my life today?

People will ask me, “well, how do I know my interpretation is the right one? And I always say, you will know because when you consider an interpretation, your mind will say, “Yes, that’s it. You’re right on target with that.” I’ve had many people tell me that they knew that that was the right interpretation.

So, you’re off and running, you know, you’re recording your dreams. You were noticing the ones that have an effect on you. You could be having the emotions during the dream or after the dream. If you awaken from a dream feeling sad, feeling angry, feeling happy, or even laughing.

That’s happened to me sometimes. Those are important dreams. And those are the ones we wanna pay attention to and really dive into. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. And do you have some examples of like what dreams might tell people? Like what sort of information would they give you? 

Ara Trembly: So interesting what they do is they tend to give you information about what’s already going on in your life, but maybe in a way that you hadn’t thought of. Give you an example of a dream that’s in my book, that’s one of my patients had. She’s in her mid thirties.

She was deserted by her father when she was a teenager. And she was dealing with some tough issues. She came to me with this dream. Here’s the dream. She says, I’m walking at twilight, down a long row of trees toward a cheerful, brightly lit house at the end of a country lane.

As I draw in the air, I hear children playing, and through a large picture window, I can see a loving couple doing ordinary things, conversing, setting the table, or embracing. I press my face to the window and watch their happiness with longing, but I am invisible to them and must leave before the night falls.

This was the story of her life. Compressed in a story. The strong emotions of longing and sadness, the house in the country, and the loving couple symbolize what she really wanted in life and what she had lost. Not only as a child obviously, but in her adult life because she was invisible. That is not part of that happiness.

She couldn’t interact with the happy family she saw, and she felt she had to leave. But all of that gave us a lot to talk about in terms of what was going on with her emotions, what was going on with her life. And was the springboard for a very successful therapy, that later on, she did find a happy, stable marriage and relationship. And, it worked out great for her. But there, you see how the dream was born for that. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. I was thinking about one of the very first dreams that somebody ever helped me make sense of. It was the person from my church back when I was in college. And it was so simple. It was a string that was broken on the guitar and when he helped me work through it, it was representing my relationship with my good friend who played music.

But our friendship was awkward, which at the moment, symbolized by like a broken string because that would be awkward to play the guitar with a broken string. And that just been fascinating to see those themes come up, I guess in my own life through the dreams. 

Ara Trembly: Absolutely. Yeah. Tell us a lot about ourselves and it’s a light window into our own, because usually we’re not in touch with that, going on in our unconscious mind. And that’s why it’s unconscious.

It wouldn’t be something that we’d be unaware of, but many times we are unaware of these things until the dream brings us. And then it gives us that we can use to grow and improve and solve problems. 

Symbols Are Personal

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes. And somebody who’s listening to this, they might be thinking about the steps in this, right?

So I gotta tell myself to remember my dreams before I go to bed, and then I gotta wake up and I gotta record my dreams somehow. And then I need to like figure out what it represents. And then I’ve gotta like somehow do something about that? Or like what do people do once they figure out what a dream is representing for them?

Ara Trembly: Dreams are, as you know, from study of Jung, dreams give us a lot of symbols. What is a symbol for me might not be a symbol for somebody else. And so that’s why It’s important, you look at the symbols, at the things that you see, ” what does that mean to me?” It’s not, “what does it mean to the world?” Does that’s really the important step.

One of worst thing to do is go out and get a dream book, and that tells you what every symbol in your dream means. Because, a symbol may mean something to person A, it’s not going to mean something to person B.

A universal symbol cross, which might mean to me as Jesus or it might symbolize the church. If I’m a trucker, it might mean a crossroads. Or if medical person, I might think of the Red Cross. It doesn’t mean the same thing.

That’s really the question to ask yourself, “what does this mean and how does it apply to the situation that’s going on in my life?”

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: great. So it’s sort of like trusting what the dream tells you, trusting that you’re gonna know what to do with it once you figure it out, because it’s gonna be very personal. Okay.

Ara Trembly: Yes, absolutely. 

Getting Started Tips

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Do you have any tips for people on how they can start? I mean, of course if they want to go in depth, they should go get your book, you know, on how to interpret their dreams. 

Ara Trembly: Start the way I did, which is, tell yourself, alright, I’m gonna remember my dreams and I’m going to write them down, or I’m gonna record them.

So take a look and what’s the stream trying to tell me and why am I having this now? And you know, how does it apply to my life. Just start there. Even if you don’t have my book, do something. But if you get the book, you know, and there are more detailed steps.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Wonderful. So I’m hearing the place to start is really to record your dreams and just start asking yourself, how does this relate to what’s going on in my life? And then if they wanna go further into dream analysis, they can get the book. 

Ara Trembly: Yes, indeed. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Great. So we’ll include a link to the book in the show notes. And if someone wanted to like work with you somehow and wanted like counseling that was also incorporating their dreams, we’ll include that in the show notes as well. And so, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Ara. Is there, any like last words of wisdom or anything that you wanna leave people with? 

Ara Trembly: When I was a child and I used to have dreams and I was fascinated with them, then my parents would just say, “oh, it’s just a dream.” And tell me to ignore it. But you know, if a dream has an emotional significance for you, an emotional effect, don’t ignore it. It’s your mind trying to tell you something. Don’t be afraid to delve to it and really think about what’s going on ’cause in the end there are many ways it can help you. 

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, Ara, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking to us about dreams. 

Ara Trembly: Thank you so much for having me 

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