Working on dreams to facilitate Asian international university students’ transition to the United States.

We investigated the perceptions of the effectiveness of a single 60- to 90-min session of Hill’s (2004) model of dream work for 37 Asian international students who had recently come to the United States. Participants reported having made gains in terms of exploration, insight, and action from the dream sessions and having made changes in their lives, although they did not change significantly in terms of psychological distress and acculturative stress from presession to the 2-week follow-up. A total of 2 weeks after their dream session, a subset of 14 participants participated in follow-up interviews about their perceptions of the outcomes of the dream sessions and the helpful and unhelpful components. Qualitative analyses of interviews revealed that outcomes typically included gaining awareness or insight, improving emotions and attitudes, and implementing new actions; participants typically found the action stage and variantly found the insight and exploration stages to be helpful; having to explore unimportant images and having to provide too much detail about images were variantly reported as unhelpful. Implications for practice and research are presented. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Dreaming - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research