The Soundtrack to Your Dreams with Michael Mollura, PhD

Today’s guest composes music to his patient’s dreams, capturing feelings and moods and deepening the psychotherapeutic process. In this replay from two years ago, we meet Dr. Michael Mollura who is a PhD licensed clinical psychologist and also an award-winning music composer for TV and movies. Michael started by scoring music to his own dreams and later found out how valuable the practice was in deepening the healing for his psychotherapy clients.

We play a clip of one such piece called Scary Path Dream. Michael describes the process of scoring the piece including using cello to represent the waving branches of the trees. He also describes the effect that listening to this creation had on his client in deepening her process and even bringing up waking life memories that she had forgotten.

We take a call from Steven Ernenwein who describes his own experience scoring music for the dreams of guests on his podcast The Dreams that Shape Us.

BIO: Dr. Michael Mollura is a licensed clinical psychologist with a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He composes music to the dream reports of his psychotherapy clients as a way of accessing unconscious material to provide healing pathways on neurological and collective levels. H e has found this to be an innovative way to promote healing and well-being for his clients. The therapy draws a bridge between Dr. Mollura’s work as a professional award-winning music composer and as a clinician.

Find our guest at: DrMichaelMollura.com

This show, episode number 332, was originally recorded during a live broadcast July  29, 2023 at KSQD.org, community radio of Santa Cruz.

Intro and outro music by Mood Science. Ambient music new every week by Rick Kleffel. Archived music can be found at Pandemiad.com. Many thanks to Rick for also engineering the show and to Erik Nelson for answering the phones.

SHARE A DREAM FOR THE SHOW or a question or enquire about being a guest on the podcast by emailing Katherine Bell at katherine@ksqd.org. Follow on FB, IG, LI, & YT @ExperientialDreamwork #thedreamjournal. To learn more or to inquire about exploring your own dreams go to ExperientialDreamwork.com.

The Dream Journal aims to: Increase awareness of and appreciation for nightly dreams. Inspire dream sharing and other kinds of dream exploration as a way of adding depth and meaningfulness to lives and relationships. Improve society by the increased empathy, emotional balance, and sense of wonder which dream exploration invites.

A dream can be meaningful even if you don’t know what it means.

The Dream Journal is produced at and airs on KSQD Santa Cruz, 90.7 FM. Catch it streaming LIVE at KSQD.org 10-11am Pacific Time on Saturdays. Call or text with your dreams or questions at 831-900-5773 or email at onair@ksqd.org. Podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms the Monday following the live show. The complete KSQD Dream Journal podcast page can be found at ksqd.org/the-dream-journal/.

Closed captioning is available on the YouTube version of this podcast and an automatically generated transcript is available at Apple Podcasts.

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