Dream Tray™A Tool for Contemplative Collage

Dream Tray is an online canvas — a tool for collage and contemplation. It's a place to play, and to lay out your experiences: a dream, a nightmare, a feeling, a thought you can't shake, or nothing in particular at all.

Through the language of images, symbols, and representation, Dream Tray lets flowing unconscious experience meet the solid state of whatever you started with. There's no right or wrong way to go about a tray. You might start with something you want to cherish, or something you want to see differently.

Use it like a journal. Create with it like a collage. Let Dream Tray hold space for you.

History of Dream Tray

In many ways, Dream Tray is a dream come true.

When the trials of life brought Chloé and Jules together in a professional setting, the future was set in motion. Jules LeBreton, certified traumatologist, had been working with clients on their dreams, nightmares, symbols, and projections for years — helping them make sense of what surfaced, and integrate it, in the aftermath of traumatic experience. Part of her method for dream work collages had come to her in a dream.

After meeting Chloé, Jules had another dream — a "girl with no words," who would walk alongside her life and her practice.

Chloé Jutras, certified clinical trauma professional, learned this dream work method experientially from Jules. For Chloé — once a girl with no words, stuck in a dorsal vagal state — Jules will always be her mentor and teacher.

Today, Jules and Chloé stand as friends and colleagues, walking each other home through the lens of the traditions and teachings that shape their work — A Course in Miracles, and various yoga and sutras.

Chloé's dream of growing a practice with Jules — honoring her legacy, and sharing her Dream Work method more widely — has come to life in the online Dream Tray. You can find them both at ohmwell.ca, where sessions are available.

This is only the beginning.

How It Works

You choose items — places, scenes, symbols, emojis, web or personal images, text, or drawing — and you place them on a tray. That's the mechanic, and it doesn't get more complicated than that if you don't want it to. Have fun, and contemplate your creation as you would an art piece in a museum.

Deciding What Goes on the Tray

"Dream is a code word for any manifestation of mind."

— Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light

What goes on the tray comes from you, and all ways are welcome. Here are some guiding principles to get started.

You can hold your experience — dream or waking — in your mind as you look through the Dream Tray items, search, or add your own. Scroll through until something catches your attention. Open the search and see what words come to you. Place it on the tray. Continue with this method until you feel a sense of "completion," or being done — like a finished work of art. You don't need to know why something caught your attention. Let your creative expression be free.

You can also go looking already knowing what belongs on the tray — in what order, and what happens next — placing items that symbolize your exact thoughts and internal images. For example: I saw a black cat in a park, and a red car today, and I want to "place my day" on the tray. I place a black cat, a park, and a red car. I work this way until my "day" feels complete. Or, working from a dream, you can quite literally "place what you remember" — finding symbols that represent the sequence of events you want to portray, and letting the story of the dream re-form itself on the tray.

Blending free association with direct representation is a way too. Without forcing, or holding back, what you place on the tray is yours. Allow yourself to place, edit, move, create, add, remove, change. Feel free — give yourself the freedom to change your mind. Dream Tray holds space for you, letting the visuals speak louder than words.

Looking at What Is There

Once a tray feels finished, this may be the end of your journey. The creative play of placing an experience on the tray may feel like a natural end. In other instances, it may feel like a beginning. Like something else is opening, or asking for attention and connection.

The invitation, in this case, is to let your tray speak to you through your senses, thoughts and inner imagery. When you look at your tray the way you would a piece of art in a museum, what do you notice? Where does the tray start? Where does the journey take you next? Does anything feel challenging? Or like a solution? What are you most curious about? Does it feel like the tray is missing something?

At this stage, these contemplations are mere suggestions — a way to develop the skill of natural curiosity, noticing, and listening. Nothing will "tell you what it means." That part is yours.

Contemplative AI feature coming soon

A contemplative AI feature is coming to Dream Tray — a way to reflect on what you've placed without ever handing you prefabricated interpretations or analysis. That part remains yours. More soon.

What It Won't Do

Dream Tray is not therapy, though bringing a tray to your therapist or analyst may be a great idea. It isn't a dream dictionary — place a snake, and nothing appears to tell you about betrayal — and it isn't fortune telling either; it has no idea what's coming, only what you've already brought to it. There's no right arrangement, no score, nobody grading your tray, and it isn't self-improvement, even though self-realisation is an inherent possibility. The Dream Tray does not promise to do anything for you, and it does not promise that it won't, either.

What It's Similar To

If you've made a vision board, a mood board, or a Pinterest collage, the mechanics will already feel familiar — choosing images, laying them out, letting them sit together. The difference is in the intention or purpose. A vision board is usually a picture of what you'd like. A Dream Tray is a picture of what's already here — real thoughts, feelings, and experiences, externalised with Dream Tray's tools.

If you keep a dream journal, or you've looked things up in a dream dictionary, Dream Tray works with the same material — dreams, symbols, the strange residue mornings leave behind — but it never decodes it for you. No entry tells you what a snake means. You place it, and it means what it means to you, today.

Sandtray therapy or therapeutic collage are the nearest relatives, in spirit if not in name — small objects or images placed on a bounded surface, play and depth work happening at once. Dream Tray owes it that shape, and departs from it in the range of what can be placed — text and drawing alongside images — and in its everyday versatility, equally at home with the mundane and ordinary — a red car noticed on the way home — as with the fantastic nature of reality, and the practice of illusory form.

It's a collage maker, technically — free, online, no account required. It's also more than that, if you want it to be.

Using It — For Yourself, or For Your Practice

Most people use a tray alone — a private way to sit with a dream, a feeling, a thought you're carrying, without needing anyone else in the room. Build it, look at it, save it (if you want) and close the tab. That's the whole of it, and it's already enough.

If you're a therapist, coach, analyst, counsellor, or practitioner, Dream Tray isn't a protocol you have to learn — it's a container that holds whatever method you already bring. Grief work can become a grief timeline built in symbols. Somatic work, trauma-informed work, parts work — each brings its own technique to the same base practice: a client places, and the material becomes ground for the work you already do. Bring a tray into session, or send one home as work between sessions.