About Nicoline

Hi, I’m Nicoline, dream expert and sleep enthusiast. I’m here to help you understand your dreams and wake up with new inspiration.

Nicoline Douwes Isema is a dream expert and sleep activist based in the Netherlands. She’s on a mission to show everyone that sleeping is a productive state of mind.

Nicoline helps her clients to use their unconscious intelligence as resource for new ideas and inspiration. And to figure out what their weird dreams mean, too. 

Hi, my name is Nicoline, and I am a dreamer.

I have been speaking about dreams and the sleeping brain on international stages, radio, tv. For the past 15 years I have conducted workshops, in-company trainings, and worked with countless creatives, therapists, coaches. I wrote a book on how to interpret your own dreams through the Interview Method, where we look at the personal associations and ideas that a dream inspires. In short, I teach people to understand their own dreams, and to help others understand theirs.

Why I do this 

Dreams, nightmares, and the human experience of sleep, are endlessly fascinating. For me, most exciting is the potential for innovative thinking our minds can reach while we are asleep. Just because we are not doing anything on the outside, doesn’t mean we aren’t being productive. Stuck on something? Sleep on it.

Also, I am the person who reads all the dream research I can get my hands on, thinks ‘this is awesome, people need to know about this!’ And then tells everyone.

In the past twenty years, I have been focusing on speaking, workshops, and 1:1 dream analysis. But most of all, I want to help you make use of your dreaming brain in your everyday life.

I help my clients to:

  • explore dreams for insight
  • bring unconscious intelligence to light
  • connect feeling and intuition to rational thinking
  • get smarter by sleeping in
  • wake up with new inspiration

Ask me
🔸how sleeping in makes you smarter
🔸how to wake up with new ideas
🔸how to mine insights from dreams

In a time where resting almost becomes an act of defiance, where ‘pulling an all-nighter’ is glorified, I am on a mission to re-value sleep.

As a committee chair at the International Association for the Study of Dreams, I adhere to their Dreamwork Ethics Statement.


In this 40 minute video I discuss the IASD Ethics Statement with psychologist and podcaster Amina Mara. We dive into what it means for us in our work, give examples, and distill takeaways for you to use at home.

Coach, not a therapist
Bilingual 🇳🇱 🇺🇸
Living by the beach in The Netherlands, working online.