Understanding Dreams

We, as human beings, have throughout time believed in the importance of our dreams. From our dreams have come incredible pieces of art and literature and even scientific breakthroughs. However most of our dreams seem to be cryptic, fleeting and difficult to decipher.

So how do you work with dreams? There’s lots of material out there, but what’s the best and most sound approach? Well that’s part of the problem. Even modern science can’t tell us definitively what purpose our dreams serve. How then can we expect a $20 encyclopedia of dreams to really be in anyway definitive. These are your dreams and you have the definitive voice on what your dreams mean.

However there are some ways that are helpful in uncovering what your dream does mean to you. It is helpful to record your dreams. I personally dream so much and so vividly that writing down everyone of my dreams and including all the detail I can remember would take on the characteristics of a job. No thanks! I record only the dreams that, upon waking, have a really strong feeling of importance about them. Those are the dreams that usually contain the big messages for me. You however probably have a different experience with your dreams than I do. I behooves you to really understand how you dream, and recording your dreams helps with that understanding. If you only remember partial dreams or pieces from dreams, then please do record as much as you can. That practice alone will actually help you to begin to remember more about your dreams. Recording your dreams also provides you with the content of your dreams, namely the dream symbols. This is where the sticky wicket of dream interpretation comes into play.

This is actually where having access to collections of interpretations of dream symbols can be helpful. Helpful not in the sense that they can tell you what your dream is about, but they can give you ideas about what your dream symbols might mean. For example I could have a dream where I inherit a red car. I could look those dream symbols (inheritance, red, automobiles) up and determine whether the meaning given actually “feels” right to me. This is an intuitive process. You have to connect with that part of yourself that knows your own truth.

Lastly the technique that I like to use the best is sharing my dreams with other people. I am an external processor which means I need to talk out my experiences of life before I can integrate them. The process of sharing your dreams maybe a frightening one if you are not like me. However there is still great value in fighting that fear and sharing your dreams with others. My dream teacher, Jeremy Taylor (www.jeremytaylor.com), believes that each of us have a particular kind of blinders on when it comes to fully being able to see what our dream symbols mean. In sharing our dreams we open up the symbols to interpretation by others. Scary yes! However when we open our dreams to another person or persons we have the opportunity to see what our dream symbols mean to them. If I tell 5 people my dreams, that gives me 5 possible interpretations to draw my own meaning from. Add to that whatever I’ve gathered from dream resources and I’ve given my psyche a significant vocabulary with which to interpret my dream.

If you do choose to share your dream make sure that you choose people that have a gift for listening to others. Choose people that honor the process of dreaming and honor the fact that you have ultimate say over what the dream means. No one likes a dream bully!

So remember 3 great ways to help you work with your dreams: