Dream interpretation is very important because each of us dreams every night when we go to sleep. It’s an untapped resource that most of us don’t even know that we have at our disposal
I have found in my practice that there are four main reasons why people don’t work with their dreams.
The first reason is that most people believe that their dreams don’t mean anything. This is incorrect because dreams always mean something. Sometimes it’s not very important but all dreams mean something.
Let’s say, for example, a student is up late studying for a test and at midnight he or she orders a pizza, then while the student is sleeping, he or she dreams about bombs falling and all kinds of explosions. The person is not necessarily dreaming about an impending war instead they are dreaming that their digestion is at war.
All dreams have to do with something whether it’s our physical health, our mental well- being, or even our spiritual life and situation.
The second most common reason people tell me they don’t work with their dreams, is they say. “I don’t dream.”
Well, science has proven otherwise. Sleep studies show that every individual dreams for an average of 90 minutes a night. Now, we don’t sleep for a while and then dream 90 minutes straight through instead we have dream cycles.
We dream on average six, fifteen-minute dream cycles every night and during each of those cycles we have dreams that we need to write down when we have them because they are often very hard to recall upon awakening.
One of the things that dreams do for us, for example, is that when we sleep, very often people will go to bed with a lot of stress, unhappiness or they’re worried about a problem or situation. Then, the next morning, they wake up and they feel fine.
What has occurred here, is somehow dreams have made sense of the situation we are going through, and the body and mind have come to peace, simply by dreaming about the situation even though we may no conscious recall of the dream the next morning.
So, dreams can be helpful even if we don’t remember them.
I suggest you keep a journal by your bed and when you dream, condition yourself to wake up and write your dreams down. Just write down any color, objects, places, and people you saw in your dream and then go back to sleep. In the morning you’ll be able to fill in the rest. What you are looking for is the imagery.
The third reason people tell me that they don’t like to work with their dreams is that they don’t know how to interpret them. Dream interpretation is a skill that can be taught just like anything else.
This is why, writing down the imagery of your dreams when you have them, in your journal so important, because what you are looking for is the feeling from your dreams. Once you have the feeling you can learn to interpret the meaning of the dream.
The fourth reason I commonly hear from people as to why they don’t work with their dreams is that they don’t really have time to work with their dreams.
Yet if you suddenly realize that you lived with an elder brother who had been through everything you had been through before or a great counselor or business advisor, someone who new insights into every area of your life. Wouldn’t you want to check in every once in a while to see what’s going on in your life?
That’s exactly what your subconscious mind is. Your subconscious mind knows you better than any other person and can provide you with insights into virtually every area of your life.
Let’s look at a few of the easiest ways to examine your dreams: The theme; the emotional content, and symbolism.
So, let’s first look at the theme in a dream. Too often people have a dream and pull out a book on dreams (and there are some good ones) and they will look up every single symbol contained in the dream. This is simply a waste of time. It takes too much time and people often become discouraged by following this approach, because it takes too long, and it is often confusing.
A simpler approach is to look at the dream and try to summarize the feeling of the dream into one or two sentences. For example, you could paraphrase something like, “something is happening to someone or someone is doing something” If you can isolate the dream into a summation you’ll get a sense of what the dream is all about
Another to interpreting dreams is looking at your emotions. Very often I tell clients and people who attend my workshops that emotions are simply a mirror image of the same kind of emotion that we have about a situation in our waking life.
For example, if you have a dream about being fearful or about being insecure or you have a dream about being joyful. You have to ask yourself “what in my life is prompting these same emotions.” If you can get a sense of that you will know what the dream was about.
The third approach is what I call working with symbolism. I’m not going to be able to cover each symbol in this article Just know that symbols have meanings across time and culture. Regardless of where you are in the world or what period in time you may live in the symbol can have a similar meaning.
For example, water is often a symbol for spirit or emotion because it is the source of all life on this planet and ultimately spirit is the source of all life. The Statue of Liberty can be a symbol of liberty, freedom, and independence, for people in the United States but every culture has its own symbols.
Depending on how you feel about the symbol, that’s what it means to you. For example, if you have a dog and love your dog and dream about your dog it could be a symbol of love or it could be a dream about the dog.
On the other hand, if you are allergic to dogs or you are afraid of dogs and you dream about a dog it could be you are dreaming about something you are fearful of or are afraid of or even allergic to.
Learn to work with your dreams. Every dream means something. It may be something important or something minor. Dreams are your secret messages from you soul, as well as from the realm of spirt. They can be your greatest tool for profoundly understanding and changing your life
