The Hidden Meaning of Your Dreams

Whether you are asleep or awake, your mind is constantly in motion. It communicates thoughts and messages to you in the form of ideas, when awake, and dreams, when asleep. You can train yourself to listen and become aware of the messages you receive during your sleeping state.

Dreams help us to work out our problems and concerns. Many people think that our brain sleeps when our body sleeps, but this is not the case. When the body rests, the brain spends much of the night dreaming as it swells in the Theta and Delta states, which can be detected on a bio-rhythm machine. The stories within our dreams are messages we need to absorb for our own good and more than likely a direction to take to solve a current problem or concern. We can learn their meaning if we pay attention to our dreams. Some simple techniques can put your brain power to work for you while you sleep, and then help you to recall your dreams so you can benefit from them when awake. It is always best to keep a dream journal, at your bedside, with a pen, so you can make notes as you are awakened by these dreams.

Dreams can reveal a rich inner life waiting to be discovered. In a dream state, we can put our life force to work and solve many problems that seem insurmountable when we are awake. That is because there are no emotions involved. No guard up. When we dream, we connect with our Blessed Higher Self and Spirit Guides, through our energy system. This is done at the basic cellular level. For example, we can receive important messages about our health and well being long before a disease appears on the body or a doctor has to be called. Dreams can also spice up your sex life. Basically dreams bring understanding, problem solving, and may give clues to our future.

Follow the Dream If one advances in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with success unsuspected in waking hours.

In ancient times it was thought that dreams were messages from the gods or from demons. Priests were the only people skilled enough to interpret these dreams. People would travel far distances to visit a temple and get a reading of their dreams. The readings would show guidance on health, wealth, war, peace. or whether next year's crops would be plentiful.

One of the oldest books known to man is the Bible, which mentions more than 700 dreams, all showing an important connection to the lives, problems and well-being of the ancient Tribes of Israel.

In the new testament, Joseph was cautioned by a dream to flee to Egypt with Mary and the baby Jesus to avoid the coming wrath of Herod. The Wise Men were also warned in a dream to return home another way, avoid returning to Herod, which would keep them out of danger.

Perhaps the most famous Biblical dream is the story of another Joseph, whose brothers, jealous of his understanding of dreams and his coat of many colors, sold him into slavery in Egypt. Later, after interpreting the Pharaoh¹s dream of the seven fat cattle and the seven lean cattle as a prophetic dream of a famine yet to come, Joseph became governor of Egypt. That was when he confronted, and forgave, his brothers.

As time went on, people began to think that events in the real world caused dreams. Someone wearing a damp nightshirt would dream about water. Someone who ate too much at dinner would have a nightmare. We know now that outside factors such as noise or cold can enter your consciousness and affect small details in a dream, but have little to do with the main content of the dream.

Then Sigmund Freud, in the 1930's, the most famous psychoanalyst of the 20th Century caused a revolution when he said that dreams are created from images, memories, thoughts, wishes and fears that are stored within a person's brain. He used dream interpretation when treating his patients.

Carl Jung added to this new approach by saying that dreams are a tool for learning more about ourselves and help us to achieve our full potential. He thought the same images appear in many people's dreams because there is a collective unconsciousness in which we all share basic knowledge, even though we come from different cultures and speak different languages.

The actual study of physiology (or biology) of dreams began when a researcher at the University of Chicago checked on his sleeping son and noticed that the child¹s eyes, though closed. were moving back and fourth. This is called REM movement, and can be noticed easily in cats. It is thought that when the REM movement is present. a person is dreaming.

We spend two of every twenty four hours dreaming each day, which can add up to more than five years during a lifetime.


MAKING SENSE OF YOUR DREAMS

You don't have to analyze your dreams for them to be of help to you. the mere fact that you dream is good for you, and will help to keep your life in balance. In experiments, people who constantly wake up while they are dreaming develop serious psychological problems, we all need to dream, and it is an important part of the life process, as much as eating or drinking. However, many people feel that figuring out the meaning of their dreams gives them a richer understanding of their lives.

Your dreams can tell you what you are really feeling about your mate, your job, your parents, children, financial situation or your past and also help guide you as to what you may really want - what the Soul needs - in your future. The more you practice becoming aware of your dreams, the better you will become in remembering them as well as recording them. If your company is having layoffs, and you dreams about a collapsing building or a sinking lifeboat, you'll figure out exactly where your anxiety lies, and can begin preparing by sending out an updated resume.

The most important thing to know is this, you are the best person to figure out your dreams! There are many dream books that tell you meanings, and when one rings true for you from within, that is the way to go.


KEEPING YOUR DREAM JOURNAL

The first step to deciphering your dreams is to write them down - keep a dream journal. By writing your dreams down and making a regular effort to remember them, you will begin to recall them in more detail. You will be surprised as how good you will get if you follow this routine.

Begin by writing down the date of each dream. Allow free flowing thought to atake over.

Give your dream a title, so you can easily find the reference again.

Write down as much detail as possible concerning each dream.

Write in the present tense, not in the past tense, and don¹t worry about grammar or punctuation. this is only for your eyes.

Now, suppose you wake up and know you dreamed something about a car. Try to recall as many details as you can along with any feelings you may have had in the dream. What color was the car? Were you driving?

The dream dictionary tells you the car is a symbol of your body and show if you have your life under control. This could be connected to your self-image, your personality, the freedom to come and go as you wish, or your drive for success. Ask yourself some questions about your dream.

Was the car damages or dented? This could mean some poor self-esteem. Also, check your health.

Are you in the driver¹s seat? Whoever is driving the car is in control of your life. If you are in the back seat, you are allowing others to manage your life.

Was the air conditioner working? You may be feeling smothered, or may need to check the condition of your lungs, especially if you smoke.

Did the breaks fail? This connects with will power, discipline, overspending, and suggests you need to slow down.

Did you run out of gas? Check yourself - are you out of energy? Do you need vitamin supplements? Do you need some R&R or a vacation?

Now you can begin to see how to bring the details of the dream to light if you ask yourself questions about your dream. Sometimes it is easy to remember a dream, if it was a very powerful one or a happy one. Sometimes remembering can become difficult, especially if you tend to jump right out of bed in the morning to begin your daily routine, without meditation or contemplation.

Here are some tips to improve dream recall:

Tell yourself several times during the day that you intend to remember your dreams. This is called setting a condition. Then, just before you fall asleep, when you are relaxed, tell yourself, "I will remember my dreams when I wake up in the morning."

Place an object with a scent, a bag of herbs or sachet, near your bed. Associating the scent with dreaming may trigger some dream recall.

Keep your Dream Journal next to your bed. Just knowing it is there will help. You may need to use it in the middle of the night!

Drink a glass of water before retiring. Avoid drugs or alcohol as they tend to repress REM sleep.
If you are trying to work out a problem, write it down just before you go to sleep. then ask your Higher Self to work with you in finding a solution.

When morning comes - as you awaken - don't move! Don't even open your eyes. Hang on to the energies of the night. Lie still for a moment and concentrate on recalling your dreams. Try to remember how they felt. The mood of the dream may still be with you.

Even if you recall only a small chunk of the dream, write it down anyway. Ask yourself who was in you dream. Did the people remind you of anyone? Bear in mind that things in a dream can often be disguised, as a person in a dream may not be the person you will deal with in reality. For example, you may dream about the Queen of England, but in reality she actually represents a friend, parent, relative or teacher who you feel is ruling over you.

Then, ask yourself where the dream took place?

Did the location in your dream remind you of any place you are familiar with?

Ask yourself if anything in your dream reminds you of anyone in your real life?

Ask yourself how you were feeling in the dream?

As time goes by you will get better and better with this process.


WHY AM I HERE?

A dream that is not understood is like an unopened letter. Every night we have important messages from the unconscious. Whether we find ourselves in a car plunging down a steep slope, or piloting a plane through heavenly skies, we will do well to ask why our unconscious put us there. TALMUD

PART 2

So what are dreams all about? The true meaning of our dreams and what they signify has puzzled mankind for thousands of years. In the ancient world, dreams were often considered prophetic. Homer's Iliad contains a passage where King Agamemmon is visited in his dream by a messenger from Zeus to prescribe the king's future actions.

In the Bible, the Old testament is filled with accounts of prophetic dreams. Dreams have also been viewed as nothing more than extensions of the waking state, a carry over into sleep of what a person has thought or experienced while awake. All the conflicting notions about the nature of dreams led to no definite conclusions. It is perhaps best to agree with the French writer Michel de Montaigne that "Dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations, but art is required to sort them out..."

You can become smarter by thinking up new ideas when you sleep. Your brain is constantly at work whether you are sleeping or not. Dreams can be a part of your personal creative process. Your conscious mind may not recognize a great idea, but your subconscious could be working on it - full time - while you sleep. Some of the great literary works were conceived in this way. Robert Louis Stevenson was desperate for money and couldn't think of anything to write about. Then one night he had a dream that was the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine, dreamed a solution about how to make it work. He dreamed a tribe were throwing spears at him. The spears had a hole in the pointed tip, and they stuck point first into the ground. When he awoke, he knew he should put the hole for the thread in the pinpoint of his needle.

You can pull many answers from your subconscious while sleeping. You can sometimes find the missing pieces. Suppose something is really lost, like your car keys. You have no idea where they are. Before you go to sleep, write down something that states what you are looking for. You may find that your dreams that night will show you exactly where you misplaced the keys.

Make it a routine to jot down your dreams and study ideas that turn up, no matter how strange they may seem to you. Try to relate them to things you are working on in life. Example: You want to buy yourself a new TV but you can't afford it right now. Then you dream you've done a great job painting the living room. When you jot that down and think about it, you will realize you¹ve come up with a great idea to get the extra cash to purchase the TV. Since you're a handy person. you can do a few painting jobs for the neighbors to pay for it.

You can also influence your dreams. You don't have to wait for your dreams to provide a solution to your problems. You can directly influence them to give you more information or guidance by instructing your dream state or Blessed Higher Self to answer some specific questions as you are dozing off. Your brain can be programmed to come up with specific ideas as you sleep! Suppose you are about to give a presentation to the PTA. All your materials are together, but you feel that something is missing, and cannot seem to come up with exactly what it is.

When you go to bed, think about the presentation, and actually begin going through it as you fall asleep, bearing in mind that you are looking for some ingredient to add to it. You may dream that a slide show or guest lecturer from a local college can make your presentation even better. This missing part, or idea, was in your subconscious all the time, but you couldn¹t access it any other way except through your dreams, probably because of stress.

Always remember to sleep on it. You can use your dreams to help you solve just about any problem that is bothering you. It's easy and anyone can learn to do this. Dreaming is essential to good mental health. We all need our dreams, even if we don't understand them, even if we can¹t always analyze their messages, dreams of all kinds are still worth having. Dreaming is healthy for us.

Just because dreams are different from normal life, surprising, unusual and perhaps even bizarre or frightening, dreams make unexpected connections that we are not able to make when we are awake. We may be able to solve problems in our dreams that our self-conscious, wide-awake minds just cannot do.


DREAM WORK

To do some dream work, pick a night when you are not too tired and you have not used any alcohol or medication.

Just before bedtime, write down a problem or a question you would like to resolve.
Keep the question simple. Do not ask any questions that will have a yes or no answer.
As you begin to fall asleep, repeat the question over and over in your mind.

Many people have difficulty remembering their dreams, so when you wake up, whether in the middle of the night or the next morning, immediately write down what you have been dreaming about.

The answer to your problem will be somewhere in the content of your dream.
At first it may not appear obvious, but with a little thought, you will be able to interpret the dream and unlock the answer you are looking for.


DREAM INCUBATION

Incubating a dream simply means targeting a dream for specific problem solving. Let's say a woman and her husband are having a difficult time in their relationship. So she begins her dream work by writing down the question, "Why are my husband and I bickering all the time?"
Then she dreams about Hillary Clinton and she thinks, what does Hillary have to do with me? The wife needs to pretend she is talking to a stranger and describe everything in her dream to that stranger. She might see that Hillary is showing that wives can be both independent and active.

The next insight may be, "I'm afraid to pursue my career because I may loose my husband. I'm afraid I'll outshine him."

Suddenly the wife realizes she is holding herself back, feeling resentful and taking in out on her husband. The more she describes Hillary, in her dream, the more she can see that it is possible to have a strong marriage and an independent career.

This dream not only explains why the woman was bickering with her husband, but it gives her a solution to the problem as well as some comfort. It is OK for you to have a career!
This method of focusing on a question is called dream incubation. Another method of using your dreams to solve problems is called lucid dreaming.


LUCID DREAMING

Sometimes when you are asleep and dreaming, you suddenly become aware that you are dreaming. This is called a psychic dream or lucid dream, as you split with your Etheric Double, and the double acts out in the dream, as you. If you try, you can take part in directing as to which way your dream goes.

For example, before you go to sleep, you think about your boss, a bad tempered man who is hard to talk to. Later you dream that you are being chased by an angry bear. If you realize you are dreaming you can confront the bear, who represents your boss, instead of running away from it. Talk with the bear, work out your problems, feel safe, then say good-bye. In lucid dreaming, you will conquer some real life problems, and the bear will then go away. Dreams are always trying to help us solve problems we face in waking life. By tapping into information in your dreams, you become receptive to the answers. No matter which method you choose to solve problems in your sleep, the most important thing you can learn is that the solution to your problems are often within your own head - or can be brought to you from the other dimensions. You only have to fall asleep to find your answers.


DO DREAMS HAVE THE POWER TO HEAL?

Native American cultures have long believed that nightly messages have much to do with your mental and physical health. Now a growing number of doctors agree that dreams should be taken seriously as an indication of health. Some doctors who listen to their patient's dreams, find that these dreams can provide valuable guidance in the patient¹s treatment.

Here are some common dreams that may represent some kind of health problem:

Excessive heat or fire
Excessive cold, ice or snow
Excessive fluids
Blockages - in pipes or rivers, for example
Insects or other animals that cause you to feel repulsion or disgust
Broken machines or structures

Here is an example of a health dream:
A woman found herself as a leafless tree with a froze limb. She had fractured her wrist and the break was undiagnosed. It failed to heal properly and the dream pointed her to the direction that she needed to take proper care of that injury.

Aristotle believed that dreams were an early warning system for illness, and recent studies show that he may have been right. Think of a dream as a message from your unconscious. The mind picks up body messages, physical sensations, that we perhaps have been too busy to make note of while we are awake, or may dismiss as to minor to pay attention to. Our dreams can pass this information along to us. They tell us to pay attention to some important part of our life. It may be a message from an organ deep in the abdomen, or from a blood vessel that is straining to stay open. The message may come to us in code, and when we dream, we break the code to understand the message.

Dreams of Pregnancy. Some women dream they are pregnant before it has been confirmed and way before it is possible to detect a fetal heartbeat. Their bodies know what is happening and the dream will simply pass on the message. One scientific journal reported that a woman with rheumatoid arthritis dreamed that her arms were bound in a straightjacket. her illness then flared up. Sometime later she dreamed she fell on ice, but got up easily. Shortly after that her illness subsided.

If our dreams can tell us that an illness is developing in our bodies even before we experience the symptoms, or before our doctors can detect signs of the illness, then it is possible to use our dreams to get treatment earlier, and improve our chances of recovery.

Research is just beginning - through the acceptance of complimentary or alternative medicine - on whether dreams have diagnostic validity and can even predict the course an illness will take.


PRE-COGNITION OR FUTURE DREAMS

Females experience more psychic dreams than males, in which they see future events, and their forecasts are accurate more often than men's.

What can you do when terror strikes in your dreams? Just as everyone has dreams, everyone also has some nightmares. Studies indicate that nightmares are twice as common among adults than sleep researchers once thought. In fact the average person has one bad dream about every two weeks, unless they meditate a lot. Nightmares have been defined as dreams that frighten, sadden or upset the dreamer.

Some prescription drugs, such as tranquilizers, barbiturates and blood-pressure medications can cause bad dreams. Most people do not require professional help to handle nightmares. There are simpler ways to get at these bad dreams. If the nightmare becomes so intense and painful that you fear going to bed at night, it may be time to consult a doctor.

Here¹s What To Do:Jot down your nightmareAs soon as you can, describe your bad dream on paper, including as much detail as you can. If you are being chased, write down how the chase starts, whether your pursuer looks like anybody you know, and how the nightmare ends.
Decide to change the nightmare - or go back into the dream.Think carefully about how you would like to change your dream. If the dream ends with you being chased off a cliff, attach a parachute to your back, or have Superman catch you.

Imagine the new sequenceClose your eyes, relax, and play back the dream in your mind. This time use the new plot. You are chased off the edge of a cliff you fall, and a parachute opens or Superman catches you. See yourself landing safely.

Practice for two weeksFor a few minutes every day for two weeks, mentally rehearse the altered version of the dream. By doing this, you are imprinting a new image in your mind, and letting this seep into our subconscious. A bit of self-hypnosis.

Enjoy your nightmare free sleepYou should see a marked improvement within these two weeks. As the nightmares diminish, you can use your dream rehearsals less and less and the nightmares will disappear for good.

Nightmares can be good for you as far as unearthing your hidden fears. This will allow you to resolve some of the conflicts in your life. Sometime we may be more troubled than we realize, and these nightmares, when we look carefully, can help us to identify exactly what is bothering us. It may be a buried memory from your past, or a present life situation or person. As you work to understand your nightmares, the thing that was troubling you can be brought from the subconscious to your conscious mind, and you van recognize it and begin to deal with it.

Author: Elizabeth Joyce