Dream book – how to interpret your dreams?
Dreams are fleeting and skittish and it is difficult to persuade them to return. It only takes 10 minutes and you forget about your dream completely. Meanwhile, dreams are a treasury of knowledge about yourself, as long as you know how to get to their wisdom. Every night they provide you with key information about self-healing, and self-understanding, glimpses of the challenges that await you in your waking life, and give you direct access to your soul. They show you what you don’t pay attention to in your waking life. It is even said that to experience something, you must first dream it, hence the phrase “the boy from my dreams” is often used. Dreams are full of synchronicities, archetypes, stories, clues, information, metaphors, and symbols, therefore, to understand them, modern man often reaches for a dream book and checks how to interpret dreams.
In this article, you’ll learn the 9 keys to understanding your dreams:
- trusting your feelings,
- saving your first associations,
- checking authenticity,
- return to sleep,
- dialogue with dream characters,
- exploring your dream self,
- looking for symbols,
- looking for aspects of yourself,
- taking actions from dreams,
The dream interpretation goes back to prehistoric times.
Tribal shamans took dreams very seriously. Both their own and those described by members of their tribes. An experienced shaman, apart from being the master of his dreams, was also able to enter collective dreams as well as the dreams of others and influence reality. He could develop the skill of prophetic dreams and could also repeat the dream on demand. Dream exploring was a gift and an honor for them, and they enjoyed great authority in their communities.
Incubation of dreams.
Dreams usually appear spontaneously but can also be triggered on purpose and on a specific topic with the help of various rituals and potions. This process is called dream incubation and was often used by shamans and dreamers in Ancient Egypt and Japan. Nowadays, psychologists use this method very often. Dream incubation was used to explain the bothering problem and to make dreams come true. Such rituals were, for example, fasting for several days, because a physically exhausted organism is much more susceptible and open to spiritual feelings.
Where to start interpreting your dreams?
According to Robert Moss, the Australian dream teacher, and the creator of the active dreaming method, there are 9 keys to understanding your dreams:
Trust your feelings.
Pay attention to your feelings as soon as you wake up. It is important both how you felt inside your sleep, but equally important are your emotions and body sensations immediately after waking up from sleep. They will provide you with clues about the importance (rank) and urgency of your sleep, as well as its positive and negative consequences. Emotions link the dream content to your personal waking life.
Write down your first associations.
Keep a dream journal in which you write down your first associations. What rises to the surface of your consciousness as soon as you wake up can come from slippery sleep layers or from deeper sleep levels.
Check for authenticity.
Ask yourself what about this dream you are familiar with in other aspects of the situation in your life, your dreams, ordinary life, or imagination. Has any or part of this dream appeared in any other way in your life? What part of your dream may play out symbolically or literally in the future? Although dreams are internal experiences, they contain accurate information about your external reality. They contain both subtle and direct signals from your external environment.
Back to sleep.
Dreams are real experiences, and a fully remembered dream is already its interpretation. Sleep matters in the dream itself. To learn how to re-enter it. Consider whether this dream is over or you broke it by waking up. As you learn to re-enter your dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, reconnect with your inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business.
Have a chat with the characters from your dreams.
You can do this by entering sleep again or simply by sitting down on a piece of paper and imagining a conversation with this character. Record the results of this conversation. These characters can be another aspect of you or a transpersonal experience, ghosts or angels.
Examine your dream self.
Check who you are in your dreams, a hero, an active participant, or rather an observer. Are you young or old? What is your gender? Compare your sleep behavior with your waking behavior. Is there anything you could bring from this dream into your waking life and vice versa? Remember that the character that appears in the dream is you, even if it is just a witness. Think if there is anything you can learn from your dream.
Looking for symbols.
Although dreams try to communicate with us as clearly as possible, they sometimes use symbols to lift us beyond the limits of our own daily minds. Symbols take us from what we know about ourselves to what we don’t know yet. So, by analyzing your own dream, you can sometimes discover in your personal dreams timeless myths from many traditions.
Remember that the best dream book interpreting the meaning of symbols in your dreams is your own diary.
Which part of you?
Dreams give us a picture of wholeness and unity. They show us many aspects of ourselves and help us bring them together under one roof. Therefore, it is often useful to ask “what part of me” different characters and elements can represent in a dream? However, this approach is rarely sufficient because dreams are both transpersonal and personal. If you meet a tribal shaman in a dream, it could be an aspect of you and the true shaman. If you meet your deceased grandmother, it is more likely that grandma is trying to communicate with you than just the part of you who is like her.
Take action from your dream.
Dreams require action. Share your dream with someone, the other person can then say, for example, how they would interpret the dream if it was their dream. Paint it, make a collage, dance it, sing it, and turn it into a story. Find that unknown dream place on the map, translate this unknown dream word, and so on. Thanks to this, you will learn more about yourself.
There are many methods of working with dreams, some of which you will learn about in the following articles. However, if you are not interested in working with dreams in depth, it is worth writing down at least a few dreams as an experiment using the above tips. Surely you will start looking at them in a different way after doing this exercise. In our folk and Slavic beliefs, it is said that the first dream should be remembered in a new place because it has a prophetic meaning. So, it is worth writing down such a dream as soon as you wake up and analyzing it. Perhaps you will find out what awaits you in this new place.
Dream book – how to interpret your dreams?
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Source:
2020 Dreamwork Summit series: Harness the Power of Your Dreams for Insight, Guidance, and Renewed Purpose 13-16.10.2020
Robert Moss Conscious Dreaming, Three Rivers Press, 1996
Dream interpretation – how to interpret your dreams?
