Dream Stories
Have you ever wondered why dreams come to us in pictures? Pictures are an extraordinary means of communicating a great deal in a short amount of time. It’s the reason for the old saying “A picture’s worth a thousand words.”
But what dictates the pictures that create our dream experiences? Encounters we have in our waking lives, for one. Our likes, dislikes, good and bad experiences of all kinds add up to what appears in our dreams.
A very common example of this is when a dog shows up in a dream. The dog doesn’t necessarily have to be doing anything, just standing off in the distance, and dreamers have all kinds of reactions to it. To some, a dog might mean a faithful companion. To others, it’s merely an annoying yapping noisemaker the neighbors couldn’t keep quiet when you were trying to sleep. Still, others may have had a bad experience with a dog when they were young. The presence of a dog will have very different emotional effects on each of these people.
Someone I was speaking with recently quoted a guy by the name of Eldridge who said: “Words are the language of the mind, but stories are the language of the heart.” I immediately thought of how dreams are stories told with pictures. They’re a fabulous communication system. They may reveal things the dreamer has forgotten about themselves, things the dreamer has refused to deal with, issues of the heart, even a dreamer’s life purpose. And these messages are coming to all of us every night!
Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of dreams are about the dreamer. That’s not saying you’re not dreaming of others, but it does say that dreams are telling you about yourself a great majority of the time. Just think if you only remembered two to three dreams every week the rest of this year that’s roughly one hundred to one hundred fifty dreams that are speaking direction and encouragement to you; maybe even the answer to questions that your life and career depend on.
My mentor tells a story of a woman who began to have dreams that one of her children was drowning. She had a lot of fear associated with the dream and it seemed the more she dreamed one of her children was drowning the more she was afraid of it actually happening. The more she was afraid of it happening the more she was dreamed of it. The woman went through a process of overcoming the fear associated with the dream and thought that was the end of it.
The next summer the woman and her family went to a family gathering at a lake. Before anyone knew what was happening the woman’s daughter fell into the water and was struggling to survive. The woman felt an inner tug to run to a certain place at the lakeside where she found her daughter just about ready to drown. The child’s life was saved because the woman dealt with this frightening dream and didn’t ignore it.
Although this dream didn’t directly deal with the dreamer, but her child, it goes without saying that dreaming something like this about someone in your immediate family directly affects the dreamer and is considered a dream that falls into the ninety-five to ninety-eight that is about the dreamer.
EB