How to Understanding Your Dreams

    Dreams can be challenging to understand, but that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to understand. When you wake up from a dream with confusing images swirling around your mind, it can seem daunting to try and understand them on your own. In this blog post I’m going to show you how to do four specific things that will cause meaning to rise to the surface of your dream.

First Principle – Determine where you are in the dream.  By this I mean are you observing what’s going on, are you participating in some kind of group action, or is all the attention on you?

 Observing: This typically means that you are above the action in the sky somewhere, or standing off to the side while some action is happening.  This means the dream is not about you, but about whatever you’re observing.  Could be revealing to you some things about a family situation or about world events.

  Participating: This typically means that you are accomplishing some project or helping to rescue someone in trouble, and you’re working as part of a group.  Participation dreams could be about a situation at your work place, or family, or somewhere else where you’re a part of a community.

You’re the Focus of the dream:  This is the place where most dreamers find themselves.  In over ninety percent of dreams you’re the focus of your own dream which means the dream is primarily about you; you are being shown something about yourself or a situation you are dealing with.  I’ve oversimplified these three a bit, but hopefully you now are able to identify where you fit in the dreams you’ve been having.

  Principle #2 – What are your thoughts and impressions in the dream?  You may have read in an earlier post about being aware about your thoughts and feelings when you awake from a dream.  Your thoughts and feelings while you are inside the dream are just as important.  For example, were you around a lot of people in your dream but only one or two were ‘singled out’ somehow?  Have you been inside a large house with many rooms and you had the feeling that there was something important in the kitchen or the dining room or the back bedroom?  This is the dream’s way of highlighting important things to you as a dreamer.  How many times have you been dreaming and you just ‘knew’ something?  You remember knowing that specific thing because that specific thing is being highlighted for you to remember.

  Principle #3 – Reduce the dream to its simplest form. This may seem like quite a daunting task if you’ve had a long saga-like dream, but believe me it is not impossible.  With a bit of practice this gets easier and easier.  For example, if in your dream you are doing chores and running errands as you usually don on the weekends and then something spectacular happens to interrupt you, You could simplify it by writing down – as I’m going about my usual business on the weekend.  That is what’s happening, even if it takes ten minutes or thirty minutes of dreaming to establish the point.  There is no rule that says you have to scrutinize every little thing that you do.  In fact, it may hinder you in figuring out what the scene is saying if you’re trying to gain meaning out of seeing the dry cleaner and the postman and the girl at the checkout line at the grocery store.  True, they could all have significant meaning, but if you start by simplifying the contact you have with them then you won’t immediately get bogged down by the details and feel overwhelmed.

Principle #4 – Don’t focus too much on the details. If we begin looking at our dreams by identifying our position in the dream, then remembering our thoughts and impressions in the dream, and try to summarize the scene into a few short sentences, this all helps us to bypass details.  It’s easy to have certain details of a dream stick out in our mind because they were highlighted in the dream as being important, but if we spend all our attention on a few details then we will soon get stuck in them.  In order for you to avoid getting stuck in the details I want you to remember one thing about a detailed symbol: reduce the detailed symbol down to it’s simplest meaning.  A shrunken head, for example, could be referring to small mindedness.  A vehicle refers to something that gets us from one point to another.  If our boss is driving the car, then it’s talking about getting us from one point to another while our boss is behind the wheel.  You get the idea.

  I hope this has helped you in understanding how to look at your dreams in general and given you some encouragement that you can take small steps to help you understand such a large topic.

EB