Why Those Who Know Us Well Shouldn’t Help Us with Our Dreams

The next few weeks most of us will be around lots of family for the holidays.  For some of us, like me, it means going to grandma’s house in the country.  I always sleep better when I’m in the country, and often have dreams I remember every night that I’m there.  It got me thinking of how when large families are around each other someone’s inevitably going to bring up a dream they’ve had.  As I was thinking on the subject I came up with some reasons not to expect much insight when members of your family gather around and share dreams.

  #1: Family knows each other too well.  On the surface it doesn’t seem to matter much, this idea of telling people close to you about your dreams.  After all, who knows you better than your family?  And herein lies the problem.  In order to gain insight into your dreams, you need someone who has an objective point of view.  That’s the one thing those who know you well are unable to offer.  We all want what’s best for our family and if a dream seems to suggest great fortune, it’s human nature for those close to us to pick out things in the dream that suggest that fortune and gloss over all the parts of the dream that doesn’t make sense.  This, however, an do more harm than good, and can only be accurate under the right circumstances.

#2: Those close to us make assumptions on their biases.  Those who are close to us know our gifts and talents, as well as our deficits.  So then, everything we hear out of their mouths about our dreams may be based on how many mistakes we’ve made in the past, or how we just can’t ever seem to get things right when it counts.  True, some of our dreams could point out what we’ve done in the past, especially in nightmares.  But what if your dream isn’t a nightmare, and it starts off with a statement like “You know how things have always gone this way in the past?”  If a brother or sister or spouse picks that part of the dream out, but fails to include the rest of the conversation the dream’s presenting, then we can easily get stuck in thinking that things will always be the way they’ve always been.  You’ve probably heard me make reference to it before, but I’ll say it again.  Most dreams that show us problems also show us the answer to the problems.  The reason we, or the ones we love, tend to focus on the problem is because that’s the easiest part of the dream to figure out; it’s the one we’re most familiar with.

There are lots more reasons we should entrust our dreams to those who don’t know us as well as our family, but those will appear in another post sometime down the road.  For now, just remember when you’re with family over the upcoming holidays and someone blurts out a dream to echoes of, “Yeah, that was a really strange dream.” fire up your tablet or laptop and send the dream right over to equitisbic.com.

EB

Photo credit: drosen7900 / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND