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Significance of Dreams

Dream Interpretations

Our nightly dreams are about us and us alone. Every part of the dream is a part of ourself, a part of our personality. All characters, objects, and places we encounter in dreams, have something to say to us about who we are. The more resistant we are towards identifying with something in our dream, the more certain we can be that there is a particular aspect of ourselves that is being disowned and needs to be reclaimed. By reinstating it back into our conscious awareness, we make our lives fuller and richer.

If we cannot understand our dreams it is only because in the modern world we have lost touch with the language of SYMBOLS which, as it turns out, IS the language of dreams. Dreams issue from the unconscious to inform the conscious mind of that which is at work within us.

The unconscious is not concerned merely with putting right the things that have gone wrong in us. It aims at our well-being in the FULLEST possible sense; its goal is nothing less than our complete personal development, the creative unfolding of the potentialities that are contained in our individual 'ground-plan' or 'destiny'. This means not just healing, but WHOLENESS. Therefore, dreams are not just showing what is WRONG in the psyche, but also the REMEDIES for our disorders. And it does both these things through dreams.

The adult personality is largely conditioned by childhood experiences or, more precisely, by the emotional impact of those experiences on the child. And what doesn't come from childhood comes from traumatic experiences in our later life; the present state of our psyche is the result of our emotional self's reactions to the experiences and situations that life has thrown at us.

What this means is that a correct and useful interpretation of our dreams requires a full awareness and understanding of what is happening to us now and what has happened to us in the past. Our unconscious is a storehouse containing all the emotionally charged experiences of our life, and it is just these decisive emotional reactions--fear, hatred, resentment, guilt and the like--that are expressing themselves in our dreams.

None of us has COMPLETE inner harmony and/or psychological balance and in that sense, we all are, to some extent or another, neurotic. What this means basically is that we have developed inappropriate, distorted and unsatisfactory ways of expressing ourselves in certain areas of our lives. Dreams show us these distortions and all the ways in which we disguise our true emotional desires. Paying attention to our dreams then, means becoming consciously AWARE of any repressed desires or emotions we may have. Hence, dream interpretation is a form of therapy.. a way of healing ourselves, wherein the cure consists in first FACING the repression, making sense of the ways our past still affects us today, and then transforming its energy so that it can be redirected elsewhere in our lives.

The process of facing our irrational fears and our angers has a way of transforming the energy that sustains them--perhaps not overnight, but little by little. Certainly, some neurosis are severe enough to warrant professional help, however, most of the time applying ourselves to dream work is precisely what we need to work out our troubling kinks.

Since the dreamer is really the only person who can truly interpret a dream, then dream books are of relatively little use to anyone other than the author. One needs to record their dreams faithfully and regularly, and in so doing, develop a personal dream interpretation list of images that eventually becomes the accurate map to their own inner psyche talk. This is the only way to learn the language of your personal unconscious, recognize your inner landscape's climate, and map out the uniquely carved paths and significant highways that your soul strives towards.

We need to explore the unconscious depths of the mind

It is not the rational mind that explores the unconscious; mere reason alone will not reveal the truth about ourselves and our destiny. Because the rational mind rejects the unconscious we must turn to the purity of awareness to explore our depths and to cut through abstract reasoning to an immediate experiencing of reality. Reason conceives--imagines and speculates; pure consciousness perceives reality directly. Reason knows about things; pure awareness knows the things themselves, experientially. Awareness, not reason, is the key that will open this door. By entering the unconscious depths of the psyche, or by letting them enter consciousness we become more of ourselves.

Every dream image that surfaces means something, although the same image may mean different things for different people or for the same person at different times. Interpreting your dreams is not as difficult as it may at first seem; it is certainly not a job that necessarily requires the services of an specialist consultant. It is something we can do for ourselves, so long as we have at least a respectful attitude towards our dreams, with a belief that they may have something valuable to say to us. A determination to be open and honest with ourselves informs our inner dreamer that its messages will be taken seriously. This signals a green light for dreams to be consciously recalled in the morning.

More often than not, the people, places, objects and events in our dreams represent parts of us: feelings, fears, desires, attitudes and so on. We may not be consciously aware of them, and one of the main functions of a dream is to make us aware of the fact that we are hiding things from ourselves and to therefore pay attention. We will need to accept that there is much about ourselves that we have not acknowledged. Honesty is the door that will allow us to make a connection to whatever we've been ignoring.

Anything in a dream may be important when it comes to interpretation. What in the dream itself seems to be quite trivial or merely incidental to the main action may, in fact, turn out to be very pivitol and the key that will unlock the meaning of the whole dream. For those of us who regularly journal our dreams, we may find it enlightening and helpful to look back every now and then over the dreams of the last year, or two or even longer to see how much or how little we have changed over that period.

Finally, we will find that should we incorrectly interpret a dream, we may find that our next dream serves to correct our mistake. Dreams come from the unconscious, and the unconscious works intelligently and with a purpose. If we respect our unconscious and show it respect by paying attention to what it is saying to us in dreams, it will cooperate with us and assist us towards a true understanding of its messages.

A dream not only appears within the context of an ever-continuing series of dreams; it also occurs within the context of your life as a whole--your family life, your work, your love/hate life. Your dreams reflect your deepest emotional responses to your waking-life experiences. It follows, therefore, that a correct interpretation of your dreams will only be possible if they are viewed in the context of what is actually happening in your life at the time. For instance, look at what is happening to you now, the situation you are in now, your present problems, your present ambitions, what makes you anxious, and so on. Your most deeply seated attitudes, hatreds, prejudices, habits, fears, guilt-feelings and pains of all kinds may stem from experiences in your early life. Still, you will find that if you've not dealt with them before, they are affecting your life now. Therefore, every dream refers to and expresses something in your present situation, your present life, your present state of mind. The causes of a present anxiety may lie in the remote past, for instance, but all you need to do is to deal with that anxiety in the here and now. Note also, recurring dreams should nearly always be treated as expressing some more or less long-standing inner conflict or anxiety.

Of course, not every dream element has a deep significant meaning; not every dream will contain a life transforming revelation--but then again, any dream might! Even the apparently most trifling dream story may be trying to tell you something important. On the whole, the truth would seem to be that if you are trifling with your dreams, their content will tend to be trivial; if you take your dreams seriously, their content will tend to be serious and significant. If what you want from your dreams is a fuller understanding of yourself and, eventually, fuller control over your life and the attainment of your proper 'destiny', your dreams will not let you down. They will lead you towards them.

Dream Interpretation

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