Dreams: Interpretation Of Dreams And Using A Dream Journal
09/10/22 17:48 Filed in:
DreamsThere is a guiding principle to dream interpretation, and Edgar Cayce said it best when he called for us to interpret the dreamer and not just the dream.
Dreams are a tool, like the proverbial finger pointing to the moon. Don't focus on the finger or we will miss out on all the celestial magic. Dreams are the finger and they are pointing to the dreamer. Interpreting our dreams is an exercise in self-discovery and self-growth. They are almost always referring back to us and every character, image and emotion is usually referring to various parts of our psyche.
The primary purpose of dreams is to attempt to balance the psyche. Keeping this in mind will help us understand the meaning of our dreams and prevent us from getting way off track in our interpretation.
Trying to understand one dream in isolation is like trying to understand a person by spending one day with them. By recording all of our dreams in a dream journal we will, over time, find it easier to understand individual dreams we have in the future.
Dreams are like plays or movies that we create every night, and they have a similar structure. It may be helpful to look for this structure when trying to understand our dreams:
- Location: Where does the dream take place? How do we feel about that place? What emotions arise within us as we think about it? Does it have any relationship with a real place we know?
- Characters: Who are the characters? How are we presented? Who is the antagonist? How do we feel about each of those people (including the presentation of ourself), and how do they relate to parts of our own personality or to people we know?
- Plot: How does the plot unfold? There is usually a beginning (where the story is established and begins to build), a middle (where a crisis peaks), and an end (where the crisis gets resolved though sometimes dreams don't provide the solution and end in the middle of the story because it is up to us to provide the resolution).
Sometimes (rarely) dreams are literal and they are easy to understand. There is nothing wrong with asking whether the face value of the dream may have meaning for us.
Most often, however, dreams are shrouded in symbolism that points beyond the literal image. They may be trying to communicate a very specific message that applies to our waking life, they may be merely trying to balance our emotional life or they may just be hinting at some thoughts or emotions in progress without any final resolution yet in mind.
Dreams are often messages from our subconscious mind that are resisted by our conscious mind. For this reason, the subconscious often cloaks the message in symbols so the dream isn't immediately rejected or simply avoided by the conscious mind.
Unraveling these symbols is very difficult, and also a lot of fun. It's the ultimate mystery and the most elaborate puzzle, yet the answer is always within us.
Sometimes the answers are as simple as consulting a dream dictionary for the meaning of common symbols and archetypes. However, each person is different and has their individual dream dictionary. To make things even more interesting, our personal dream dictionary will change over time.
Interpreting our dreams provides us with a life-long quest that goes way beyond the puzzle solving of the Da Vinci Code, and much more rewarding.
