Interpretations
Whilst it is interesting to use books and other people's ideas to interpret the symbols and meaning of your dreams, the use of self inquiry, gestalt, sandplay, psychodrama and other experiential methodologies allows you to find their specific meaning for you.
You carry your own unique life history and circumstance which the dream language reflects. When you discover your dream's meaning from such inquiry, you are much more committed to applying the teachings of yourself to your life than if someone else simply tells you what it all means.
Lucid Dreaming
It is possible to be awake during dreams where we cease being the observer and become aware that we are dreaming. Here you can consciously direct and interact with the dream characters and landscape. This is called lucid dreaming. You may experience what seems to be physically impossible feats and influence events in the waking world.
Depending upon the dreamer's level of conscious awareness, the lucidity of the dream may be very vivid and feel totally real. You can experiment with beliefs and behaviors that would be either unacceptable or dangerous anywhere else and you can learn how to visit other lucid dreamers, send healing energy to loved ones and weave new possibilities into your own future.
Most people become aware of themselves as they dream and enter into the lucid dream landscape. Others can move straight from the normal waking state into lucid dreaming.
Waking Up Screaming
When the message from your unconscious Self literally wakes you up screaming in the middle of the night, it is really time to pay attention. The feelings of terror, imminent death and of falling often cause us to vividly remember the details of the dream but it is often the small details that our waking mind overlooks that hold the key to its message.
Recurring nightmares resulting from post traumatic stress and grief take much longer to resolve. By entering into experiential explorations of recurrent nightmares, people learn to face the unresolved feelings and patterns, and reclaim the pieces of themselves that have splintered off in shock and despair.
Relationships
I value my dreaming body and so like any important relationship, I spend time with it. Dreams are a powerful way to enrich life, solve problems, get rid of the daily trash and imagine better future for ourselves and others. The more I pay attention, the more direct and creative is my dreaming experience.
It is possible to detect the subtle difference between the symbolic representations of people that show up in dreams and the awareness of when another person's presence has actually entered the dream space. Studies into remote viewing have validated the translocation of people's awareness. I have often dreamed a session with someone only to have them call me in the morning and share their experience of the same event.
When we have lost a loved one, dreams can be like a telephone to call back home to feel the connection alive again. Sometimes it may feel like the psyche's comment on current life circumstances but often the dreamer really feels the lost person or pet or place, reminding us that consciousness goes way beyond the physical body.
With our planet in ecological crisis, some people are dreaming apocalyptic visions of the earth, others the garden of eden returned. The tendency to want to see these dreams as prophetic cannot be denied, and in fact, they need to be heeded and integrated if we are to find our personal response and new answers to the challenges. Our relationship to the biological systems that nourishes us, absorbs our wastes and sustains our lives teaches us much about the health of our own psyche and soul. The world reaches into us in our dreams and it is time to really pay attention.
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