While dreams have been a subject of study for thousands of years (the first documented dream study dates back to 4000 B.C), they are little understood by modern science. In fact, the “official” scientific understanding of dreams is way behind more intuitive working models. Even Freud attempted to scientifically study dream interpretation, and wrote a book on the subject.

Why so much time and energy spent studying dreams and their meaning? The answer is simple: it’s a good use of your time. Think about it: you spend a third of your life sleeping. To put it in prospective, at age 60 you spent about 20 years unconscious. That would be a lot of time if it was completely wasted! Since dreams can bring useful and enlightening information, it seems that studying how to make the best out of them, and out of all these years spent sleeping, is a good investment of time. In fact, intuitive study of dreams can teach us a lot about ourselves. Every night dreams bring our awareness very close to the sub-conscious, allowing us to take a peek at its creations and messages. Dreaming is the ultimate form of meditation, the ultimate tool to shutdown physical world distractions and concentrate inward on a world without the boundaries of the physical reality. Dreaming is the ultimate second life, another side of you dwelling in another dimension.

A brief list of some information you can get from dreams includes:

• Health: your sub-conscious knows everything that is happening in your body. It can point out possible health issues before they manifest externally.
• Relationships: your sub-conscious can be thought as a very intuitive friend and a close friend to every person you care about. It is exposed to the information about everything and everyone that is available at the super-conscious level. Even if that information doesn’t make it to the conscious awareness level, your sub-conscious is aware of it and it can give you insights on relationships and suggestions on what you need to work on. For example it can tell you how somebody feels about you, what you should do to change that, etc.
• Inspiration: if you tend to shut down inspiration at the conscious level, your sub-conscious still gets it from the super-conscious; that inspiration can be a source of great ideas that are often given to you through dreams or day dreams.
• Warnings: your sub-conscious often sends warnings in your dreams. These could be a reflection of your conscious worries, or the reflection of the sub-conscious beliefs that something painful or unpleasant is going to happen if you don’t change anything in your life. Remember that the sub-conscious doesn’t know the future. The future is not pre-determined. The sub-conscious simply has access to much information that can help foreseen possible futures. It knows what wheels are turning in what direction in your life and around you. It can be surprisingly accurate in its predictions or guesses, but it will never be absolutely perfect.
• Messages: your sub-conscious can bring you messages from “other” people. Some examples are messages from departed loved ones or from living loved ones that are intensely consciously or unconsciously broadcasting messages to you. These messages are coming from the super-conscious, which is connected to everything, and often the sub-conscious belief system lets them in your dreams, if your conscious mind doesn’t have an issue with that notion. True skeptics will have an extreme hard time ever experiencing anything like that because their belief system is locked down and won’t let these messages in. Even if they did, they would be consciously dismissed.

Since during sleep you don’t consciously judge and reject what the sub-conscious has to say, a lot of information reaches our awareness almost untouched, if there are not existing preconceived filters. The sub-conscious as usual takes note of the amount of attention that the conscious puts on that information, which is almost none, and stores that in memory along with the dreams. We usually have 6 or 7 different dreams per night, but when we wake up we often can’t recall most of them because of that small level of conscious attention we paid to it.

Sometimes we wake up in the middle of a dream, and our conscious has a chance to focus on the dream for a few seconds while we are coming back to consciousness. That gives the conscious a few seconds to pay attention to the dream, and the dream becomes all in a sudden much easier to remember.

All of this can be programmed differently, and we can train our sub-conscious to remember dreams even if we don’t pay conscious attention to them while they are occurring. In fact, if when we wake up we focus on trying to remember our dreams, our sub-conscious takes note of that. If we keep doing it for several days or weeks, the sub-conscious eventually modifies its belief system and assigns a higher level of conscious attention to dreams, even if that conscious attention is not active during them. The more we try to remember our dreams, the easier is going to be. If you ever stop trying, your sub-conscious will notice, and eventually it will become hard again.

Dream Types

Dreams can be categorized in different ways. The picture below shows 3 different possible categorizations of dreams by content, experience and frequency.

I’ll dedicate several articles on these various dream types and what you can do with them. I will especially concentrate on Lucid Dreams, which are the ultimate second life experience.

Dream Interpretation Mastery

Regardless of their various categories and types, we can learn how to use dreams as a fantastic tool of discovery. This learning can make you a “Dream Master“, which is an individual that can remember and accurately interpret his or her dreams.

To become a “Dream Master” you need to train yourself to remember and interpret the symbology of dreams.

How to Remember Dreams.

To remember your dreams you simply need to focus your conscious attention on trying to remember them, and you need to keep doing it day after day. It’s that simple! Doing so will tell the sub-conscious that you are interested to remember, and that will cause your sub-conscious belief system and filter system to accept that order and allow the memories of dreams to be accessible by your conscious mind while you are awake.

Your sub-conscious is very impressed by any physical action taken toward a certain objective. Based on this fact, there are some very effective techniques that you can try.

Dream Journaling.

Keep a journal and a pen next to your bed, so that you can reach it as soon as you wake up. Alternatively keep a tape recorder or a digital voice recorder near your bed, so you don’t even need to write. When you wake up, before you move much, write down or record what you remember of your dreams. As you write or speak, more details will come to mind. Write them down. You don’t need to write all the details; dreams are a high bandwidth communication channel, so there is way too much detail in a dream to be able to write it all. What you can do is to write or record the main aspects of the dream, or the aspects that seem more important to you. You can draw simple pictures, if you like to do so. You don’t need to keep the journal neat and clean. Just write! Make it messy and creative, it’s ok! Have fun with it! Also, while you are remembering and writing, don’t try to interpret the symbols. Just let them come to mind. You’ll interpret them later. Don’t forget to write down non physical aspects of what you see. For example the way you felt about the happenings; if you were seeing the scene as in a movie or if you were an active partecipant; if you were in a body or if you were “outside”, like a camera. All of these details might be useful for interpretation.

Programming Your Sub-conscious.

Before going to sleep, tell your sub-conscious that you want to remember dreams. Mentally say something like “Tomorrow morning when I wake up I will remember all my dreams, and I will write them in my journal.” Visualize remembering effortlessly and writing in your journal. Visualize it as something easy and natural that makes you happy.

Repeat a couple of times, but no more than that. You do not want to put too much pressure on yourself, otherwise it will become painful and you will obtain the opposite effect. Your sub-conscious tends to run away from pain. If remembering dreams is going to be painful, your sub-conscious is going to make sure you won’t remember them at all.

Don’t give up.

It may take days, weeks or months to remember dreams. Don’t give up! If you give up you reinforce your sub-conscious belief that you don’t really want to remember dreams, and it will get harder instead of easier.

How to interpret dreams.

Dream interpretation is a bit like cracking a code, but is not difficult. You need to learn and understand the map of symbols used by your sub-conscious and use it to decipher dreams.
Each person has a different code, so you can’t ask somebody else to decipher your dreams. You need to do it yourself. Two effective way of doing so are:

The “Pause and Ask” method.

Who better than your sub-conscious knows the meaning of the symbols in your dreams? Just ask the sub-conscious! What you can do is to close your eyes and bring to mind the dream and play it again like you would with a movie on DVD.

When something interesting happens in the movie, just press the pause button and study the scene. Focus on the various details and objects and, for each of them, “become” that object or detail. Take its point of view and ask yourself what the meaning is. Alternatively think of each object or detail as a living creature, and simply ask it what its meaning is. Most likely you will get an answer.

The “Inner-Channeling” Method.

Channeling is usually a term that refers to the process of bringing information from an external source, such as a spirit or entity. What I’m describing for dream interpretation is more of a channeling of your sub-conscious; to differentiate the two concepts I call this process “Inner-Channeling”. For this method I recommend the use of a tape recorder, but it is optional. While you are driving, doodling, working out or doing anything else that keeps you somewhat physically busy, start talking aloud about the dream (and record yourself, if you decided to use the recorder). Imagine that you are in front of an audience and that you are a known “Master Dreamer”. The audience is there to learn from you, and you can interpret any dream perfectly and accurately. With that idea in mind, first describe the dream. The audience needs to know what you are going to interpret, right? When you are done, start interpreting the dream, item by item and object by object and make connections between interpretations. Don’t stop! If you get stuck, make stuff up. Don’t spend too much time thinking about it; just talk your way through. The audience in front of you wants to hear you speak. The worse you can do is to stop. Don’t worry about making mistakes and correcting them. Just keep saying things. Keep going all the way to the end. You will surprise yourself of what you can come up with.

The “Symbol Programming” Method.

You can buy one of these dream symbol interpretation books. It can’t possibly work out of the shelf, but if you keep reading it and studying it, your sub-conscious learns and takes note. After a while you will start dreaming in terms of the symbols you studied in the book. In other words, you are teaching your sub-conscious a new symbolic language that you can then translate using the same book.

Asking for Confirmations.

What if you came up with an interpretation to a dream that you are not sure about? What if you have doubts? Well, ask your sub-conscious! If it works well for you, you can use the “The Pendulum” or the “Body Answers” methods to ask questions about your interpretation, and see what the sub-conscious has to say.

Have fun with this! Take it as a way to get back one third of your life for something truly useful, and for an exploration of your inner-self and a discovery of your potentials.

I like it, stumble it!