Last night I had the stangest dream. I was exploring a building that was full of scientific/new age experiments. My business partner was expanding and contracting himself like a balloon to reach some conclusions about mass and there was a girl who was growing some enormous vegtables in a vibrant garden. Then my friend, myself and another person turned into fruits, specifically an orange, lemon and lime and travelled up large flights of stairs and along corridors to a canteen where we conversed with a few others. Incidentally, we had transformed back into humans and they told us that when we reach the ‘hospital’, we can make anything we want happen. What does it all mean?
“Dreams are the mind’s way of dealing with unresolved emotional arousal from the day. It happens during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and enables your mind to gain closure on things that have happened during the day that are still active. Dreams are often of a weird nature because the mind is deactivating the aroused emotion, not the situation itself. You maybe able to work some of it out by remembering your thoughts and what happened the day before.”
Claire Whiston
“I’ve done enough dream work over the years to be pretty sure that only the dreamer can really know what a dream means.
There may be some value in the notion of standard symbolic equivalences (e.g. losing teeth in a dream = fear of losing power), but IMO third-party interpretations of dreams have far less resonance than when the dreamer experiences what a dream means by revisiting it using various techniques such as those in Gestalt.”
Stuart Harris
“Funnily enough, I had a brilliant dream last night.
I was looking at someone’s old photo album, all the pictures were sepia and suddenly I noticed that all the people in them were talking to me! Just like the newspapers and photos in the Harry Potter movies!
I called my partner in the dream still, and said: wow! what a great way of channelling those who have passed and getting messages from them! Unfortunately, they were muttering. I couldn’t make out what they were saying and then I woke up.
I work a lot with dreams with my clients. I believe that many of them are attempts by our unconscious to deliver us information about important things which are going on in our lives, and sometimes lead to understanding about deeper issues.
If you would like to learn to process your own dreams, please visit my website where you can download How to Analyze Your Own Dreams: FREE!!!! http://www.hi5.info
I agree Stuart. Those dream interpretation books are a waste of trees to me. I’ve always encouraged my clients to bring the dreams they remember and it’s always rewarding. Interestingly, people who claim not to recall their dreams, or even think they don’t dream, often begin to do so when they are in therapy, especially with those of us who like to do deep work.
I think there are many levels of dreams too. There are some which are obviously, as Clare Whiston says, processing the day’s stuff, but some, especially recurrent dreams, have fantastic information about underlying processes.
I read a book by Keith Aherne, the Lucid Dreaming expert some years ago and have managed to have a couple of those (being able to ‘wake up’ in a dream and change it.) Keith wanted to teach disabled people to dream so they could experience physical activities that they could not achieve due to their limitations.
He said it was easier to have a lucid dream in the morning if you had awakened and then went back to sleep. Presumably a variance in the REM/Delta etc. pattern. My partner claims to be able to get back into a good dream if he wants to – he’s been a practitioner of High Magic so is an experienced visualiser, but it eludes me, I can’t do it!
Lucid dreaming is also featured widely in different shamanic practices all over the World.”
Rhiannon Hill
“being able to ‘wake up’ in a dream and change it.” – I can do that on occassion but I don’t know how or why it happens.
I had a dream that i was a guest at a wedding, i knew the people around me. When they asked me who i’d brought with me, i answered by introducing “Sean”. Sean died when we were 18 and we were never close, we were in the same class at school. I’ve never had any feeling for him and haven’t thought of him in many years. In my dream he wasn’t as i remebered him he was older but i could see it was him. Why would i dream that?