dreaming
Anyone who knows me, even vaguely, will probably know that I love my dreams! For me, dreaming is a source of guidance, inspiration, wisdom, healing, knowledge and so much more. I’ve been dreaming significant dreams since I was a kid and even now I can still recall some major dreams from way back at the age of 5. In my teen years they took a turn for the nightmarish (lots of vivid dreams involving swords, knives, death, that kind of thing… and, yes, Freud would probably have had something to say about the sexual nature of the symbolism!) during which time my treasured friend told me I should start writing them down… so I did… and so began a lifelong relationship with my inner symbolic landscape.
A couple of decades later and I now have a wonderful collection of dream diaries that have been with me through all kinds of massive life events. Just in the same way that I consciously engaged with my intuition and that caused it to refine and develop, I also consciously engaged with my dreams and over time they developed into deeply spiritual experiences and took on many levels of meaning. This is not to say that every dream I have is profound, far from it, I do a lot of processing of daily information and underlying emotions and all the usual stuff that dreams typically represent. But my dreams also took on spiritual, psychic, telepathic, and pre-congnitive elements that have benefitted both my life and the lives of others through clear and significant messages.
I’ve trusted in the wisdom of my dreams so much that it has altered the course of my life. Leaving a significant relationship to start another with the man I would have my children with was perhaps the most important, but there have been many over the years, including pre-cognitive dreams of men who would become significant in my life, and another treasured one of my son before he was conceived saying it was time to ‘catch’ his soul and I had to act quickly!
One of my favourite dreams was a much more frivolous kind of one that I had when I lived in Glasgow. I worked in an Indian restaurant with some young Irish women who were a lot of fun and loved to party. One night I dreamed that one of them was down on the carpet, scrubbing it. She was with a friend and they were preparing for a party they were going to have. That was pretty much all that happened - they scrubbed the carpet! - and it seemed like such a random thing to dream about. The next day at work I told my friend the dream and her mouth sort of dropped open - “that’s exactly what I was doing!!!” she exclaimed, “we’re having a party on the weekend so we were cleaning the carpet!”
I remember trying to understand why I would dream about something like that. I don’t really know, but it still taught me something. I showed me that there is so much more to what we are capable of knowing than simply what we see and experience in our daily lives. We are connected to each other. We have a consciousness that goes beyond our rational minds. And it’s really fun to discover these aspects in yourself.
The most important thing you can do if you want to remember your dreams is to put a pen and notepad (or you can use your phone as I often do now) next to the bed and tell yourself as you go to sleep that you want to remember your dreams. When you wake up, try to start recalling the dream before you become fully conscious as you can lose details very quickly. Then, just write down everything you can remember. Who, what, when, where, why, how, as well as colours, environments, relationships between things, how certain things made you feel, etc… write down anything you can remember without trying to interpret it (but if you have a strong feeling about anything that happened, then write that down too).
Once you have recorded your dream, you can read it through for interpretation, and really you can do this as many times as you like and over a period of weeks or even months if you felt like it. In learning how to interpret your dreams, you need to start to see things more symbolically. As you get more familiar with your own dreams, start to notice if certain things pop up symbolically again and again. As an example, when I was in my 20s, I came to realise that crocodiles represented a deep and powerful fear. So, if I dreamt of crocs, I knew the dream was talking to a fear.
Learning the symbolic nature of your own dreams is essential to understanding them and is a great way to get to know your own psyche: it’s here in the subconscious that hidden aspects of your conditioning reside, and if you are willing to look at them, you can find healing. Of course, if you find anything traumatic about recalling your dreams then you may need to seek professional help from a psychologist. Ilana Laps is a psychologist in Melbourne who also specialises in dreamwork and could be a good place to start.
I think it’s also important when working with dreams not to get attached to them, or to their meanings. You don’t want to become self-obsessed with it all. Dreaming is just another tool to use to get to know yourself better, this time at the deep level of the psyche. In my earlier experiences of dreaming I would sometimes get caught up in them, in their meaning or significance to my life and it became confusing. If you can’t figure out a dream’s significance just let it go. Most of our dreams are just about processing information and getting to know yourself at the subconscious level. But sometimes they represent more and by giving them your awareness over time, you can open up another gateway to healing, guidance, creativity, intuition, and more.
If you’d like to learn more from me about dreaming and how you can enhance your relationship to your own dreams, then please get in touch! See my Services page for more information on Workshops and Spiritual Direction consultations.
