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life coaching tip – from may 08 |
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Unravel the messages in your dreamsEvery night you get a sneak preview of what’s really going on in your life – often things your conscious mind has missed. Dreams can show you where opportunities lie, give you important feedback on your health, show you where you are out of integrity and give you a different perspective on what’s happening all around you. Once in a while, dreams also show you the future – but mostly your dreams are about you and your life right now. WHY DO WE DREAM? RECALLING YOUR DREAMS Recalling dreams actually starts before you sleep! Firstly, make an intention. Tell yourself that you wish to remember your dreams. Then, before you snuggle down, make sure you have something with which to record your dream: a notebook and pen, or a mini cassette (Dictaphone). On waking, whilst still half groggy (if you wait until you are fully awake, it will be too late) record everything you can remember – the people, places, objects and what happened. Pay attention to the ‘odd’ bits – for they often hold the clues to the deeper meaning of the dream. Once you have recorded your dream, you can allow the rest of your waking process to happen in your usual way – interpreting your dream can be done later. INTERPRETING YOUR DREAMS Let me give you an example. I haven’t recorded my dreams regularly for awhile (and some are too intimate to share!) but here is a dream I recorded in September last year. I have a card. It’s a Christmas card with a paper insert. The image on the card both outside and in, magically changes. In the beginning the images are of famous people. I've sent this card to a man I like. I hope he keeps picking it up and seeing it change. I want to order this card for my clients. I see this card in a catalogue. If I press the page, the image changes – maps, beautiful scenes, beautiful women and snowy mountains. The man I'm ordering the cards from tells me that a charity has ordered 6,750 of these cards. I can add 50 more to that order for my clients. So in the first column of this dream analysis it would look like this: Christmas card Now you have the key elements, in the second column, write all possible meanings, next to the key element. In this example above, next to Christmas card, I wrote Christmas cards (because my dream might be simply about the cards themselves), but also, giving, joy, connection and friendship – as symbolically these are all things that Christmas cards conjure up for me. Work your way down your list of key elements in this way recording possible meanings – especially what symbolically it means. Again, in my dream, next to the paper insert I wrote: the inside and outside not the same; look and feel different. By the time you have worked your way through all possible meanings of the key elements, you will probably have a very good idea of what the dream is about as usually a pattern begins to emerge. Now have a think about what topic you think this dream is about. What are you dealing with in your life just now? What is the main theme of your emotions? In the third column, chose words from the second column that fall into the topic you believe your dream to be about. The main essence of my dream was about my role as a coach changing, of me growing to reach more people and guiding them through changes in life. It was seeing the differences in my outer and inner worlds and how magical these different parts of me are. It was about meeting a man and wanting him to see these different sides to me. Know that dreams often interweave different messages from everything is going on for you right now for you – dreams are incredibly clever in this way. YOUR OWN MEANINGS SOME GENERAL GUIDES It does appear that there are a few common things we all dream about: animals, moving in a vehicle, being in a building, people you know, flying and dying. Dream Interpretation books give you common meanings – and they can be useful, but please don’t take their view over your own meanings. Your meanings are the right ones for you. To finish, let me just reassure you about bad dreams and nightmares. These dreams are simply where the message is stronger. They are trying to tell you something and your subconscious is trying very hard for you to ‘hear’ its message. Remember it’s still symbolic. For example dreams of dying – are rarely about a real death. More often they contain a message about radical change (death of the old way), new beginnings or that you need to stop doing what you are doing for it is metaphorically killing you. …AND FINALLY * Exercise on mind filters WHAT NEXT? |
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During our waking hours, we are bombarded with messages from all of our senses – what we see, hear, touch, smell, taste and psychically absorb (to varying degrees we are all psychic). We receive far more information than we can process in the moment – so the mind filters* it according to our belief and value system and the emotional state we are in. Our dreams (in the simplest terms) are the way the subconscious does a tidying up job of all of the information we have gathered in the day – including the bits the conscious mind filtered out: it categories, makes sense and files away all of this information. As it does so, it creates dreams – movies that very cleverly incorporate the messages in a multilayered, condensed format. We sometimes we naturally ‘see’ our dreams with the conscious mind as we awake, just before they are stored in our memory. Instead of just recalling dreams randomly, we can however, begin to ‘capture’ our dreams and decipher their hidden messages – it is easier than you might imagine. 
When we sleep, the body cycles through different sleeping levels – deep, light and Rapid Eye Movement (REM). At the beginning of the night we spend more time in deep sleep. Towards the end, more time is in REM sleep. It is in this phase that we have our most vivid and memorable dreams. In particular, we are often experience REM sleep just before we wake up.