Do you dream at night?

Most of us dream every night. But we don’t remember our dreams. When we wake up and return to reality our conscious mind steps in and we rarely remember where we have been.

Our dreams are a window into our inner world. They are able to enrich our lives in a variety of ways if we take the time to record them we can find the meaning and symbolism within them. Dreaming is the communication between our conscious mind and our unconscious mind, helping people create wholeness. They are the bridge that allows movement back and forth between what we think we know and what we really know.

Dreams can assist us in understanding our daily challenges and help us to find clarity in the decisions we need to make.

Dreams can give us insight into our intimate relationships and our role in them.
Dreams are able to guide us in unlocking our creativity and imagination.
Dreams highlight our emotional difficulties and can give us a new perception of them.
Dreams can be the door to what psychiatrist Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious” – the deepest layer of the unconscious which extends beyond the individual psyche.

In our dreams we escape to magical and mysterious worlds. When we dream we are able to ignore the boundaries of time and space, and travel to other places which we might never actually have visited in our awakened state. Dreams can also be a portal into past life memories.

We can travel back in time, experience unresolved issues in our present existence, as well as going forward in time to see and experience possible outcomes of where our actions might lead us.
Exploring and recording these internal adventures lead us to clarity and gives a different insight into all aspects of our lives.

How can I record and analyse my dreams?

Keep a notebook next to your bed or use a phone app like Dream Journal Ultimate (you can download the Apple app here or the Android app here). As soon as you wake up, record what you remember of your dream(s). If you can’t remember a dream from that night – write ‘no dream’. If you keep this up for at least two weeks, you will start to program your conscious mind to remember your dreams and you will begin to wake up full of ‘memories’.

Identify how you were feeling in each dream. Did it make you feel scared? Excited? Angry? Confused? Remorseful? Do you still feel these feelings the morning after? Your emotional state during a dream is key to making sense of it. This should be the aspect of the dream that you pay the most attention to.

Look for a pattern in your dreams over time. They will reveal what you’re subconsciously thinking about. Look for elements that are consistent across your dreams: are you always in a certain place and/or time? Is there a certain person always there with you, or are you always alone? Is there a particular plant, animal, or other object that always shows up? Are there recurring thoughts or emotions?

If you keep dreaming of the same things over and over, it may point to issues in the waking world that you’re trying to deal with or perhaps have been reluctant to confront.