Dreams are our friends - yes, even nightmares! They can tell us a lot about our lives as well as give us a hint about secret desires, aspirations and ambitions. The trouble with dreams, however, is that, more often than not, they come to in a form of a bizarre mumbo-jumbo, more likely to complicate your search for truth than facilitate it. It is with this problem in mind that this article looks at five very easy steps to find out what your dream is about.
1. Relax Before You Dream
Falling asleep with a clear and relaxed mind is critical to any dream interpretation effort. The more distraught you are when you go to bed, the lower the chance that you will be able to remember your dreams in sufficient detail. Therefore, do your best to relax and get the day's troubles out of your head as you go to sleep.
2. Record Your Dream
If you are at all serious about dream interpretation, keep a notebook and a pencil ready and record your dream as soon as you wake up. Many people make the mistake of assuming that just because they remember the dream now they'll be able to remember it a few hours later. This is not true! Unless you've written down the details of your dream immediately after waking up, you won't have much to work with later when you proceed to the next step - to actually find out what your dream is about.
3. Associate Your Dream
After writing your dream down, you will more often than not be looking at a list of bizarre events and occurrences, from being chased by a three-headed green Martian to seeing your fiancé attend an important event wearing little more than underwear! The key to this stage is to look past the seemingly meaningless pattern and associate these apparently bizarre events to developments in your life in order to create a connection between the events in the dream and the happenings in the real world. For example, does your fiancé have an important meeting coming up? You will never be able to find out what your dream is about unless you are able to associate it with what's happening to you in your everyday life.
4. Analyze Your Dream
Having established associations with the real world, it is time to analyze your dream and to actually interpret its meaning. To take the fiancé example even further, perhaps he worries about not being prepared for the meeting (hence the mental picture of him showing up to it in nothing more than underwear?) As you can see, creativity is critical for this stage (and having a good-looking fiancé usually helps, too!) Remember, to find out what your dream is about you must take an open-minded approach towards analysis.
5.Consult with References
This is an optional step that involves cross-checking your understanding of the dream with existing resources available both online and in the real world. Although ultimately dream interpretation is a personal process that relies on your unique experiences, a lot of people exhibit certain commonalities in what they experience - and therefore consulting with a reference source may be a good idea.
This brief step-by-step guide should hopefully give you a good start in dream interpretation. However, always keep in mind that it takes a lot of training and self-discipline before you can accurately find out what your dream is about! Therefore, be patient, persistent and meticulous, especially when writing down the details of your dream in the morning, and do not be discouraged by the lack of immediate results. Dream interpretation does not offer instant gratification - but, in the long run, it does help you unlock doors to your subconsciousness.
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