Befriending Your Dreams: A Guide to Understanding their Hidden Meanings

To understand the meaning of dreams, you need to move, comfortably and gracefully, from the language of science to the metaphorical language of poets and mystics. Suspend whatever you believe about dreams and try to think of them as wise messages from deep within. These messages must be nurtured. The source of these messages, the dream maker within us, needs to know that we are ready to listen. Dreams can be friends, teachers, and mentors if we pay attention to their wisdom and listen.

In the sleep lab, when a subject is awakened during REM sleep, they remember a dream about 80% of the time, but in everyday life many people have little or no recollection of their dreams (Schredl, 2018).   For one thing, our society may be sleep and dream deprived (Naiman, 2006). We sleep too little, and especially we wake up too early. We don’t give ourselves enough time to dream. Also, many of us take medications like antidepressants and sleeping pills, that suppress REM sleep.

Also, the brain must be taught to remember dreams. Unless they are consciously rehearsed, the brain tends to retain dreams in temporary storage instead of in long term memory.  Remembering dreams is a skill that requires practice and the proper attitude (Harris, 2002). Dreams must be approached with mindful appreciation. Since they can be bizarre and unpleasant at times, it is easy to skeptically dismiss dreams. Like friends, if we stop inviting dreams and ignore them when they do come, they will stop visiting. So, how do we befriend our dreams and allow them to guide us to understanding them and their hidden meaning?

Ten steps guide to understanding the hidden meaning of your dreams:

1. Have the right attitude. Honor dreams, respect them, assume they have a message to tell even if you cannot grasp that meaning.

2. Make the recollection of dreams a daily ritual. Dreams, even if vividly recalled, are easily forgotten. Some people try to write down their dreams when they first wake up. This can work, but many mornings the dog is barking, the kids are crying, the boss is calling, and the spouse asks a question. By the time we attend to these “urgent” matters, the dream is lost.  Some people keep a notepad beside their bed to record their dreams to avoid this problem. We prefer to record dreams on a phone, through creating voice memos. Record them either first thing in the morning or upon awakening from a dream. Use your phone without any room lights. Bright light causes an alerting response and can make it harder to fall back asleep. Sometimes I am even surprised to find a dream recording on my phone that I had no recollection of.

3. Let the dream percolate in your mind as you go about your routine. Play with the images, see what thoughts and memories they bring. Don’t try to understand the dream, don’t try to reduce its beautiful, artistic language into commonplace truisms. Instead, enter the dream world’s unique narrative flow and patterns.

4. Notice connections between past and present dreams. I have attended a local dream interpretation group for many years. Dreams have their own fingerprints; each group member’s dreams have their pattern over time. The same images recur, with interesting variations, and the same plot structures. We never share dreams anonymously, but it would be evident to any group member which dreamer authored the dream image.

5. Remember that, like any good poem, novel, or painting, a dream can mean several things simultaneously. We must hold that ambiguity and find richness instead of doubt and confusion. Explore rather than try to interpret a dream. Appreciate its richness instead of insisting on a single simple meaning. 

6. With the guidance of a therapist, consider some advanced techniques, like dialoguing with dream images and characters or “dreaming the dream forward,” that is, extending it in your imagination to enrich and amplify plot elements. We will discuss these advanced techniques in more detail in a the later chapter on active imagination.

7. If you are a therapist, remember that it is a meaningful gift when a patient offers a dream in therapy. Value and honor that gift by interacting with their dream and taking it seriously. Therapists often covertly discourage discussion of dreams because they feel inadequate in the realm of dream interpretation. They feel like they need to know exactly what the dream means themselves before exploring the dream. You don’t need to know what the dream means, but you may gain important insights by talking about the dream and valuing it. You are modeling for your patient an open attitude toward the whole inner world.

8. Sometimes dreams are dark and frightening. Such dreams carry a message as well and need to be heard and understood. As Richard Rohr advised about spiritual distress, don’t panic; go deeper (Rohr, 2019). We will explore nightmares in a later chapter.  

9. Practice good sleep habits. Our culture devalues not only dreams, but also sleep. We sleep too little; we shorten the night with electric lights. We wake up too early. The longest periods of REM sleep occur in the early morning hours, after 5 AM. If our alarm goes off at 5:30 we will miss most of that REM sleep. Remember that our ancestors in northern climates faced 16-18 hours of darkness during the winter months. They probably slept for most of that time, perhaps making cave paintings in some REM like trance. 

10.  Perhaps most importantly, pay attention to the emotional content of the dream. When we dream, we process and integrate emotions, so paying attention to the emotional content of a dream helps you understand it’s message.  Exploring who feels what in a dream and why they feel it will help you remember the dream and be in relationship with it.

Dreams as invitations for change

When I share my interest in dreams, I usually get two kinds of responses. Some people want to hear more, while others condescendingly say,” most dreams are just nonsense.” What those people do next is always very similar, as if they were reading from the same script.  They report an example of a dream that seems to them to be nonsensical. Their example, however, has a patently obvious and transparent meaning to anyone else.

 My own father is a great example of the second kind of response. My dear father is 100 years old. He has always had troubled relationships with women. The two important women in his life, his mother and his wife (my mother), treated him cruelly, and he had a difficult time asserting himself with them, but he idealized them. When I told him that I was writing this book, he told me that dreams are usually just nonsense. “For instance, last night I dreamt that I was mowing the lawn. Someone, either my mother or my wife, was criticizing me for not mowing right. Isn’t that just nonsense!”

My father’s “meaningless” dream is a succinct summary of the negative way that he experienced women in his life. These two women merge into one image and criticize him. Even now, at the time of “mowing” or harvest at the end of life these dark figures have power over him and demean him. They are not the actual people; they are the negative aspects of the feminine that he has internalized. He can’t or won’t see the dream’s meaning, so the dream appears meaningless to him. The dream, properly understood, might offer him an opportunity to make sense of his own past, but he is not ready to explore the dream and must dismiss it. 

The value of understanding dreams is, after all, to change your life.  The poet Rilke writes, “. . . for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”   Change is far more important than understanding. Understanding is what the ego does. Understanding can be very helpful and can lead to change. Understanding can be superficial and intellectual. We can understand many things but never change. 

Dreams, because they come from outside the ego, can be powerful vehicles for genuine change. They offer a perspective from outside our conscious mind, with a power that comes from their archetypal nature.  

References

Eisely, L. (1978). The Star Thrower. Harvest Press. 

Harris, B. (2002). Sacred Selfishness. Inner Ocean Publishing. 

Naiman, R. (2006). Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming and Awakening. Syren Book Company. 

Rohr, R. (2019). The Universal Christ. Crown Publishing. 

Schredl, M. (2018). Researching Dreams: The Fundamentals. Palgrave (Macmillan).