Interpreting Your Dreams - Dream Interpretation

(originally from the Magical Mysteries Collection – 
later republished on Yahoo! Contributor Network July 30, 2008)

Dream analysis, for thousands of years, has been a function performed by magicians, sages, and prophets. In Genesis 40, the Pharaoh summoned Joseph to interpret his dreams. And in Daniel I, King Nebuchadnezzar called upon Daniel to analyze his dreams. Because incorrect interpretations might result in death, it was imperative that they be accurate.

Today dream analysis books and websites offer readers a glimpse of the subconscious dream world through universally accepted images and their associated meanings. Archetypes (universal images), mythical figures, and dream symbolism figure prominently in our psyche and relate to us messages from our subconscious. To know ourselves, we must know our conscious mind as well as our subconscious mind.

But many of us find, upon awakening, that if we remember our dreams at all, they appear in fragments that make no sense to us. Websites and books explain some dreams, but certain dream symbols may be more personal than universal. A bird to one person might signify flight and freedom, but to another it may mean fright. If we want to understand ourselves, we may benefit by understanding our dreams.

Remembering them may be difficult, however. To remedy forgetting them, try concentrating not only on having a dream before you fall asleep, but on remembering it as well. Gayle Delaney, in her book, "Living Your Dreams (see above)," invites us to explore our dreams by keeping a dream journal.

Keep the journal and a low-wattage lamp by your bed. Get in the habit of recording your dream immediately upon awakening. Even if only fragments appear, write them down anyway. As you write, more pieces of the dream may surface.

When you finish recording the dream, make a list of all the people, places, and things you remember from the dream. Next to each image from the list, describe its appearance, its form, and the feelings it arouses in you. Do any of the images remind you of anything else going on in your life, or any person?

Now describe the actions that took place in your dream and write the feelings associated with each action. Record the overall emotional quality of the dream. I've included a form that might help you record your dreams. Just click on it and print it out.

Don't try to analyze your dream as you write it. Logic and analysis can wait. Sometimes enlightenment will come as you record your dream. Other times it will appear when you review your dreams. Still other times the message won't come until weeks or even months later. A dream you had in March may make more sense to you in October.

As you become adept with the process, ask yourself specific questions before falling asleep, and ask for the message to be clearly illustrated in a dream. How, what, and why questions will result in better dream answers than yes or no questions. For instance, "What can I do to improve my relationship?" works better than "Will my relationship improve?" As you record your dreams, in time, certain patterns may emerge.

Learning about yourself through dreams may open windows to your soul.

Paranormal Nightmare – While Awake!

On Halloween the room was dark except for shadowed branches dancing on the walls. I was alone, awaiting that moment of surrender when my body would cave to the demands of sleep. But sleep never came.

My eyes sprung open at the mention of my name. Thereeeeesa, the voice whispered long and slow. Thereeeeesa.

As if the planets had spun out of control, their centrifugal force racing at a speed too fast for my mind to comprehend, I felt myself plastered to the bed. Every time I tried to lift my arms, my legs, and even my head, I remained glued in place. Panic swept over me in a drenching sweat as I tried in desperation to force myself out of my bed.

Though I poured every bit of strength into every imagined move in my efforts to stand up, I felt my energy deplete with each attempted movement. A kind of prickly numbness stabbed every pore in my skin while I listened to the reverberation of my heart thumping in my ears - drowned out only by my name being called again, Thereeeeesa.

(To read the rest, please visit A Halloween Paranormal Nightmare While Awake: Halloween Voices Won't Let You Sleep.

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Unrecognizable People Who Appear In Your Dreams – Could They Be From a Past Life?

Have you ever dreamed of a person you've never met? I have. I see people I couldn’t possibly have made up. Their features look unlike anyone I’ve ever seen. While the possibility exists that these may be people I saw when I was a baby and forgot I’d seen them, another possibility exists – they may be people from a past life.

In a dream once, I looked into a mirror and the person staring back at me was not me, but because I was looking into a mirror, I instinctively knew that it had to be me, though she looked very different. How can we create people with a certain hair texture and color, facial structure, including eyes, nose, lips, and ears, body height and weight – specific to only one individual – if we have never seen that person before?

Babies tend to stare at people, so we could assume that the features of those individuals remain firmly affixed inside a baby’s brain, coming out years later to surface in a dream. Maybe the woman with long red hair struck the baby as being kind and loving. Now the baby – as an adult – dreams about that woman with the long red hair, but the baby doesn’t remember the woman and wonders why she dreamed about her.

In other dreams I have been in places I’ve never visited in this lifetime. Then one day, I see a photograph of the place that had formerly been in my dreams. The only difference is that the building was demolished before my birth. How do we explain those kinds of dreams – imagination?

Long before Harry Potter, I dreamed that I was sitting in a train station. Somebody handed me a photograph of a family. The people in the photo moved as if they were in a movie and I recognized one of the people as being me, but not the way I looked in the dream. Others in the photo were part of my family, but I sat alone in that train station and didn’t recognize them as part of my family at that time. Even in the dream I wondered if I was looking at a photograph of my family in a past life.

Years later, I wondered how JK Rowling and I came up with the same idea. Are ideas roaming around us all the time and those of us who grab onto them are credited with creating them? That’s a story for another blog.

As far as this blog is concerned I have often thought back to times when I was a little girl. I had a certain fascination with trains. My grandfather worked for the Illinois Central Railroad in Chicago, but my fascination with trains went beyond knowing my grandpa worked for a train company. When I played with my dolls, I pretended my couch was a car in the train and I held my babies close to protect them. Always, when I played with my dolls, I protected them. From what?

So many strangers throughout my life have appeared in my dreams. That I remember them is significant. Why would I make up a face and a body and then remember that person when I awoke? Do strangers appear in your dreams? If so do you create them? Are we all gods who design different bodily elements and are fully capable of pulling those elements together to create a human being? Or do we use our imaginations to create people? 

Admittedly, I have a rich imagination, but am I capable of dreaming into existence a structure that stood hundreds of years ago. How did I know what it looked like? While many possibilities exist, I can only wonder at how much of our unused brain holds material we’ve gathered throughout our time on earth, whether in this body or in a past-life body. Have you dreamed a human being into existence?

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Premonition Dreams – Psychic Dreams

Premonition dreams are psychic dreams that alert the dreamer to events that might occur if the dreamer doesn’t take necessary precautions to prevent the dream from coming true – if the dream portends evil. On the other hand, if the dream promises a joyful surprise, the dreamer can look for opportunities that allow the dream to manifest. 

Dreamers don’t often know that what they are experiencing is a premonition dream until the dream comes true. As adults, our dreams manifest in such a way that the alarm caused by the dream alerts us to automatically heed the warning, but what happens when a child experiences a premonition dream? Here is one story:

A 9-year-old girl, Audrey, dreams that her 2-year-old sister, Avery, has been abducted and that she was responsible for her baby sister being stolen by a man. The following morning Audrey is so shaken by the dream, she tells her mother about it.

Later that day, while 6-year-old brother, Nolan, plays at the ball park, Audrey and Avery play with some friends at one of the 3 parks within the same ball field. One of Audrey’s friends asks Audrey if she can take Avery to the smaller park to play. Audrey agrees.

Several minutes later, the friend arrives without Avery. Audrey panics. Where is her sister? 

The friend doesn’t know. 

Audrey runs back to her mother and cries in fear that Avery is missing and that it’s all her fault.

Dreams are filled with symbols and personal information about the dreamer, but sometimes they serve as warnings, too. In this case, my 9-year-old granddaughter hadn’t yet developed the skills that would alert her to possible danger the moment her friend asked to take her sister to a different park. Red flags would have surfaced everywhere for an adult. The dream would have materialized immediately and the adult Audrey would have said something like, “Don’t lose her,” “Watch her carefully,” or “Make sure you don’t leave that park without her.” But Audrey is 9, and might never have had a premonition dream before.

Over the years, I’ve had numerous premonition dreams and I’ve learned to heed the warnings. You might not know that you’re having a premonition dream until the dream comes true. Sometimes you’ll dream about characters you’ve heard about through others or from books or movies. Those characters might represent a person in your life. Pay attention to your dreams and your personal symbology, so you will avoid experiencing the pain Audrey felt when her dream came true. You might want to read my Inaugural Blog to find out more about symbolism in your dreams.

After the frightening event occurred, my daughter assured my granddaughter that everything would be fine. A man carrying a baby and walking with another of his own children, had seen that Avery was alone, asked Avery to show him where her parents were, and walked toward the ball field with her. So as my daughter and Audrey walked toward the parks, the man walked toward my daughter. Audrey vowed to never again allow anyone to take her sister away from her.

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Evil in Dreams

Maybe I’ve been watching too many crime shows and they all culminated in the dream I had early this morning. But in the dream I was at an event with President Barack Obama who graciously accepted my request for a photo with him after a friend of mine got her picture taken with him. My camera ran out of battery life though, so I turned around to ask if anybody could take our photo together, but everyone was gone, and when I looked back, the president was gone as well. An odd-looking man who I can describe only as being part octopus because he had at least 8 arms, reached out for me.

Octo-man began running after me and I slipped through what looked like a maze of pipes trying to escape his tentacles. Every time I thought I had lost him, he found me again. Escaping him was difficult, because he seemed to know where I was going at all times.

But now I was in a house that may have belonged to one of my daughters (I don’t know which one, because it didn’t look like any of their homes). I sensed an evil presence in the home and the front door slammed shut behind me as I entered. Doors kept slamming all around me and when I left one room to go into the kitchen to get some food for my two youngest daughters, the door to the room they were in slammed shut as well. I didn’t seem to be frightened – more angry than anything, and with no way to enter the room they were in, I found myself trying to figure out what types of food I could slip under the door so my kids could eat.

But then the oppressive and heavy evil presence surrounded me and I became frightened. I couldn’t make it go away by myself, so I started calling out for Jesus’s help over and over. And then I awoke.

This dream may have come along because of my intense feelings for the horrifying events Michelle Knight experienced at the hands of a man who was so evil he kept her locked up for 11 years. Dr. Phil was a guest on The Doctors yesterday and he talked about his interview with Michelle. The evil kidnapper, the father of a friend of Michelle’s, seduced Michelle into his home by offering her a puppy for her son. What’s so sad to me is that many of us might have trusted the father of a friend too, simply because we knew who he was. The (I’m finding it hard to call him a man) devil tortured and raped her so often, I couldn’t help but wonder how she survived for SO LONG in the presence of true evil. 

So I think that was at the top of my mind when I went to bed. I also watch a lot of the true and fictional crime shows. Yesterday I was reminded, through Facebook, of the kidnapping and subsequent murders of Kankakee, Illinois, children, Christopher Meyer and Tara Sue Huffman, who were both murdered by the same man. Another blurb on television spoke of a group of people who believe the world is becoming more evil and they’ve joined forces – for what? – to end evil? I don’t know. I got distracted. So I think the reason I dreamed of evil was because my subconscious allowed me to dream of evil.

What the octopus man reminds me of is one of the characters in one of the Spiderman movies – Dr. Otto Octavius (Doc Ock). That character always creeped me out. So I think that’s why I included him in the dream.

Another obvious theme is locked doors. Locked doors generally signify opportunities lost. But you know what "they" (whoever they are) say – when one door closes, another opens. With so many doors closing, maybe more opportunities will begin knocking on my door.

Maybe I should start watching different shows.

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What Do Alligators and Snow Represent in a Dream?

While driving by a hotel during a snowstorm, my car swerves off the road and falls beneath several feet of snow. Because the snow is light, I manage to open the driver's side door, climb up the incline, and walk around the front of the hotel where I enter the bar and ask several of the men who are drinking if they can help. None of them offer and in fact ignore me as they return to their drinking and talking, so I walk back to my car and get in, remembering that I had previously been able to maneuver my way out of a couple of ditches (in real life I actually did), so I should be able to do it again.

After moving the car back and forth, I successfully pull myself out of the ditch. But then, because the road is so icy, I fall off the road on the other side and the car falls deeper and deeper into that ditch.

Now I'm at home (new dream? same dream jumping ahead?), but it doesn't look like my home and an alligator is walking freely throughout my house. I feel as if I should be afraid of the alligator – at least for the sake of my grandchildren, but while I'm watching my step, I'm not really terrified of it. Somebody else is in the home with me but I don't know who it is because I can't see the person. 

In trying to get away from the alligator I become suddenly aware that the alligator is right behind me. I freeze in terror but I also feel a kind of calm as the alligator wraps its head around mine. It doesn't bite me though. It just keeps its huge jaw suspended around my head. I can't move, because I don't want any sudden movement to cause the alligator to bite me, but I feel no fear. I can see everything in front of me, but I don't want to move.  And the dream ends.

In trying to decipher the meaning of the first part of the dream, I think the reason I dreamed of snow is because I have been swamped with it lately (hmm, don't alligators live in swamps). Snowfall after snowstorm after snowfall after snowstorm has been my experience of the weather this winter season. But the snow must represent SOMETHING.

As should the alligator. I don't remember watching any programs about alligators. As a matter of fact the only reptiles I've seen lately are the little geckos from the Geiko ads. And yet, the more I investigate this dream and I connect this dream to the previous one, I believe the snow might represent my financial situation. I'm buried beneath the weight of my financial responsibilities (I'm actually waiting for better weather so I can put my house up for sale, because I can't afford to live here, though I really love my home and really don't want to move). 

The men in the bar could have represented all of the financial institutions I've been contacting in hopes of refinancing my home, but I've been having absolutely no luck. They all act as if my manufactured home is some type of pariah and I'm left to fend for myself. Manufactured homes are considered vehicles. Nobody wants to refinance a vehicle. Like the car in the dream, I'm going to have to get out of this mess by myself.

The alligator could represent some aspect of my situation. We often hear, "I couldn't wrap my head around it." In this dream though, the alligator was able to wrap its head around mine. I was at home (though not necessarily the one where I now live) and while I was afraid for my grandchildren, I wasn't afraid for myself. Perhaps the primitive reptilian part of my brain actually CAN figure out my dilemma. And selling my home seems to be the first step toward getting out from under the tremendous debt this home is causing me. So even though I don't want to move, just as I didn't want to move when the alligator had its head wrapped around mine, I know that I have to – unless my financial circumstances change.

The positive aspect of this dream is that I have always been able to get myself out of difficult situations, and this dream is telling me that I will be able to get myself out of this difficult situation.

Photo of alligator is from wikimedia commons.

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