Dream Dictionary

1. Dreams: Mirrors to Your Inner Self

A Dream is a mirror revealing your deepest self.

Dreams as Monitors: Like hospital monitors displaying vital signs, dreams reveal unconscious processes within your body, mind, and intuitions. They offer a glimpse into your inner world, showing feelings and mental structures that are often hidden from your waking awareness. This perspective allows you to witness subtle, otherwise unknown processes, providing a unique window into your personality and connections with others.

Beyond the Surface: Dreams are not merely reflections of experienced events. They are complex mental phenomena that can solve problems, predict outcomes, and play with possibilities through imagination. They replay disturbing events to find constructive solutions, create new ideas from old memories, and deal with a wide range of issues beyond simple reflection.

Personal and Universal: Dreams are a deeply personal experience, yet they also connect you to the universal human experience. They are a mirror reflecting your unique self, but also a window into the collective unconscious, where shared human experiences and archetypal patterns reside. This duality makes dreams a powerful tool for self-discovery and understanding.

2. Decoding the Dream Language

Dreams do not express this wider perspective in words or the neat phrases of spoken language.

Beyond Words: Dreams communicate through images, interactions, and feelings, not through the neat phrases of spoken language. They use the language of the unconscious, which developed long before speech. Like skilled actors, dreams use body language, interactions, lighting, and color to convey ideas and emotions.

Personal Associations: Each object, place, and person in your dreams is associated with your unique feelings and ideas. The image of a car, for example, might represent your ambition, social standing, or feelings about the environment. Dreams use these personal associations to depict your reactions and feelings.

Drama and Insight: Dreams often present a drama that reflects your unconscious feelings. By exploring the plot, characters, and settings, you can gain insight into your needs and desires. The dream puts your previously unconscious feelings into a drama that, when given a little thought, helps you understand your needs.

3. The Science Behind Dreaming

Through the scientific approach we know that each of us dream about five times every night, and while we dream our eyes move, following the action in the dream.

REM Sleep: Scientific research has shown that we dream about five times every night during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep, our eyes move, following the action in the dream, and our voluntary muscles are paralyzed, sometimes giving rise to a feeling of being possessed by an external force.

Evolutionary Roots: Studies of brain scans reveal that dreams are formed by drawing on a well of emotional memories. The presence of REM sleep in duck-billed platypuses suggests that this form of sleep and the process underlying dreaming developed in early mammals 250 million years ago.

Beyond Garbage Dumping: Research rejects the theory that dreams are merely a means of dumping mental garbage. Instead, dreams exhibit narrative coherence and logic, suggesting they constitute a separate reality that plays a vital part in our lives and health.

4. Dreams as a Tool for Growth

Understanding your dreams can definitely help you to creatively find your way through the difficulties you face in work, in relationships, in discovering your potential, and in your personal growth.

Creative Problem Solving: Dreams can help you creatively navigate difficulties in work, relationships, and personal growth. They reflect truths about your makeup, strengths, and weaknesses, and have access to your total memories and creativity. Dreams can show you new approaches to problems you are stuck in.

Health and Well-being: Dreams can improve your health and way of life by showing you what situations allow you to express your potential more fully. They can also point to what foods will help and heal. Dreams combine the needs of your waking self with your deepest physical and transcendent needs.

Virtual Reality: Dreams provide a safe environment to experiment with relationships, sex, creativity, and different approaches to situations. They offer a virtual reality that can enlarge your experience of yourself and life, allowing you to explore possibilities you might not otherwise consider.

5. A-Z Dream Dictionary: A Guide to Symbols

The Dictionary contains explanations on almost any type of dream subject.

Alphabetical Access: The book provides an A-Z dictionary of dream symbols, offering explanations for a wide range of subjects, from animals and objects to emotions and situations. This allows you to quickly look up the meaning of specific elements in your dreams.

Multiple Meanings: Each entry provides several possible meanings for a dream symbol, recognizing that dreams are complex and varied. The semicolon (;) is used to separate different suggestions, allowing you to consider multiple interpretations.

Idioms and Associations: Many entries include idioms and commonly held associations to help you understand the symbolic language of dreams. This helps you connect your dream images with your everyday language and thought processes.

6. Working With Your Dreams

The foundation of understanding your dreams begins with starting a dream journal.

Dream Journal: Start a dream journal to record your dreams in detail. Write them out at length, not in note form, as the details are important. This journal will become a treasure house of information that grows over the years.

Key Words and Phrases: Identify key words and phrases in your dream and look them up in the dictionary section. Consider the important phrases and the drama they depict to deepen your insight.

Connecting to Waking Life: Take the dream out of its symbols and write a connected version of the key words and phrases as they refer to your everyday waking life and feelings. Ask yourself how the key words and phrases link with your life.

7. Archetypes: Universal Patterns in Dreams

Carl Jung used it to express something he observed in human nature. He said the archetypes are a tendency or instinctive trend in the human unconscious to express certain motifs or themes.

Universal Themes: Archetypes are universal patterns or themes that exist in the human unconscious. They are found throughout cultures in dreams and myths, and represent fundamental aspects of human experience, such as death and rebirth.

Common Archetypes: The book explores common archetypes, including the anima (female within the male), animus (male within the female), the hero/heroine, the shadow, and the wise old man/woman. These archetypes represent different aspects of your personality and potential.

Personal and Collective: While archetypes are universal, they are also expressed in your dreams through personal feelings and associations. It is important to consider both the universal and personal aspects of these symbols.

8. The Great Work: Integrating Your Inner World

Whatever you think or feel, even in the depths of your being, becomes a material fact of experience in your dream.

Inner Universe: Dreams reveal that you live in the midst of a world of thoughts, feelings, values, judgments, and fears that are largely of your own making. Your inner universe is reflected in the people, objects, and places of your dreams.

Materialization of Feelings: Every aspect of a dream, from emotions to landscapes, is a materialization of your feelings and insights. This understanding helps you see how your inner world shapes your experience.

Harmony and Mastery: The great work of human life is to find some degree of direction, mastery, or harmony within this world of your making. By understanding your dreams, you can gain insight into your inner universe and move toward greater wholeness.

Last updated: January 17, 2025