Your sub-conscious mind knows you in a way you could never imagine. It knows the direction you need to go for healing and transformation, and it sends you these messages of guidance through your dreams. But sometimes dreams can seem so complicated, whimsical, or even frightening, that it’s nearly impossible to understand what your sub-conscious could possibly be saying to you.
Learning the art of dream interpretation will help you to discover these hidden messages, so that you may move forward in a way that’s for your highest good.
There are many ways to interpret dreams, and everyone will have their own ideas as to which way works best for them. I find that simpler is better, and with a bit of practice you will gain the understanding you need to interpret the hidden messages of your sub-conscious mind.
Everything is you.
The most common method of dream interpretation is to first see everything in the dream as an aspect of yourself. So, if you dream of an orange, you would see the orange as representing some part of you, either emotional, physical or spiritual. The challenge is to find what part that orange represents.
The next step is to decide how you feel about oranges. What does an orange represent to you? If your mother gave you an orange whenever you had a cold and it made you feel better, you may see the orange as something nurturing and healing, so it could represent a nurturing, healing aspect of yourself. If your childhood friend had an orange tree and you enjoyed oranges fresh off the tree the orange may represent playfulness and prosperity.
Describe it out loud.
If you find that your dream is still making no sense to you, try describing every single aspect of the dream out loud to yourself as if you are describing it to someone from another planet and they had no way of knowing what it was. How would you describe the orange? It is round; a sphere. The color is bright and playful, like the Sun. The inside is sweet and tart and juicy. It has a semi-rough skin that peels off easily to expose the tender, segmented, delicious part. It easily breaks apart to be a convenient size for eating. It has a sweet enjoyable taste and is highly nutritional, feeding the body vital energy and life force. By this description the orange may represent the part of yourself that is hidden away, yet can be easily exposed to show the healing, vital life force within.
You can do this for everything in your dream; animals, plants, buildings, cars, food, technological devices and even other people.
You dream what you need to know.
We generally don’t dream of things we already know and/or are working on. After I graduated high school I started having dreams of being back in school, and forgetting which class I was in, losing my locker combination, or showing up on the last day of school only to discover that I’d forgotten to attend for the entire year. These dreams gave me the strongest feeling of needing to get back to school. Once I started college (seven years later) I stopped having the dreams. They were no longer necessary as I was listening to my sub-conscious and was back in school. Then when I dropped out for a few years to have my children, I started having the dreams again. I started college again and the dreams immediately stopped.
Dreams as confirmation.
Dreams can also be given to us as confirmation of our choices. Say I went back to school, but I was questioning if I had made the right choice. I may have a dream that I’m in school and I’m really happy, and that would be the confirmation that I was on the right path. Or I may dream that I was in a scary school, in which case I would probably examine my fears of continuing my education. If I dreamt I was in the wrong place, I would then reevaluate my dreams of going back to school to see if “school” represented something symbolic rather than literal.
So we start by first seeing every part of the dream as an aspect of ourselves. Next we describe the dream out loud to get an even sharper image of the dream’s meaning. We keep in mind that dreams are generally giving us messages that we need in that moment and not something we already have a handle on, unless it’s a dream confirming something for us.
When interpreting a dream, it’s important that the interpretation feels right to you. Different things mean different things to different people, so trust your feelings, and know that your sub-conscious mind will keep sending the message until you get it.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
