Interpreting Dreams to Find Peace and Clarity
Dreams are a mystery that continue to haunt our logic-seeking minds. Science can currently provide us with many fascinating insights into how dreams reflect or positively impact our quality of sleep. Ironically, even the occasional bad dream has no noticeable impact on our sleep quality. Studies show that people who dream more often express higher levels of creativity and their improved quality of sleep can contribute to better moods, clearer thinking, and overall health. But not everyone realizes the profound ways in which getting curious about our dreams can improve our emotional well-being.
There are indeed numerous psychological benefits to exploring our dreams with curiosity and an open mind. Ancient cultures around the world have looked to dreams for centuries for clarity and used them as a tool for both personal self-reflection and collective guidance. Humans used to trust the power of our dreams and we understood that the visions our sleeping minds created played out for a reason, whether emotional or literal.
In my home, I’m used to regularly sharing my dreams with my husband in the morning. Not only is it a wonderful part of our morning that brings us closer together, but it helps me to sort through my feelings and thoughts. It’s a cathartic experience that allows me to nudge beneath the surface of my thinking mind and feel into anything repressed that is asking for my attention.
While you may not be accustomed to placing importance or a deeper interest in your dreams, they can prove to be a vast mirror into your subconscious emotions if you open yourself up to this inner voyage. In looking at the patterns of dreams studied by both philosophers, mystics, and scientific researchers alike, there are many common dreams that reflect our waking lives.
These common dreams include:
· Being lost and trying to get somewhere
· Defending yourself from a violent attack
· Wandering around a house that is unfamiliar
· Flying
These dreams can hold an infinite amount of deeper meanings for you personally by reflecting on the nuances and allowing your mind to interpret them in your own way. However, the traditional overarching meanings of these common dreams can be used as a framework, or a launching off point into deeper personalized interpretation.
Common meanings of these dreams:
‘Being lost and trying to get somewhere’
- You’re feeling stuck due to lack of progress, experiencing fear of the unknown, feeling paralyzed due to fear of failure, feel you have a lack of goals, or a lack of readiness or preparation.
‘Defending yourself from a violent attack’
- If you’ve experienced a trauma or attack in the past, this could be from PTSD, but can also represent the threats we feel we face, our buried feelings of fear, helplessness, self-defense, or desire for protection.
‘Wandering around a house that is unfamiliar’
- This can represent the parts of yourself you are unfamiliar with, a desire to explore new territories in life or within yourself, a feeling of uncertain change, that you are heading towards the unknown, and a need for excitement.
‘Flying’
- You may long for freedom, desire to escape, feel excited and alive in your daily life, or feel overwhelmed by stress and anxiety and desire to rise above it all.
When interpreting your dreams, you can begin by asking yourself what you remember – play back as much of it as you can. Keeping a dream journal can be very helpful for this, as well as telling someone you love and trust about your dreams so you don’t forget them. Don’t worry if in your dreams you do things you wouldn’t do in your real life, it’s important never to judge our dream-self. The key is to get curious about where those imaginary circumstances may be stemming from in our subconscious.
Once you’ve recounted the events of the dream, start exploring the emotions, if any, you remember feeling in the dreams, as well as how you felt emotionally coming out of the dream. You can even give some of the key themes in your dream a quick Google search like “giant wolf dream meaning”, while not all answers may be helpful or reliable, they will give you a launching off point into deeper reflection and help you determine which meanings strike a chord within you and eliminate those that do not.
When you have arrived at a few generalized meanings that resonate with you, think back to when was the last time you were aware of that feeling in your waking life? Such as in a dream about flying, when was the last time you were aware of needing to escape or desiring more freedom? Or perhaps it’s simply mirroring your excitement for the life you’re living now.
Our dreams can mean many things – from painful messages, warning signs, positive reminders, and communications from loved ones who have passed on. But how we interpret them is up to each one of us. Our own unique filter, current emotional state, and life experiences will color how we view our dreams on any given day. And whether we consciously embrace it or not, there’s a magic as old as time that effortlessly unfolds when we close our eyes to sleep and enter the land of our dreams.
Ankhasha Amenti is a Windbridge Certified Research Medium with the highly respected Windbridge Research Center (www.Windbridge.org). Her certification involved passing eight thorough screenings, testing and training steps during which her ability to report accurate and specific information about the deceased was scientifically tested under blinded conditions by Windbridge Institute Director of Research Julie Beischel, PhD. Her commitment is to give each of her clients a reading that provides comfort and validation that assures them their loved ones continue in spirit. In 2011 Ankhasha received the Annual Hospice Service Award from the Providence Hospice of Seattle. She lives a magical life in the misty forests of Washington State and can be reached by visiting her website www.Ankhasha.com.
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