There is an old Jewish saying that an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter. Everyone dreams for many hours each night. Sleep deprivation is dangerous because dreaming is vital to our mental health and we cannot do without this dreaming state even for a few days. If you see someone's eyes are moving under their closed eyelids whilst asleep, they are almost certainly dreaming. Most dreams are about the events of a normal day, but sometimes we have a dream that has an important meaning. When we experience a problem, we are advised to 'sleep on it'. Dreams are a message from the unconscious to our conscious mind.
From time immemorial, curiosity and speculation has surrounded the meaning of dreams, and in every culture there is a tradition of dream interpretation. Sigmund Freud is described as the "Father of Psychoanalysis', and he said the examination of dreams is the "Royal Road" to self discovery. Carl Jung, who studied dreams from a different perspective to Freud, coined the word "archetype", a word which describes common dream images, such as the 'divine child', the 'wise one' and the 'hero'. He considered that these dream images originate in the "collective unconscious", a repository of concepts, emotions and desires that are outside our general conscious awareness. Ordinary experiences of new beginnings, losses, responsibilities and relationships affect us all, and we replay the events of the day during sleep with symbolic situations and unexpected people, places and objects.
In the 1850s Friedrich Kekule was involved in molecular research. He dreamed of snakes biting their tails, and this helped him to realise the structure of the Benzene ring. The champion golfer, Jack Nicklaus had a dream where he swung the golf club in a new way. He tried it and won many tournaments. There was a mathematical genius in India, Svinivasa Ramanujan, who often saw handwriting on a screen that demonstrated new mathematical solutions and once he dreamed that a Hindu Goddess appeared to him and showed him a new formula.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Graham Greene and Stephen King used their dreams to provide the characters and plots for their fictional books. Barbara Cartland dreamed the story-lines to her novels - in fact, she believed God gave them to her in this way! Many artists have been inspired by dream images, especially Salvador Dali and those of the Surrealist Movement. The composer, Guiseppe Tartini dreamed the entire 'Devil's Sonata', following a dream Edward Elgar wrote the first theme of his Cello Concerto and Igor Stravinski composed an entire octet whilst asleep. The music for Paul McCartney's favourite and most successful record, 'Yesterday', was heard first in a dream.
Some simple dreams have straightforward meanings. If you have been shocked to discover that you are in a public place without wearing any clothes, this usually means you are unprepared for an appraisal or public appearance. If you dream you are being pursued, it means you need to exercise greater control over your life circumstances in order to reduce your anxiety levels. If you dream you are flying, you are in a beneficial situation. This dream shows a high level of achievement and enjoyment, especially if you can decide in the dream to travel wherever you would like to go. If you dream you have a loose tooth, get ready to lose a friend. Teeth are our life long companions and if you dream you have lost a tooth, you might also have lost a close friend. If you dream you have no ability to bite, it means you have lost your grip or power in some aspect of your relationships.
Dream dictionaries provide simplified meanings for many dream symbols, but these explanations are just entertainment. If dreams are disturbing, recurrent or leave a person depressed during the day, it is likely that there is an underlying conflict within the personality that is seeking attention. In the early days of psychotherapy, it was thought that just uncovering the meaning of a bad dream would bring resolution, but we now know that understanding the cause is not sufficient to heal the wounds in the personality. One-to-one dream counselling might be required to bring resolution to the internal conflicts that caused the problem.
Though you might not have outstanding dreams that bring about new inventions and discoveries, you might still have amazing revelations that originate from your dream-life. It is possible to discover our inner motivations and our weaknesses, our aspirations and our unhealed hurts. If you have a small snippet of a dream, don't overlook it! If you think that you do not dream, it is because you do not remember your dreams. The following instructions will help:
. Avoid alcohol
. Go to bed early
. Awake naturally and be aware of your mood
. Write down anything you remember in a dream diary.
If you would like to have a dream interpreted, contact: Wendy Stokes DipCouns at: w.stokes@btinternet.com
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