How Can You Learn From Your Dreams, The Teachers of the Night?
Dreams represent your subconscious thoughts and values. So often, though, we wake up clueless about why our dreams play out the way they do. We can feel helpless, like we don’t know ourselves. We can feel like we don’t have control over who we are or gain any insight into our subconscious.
Lucid dreaming and dream journaling may offer us the insight we’re looking for. If dreams represent our subconscious, then connecting with them, remembering them, and becoming more active participants in them can teach us so much about ourselves.
Here’s the lowdown on how to get the most out of your dreams and learn more about yourself by doing so.
Lucid Dreaming
The movie “The Matrix” has been rumoured to have been inspired by lucid dreaming. The idea is that, once you’re aware you are dreaming, you can manipulate the world of your dream. People prepare for weeks and months to teach themselves to lucid dream, as Mookychick has previously covered. We’ll go over it again, quickly.
The first step to lucid dreaming is getting yourself to dream. Some people have trouble sleeping, whether that’s due to seasonal disorders and health issues or the way they’ve shaped their own internal clock. If you’re using sleeping medication, talk to your doctor first before attempting to lucid dream.
The five steps to lucid dreaming are:
- Be well-rested
- Wake slowly
- Journal right away
- Think about your dreams through the day
- Once you become aware you’re dreaming, relax and observe.
Once you’ve begun to actively make your dreams a mental focus, you’ll increase your ability to walk through your dreams and manipulate them.
Dream Journaling
Even the most vivid of dreams can become a fleeting memory, vanishing like a snowflake on the tongue. It’s important that as soon as you wake up, you write your dreams down. Even if you wake up in the middle of the night, write them down. If this last bit of advice sends warning signals – perhaps you have concerns about irregular sleep patterns, or sleep deprivation – then you are welcome to proceed without writing your dreams down on waking at night, but it’s an incredibly powerful way to train the mind to become more actively aware of the different phases of sleep so that more work can be done in the dreaming state.
When you are asleep, your brain works in ways that your ego and superego don’t allow it to. If you want to learn how much you value things, what is on your mind at its core, or even find subconscious things about yourself you want to change, write your dreams down as soon as you are able.
This is important if you want to lucid dream as well as retain information about your dreams. Once you’re able to manipulate your dreams, your ego can infiltrate your id more or less by controlling, correcting, or working with the things it’s focusing on.
Ultimately, dream journaling is a way to learn more about yourself, and once you start remembering your dreams vividly, you may be able to start interpreting them.
In previous articles Mookychick has talked about how if you keep a dream journal you may also find that dreams come in phases, their imagery linking to your personal life cycles or the cycles of the moon. Just before a Full Moon or New Moon is a ripe period for evocative dreams.
Interpreting Your Dreams
Fun fact: people who have never met have had the same dreams. If you could compare all the dream journals across the world, you may find a lot of similarities. With your dreams in your grasp, or maybe even the other way around, you can start to interact with them and figure out what your brain is trying to explore or tell you about yourself and the world you live in.
Across the board, certain images in dreamland mean your brain is focused on the same thing. We’ve written before about how nakedness is a sign of your relationship to vulnerability. Bones, hair, and teeth tend to show your brain is focusing on power or loss thereof. Thankfully a quick online search or a chat with the dream community can reveal a lot about what you’re feeling, thinking about, or fearing.
What have you learned about yourself from dreaming? We would love to hear your stories. Tell us on @Mookychick Twitter, Facebook or our community forum!
