Your Dreams: A Life Therapy Perspective, Part 3 of 3

How to Interpret Your Dreams

Which Dreams to Interpret

The emotional impact, mental effect, or both of some dreams make them stand out from others. They are worth your time and attention. Analyzing them might release their meaning and give you an important message.

Recording and Analyzing Your Dream

In Life Therapy, you analyze a dream by separating its parts and attending to each one. As you do, you allow the dream to release its meaning to your mind’s awareness. With only your attention, not effort, the meaning emerges on its own.

First, write the story of your dream. You’re not writing for publication or anyone else to read. You’re writing for yourself, to understand your dream.

Let go of concerns about spelling and grammar. Just write the story of your dream. Include the important settings, people, their actions, and the events that occur.

Second, make four lists in parallel columns. One each for the important settings, people, their actions, and eventsof your dream. Make your list look something like this:

SETTINGS	PEOPLE	THEIR ACTIONS	EVENTS

Third, on a new page, with plenty of room between each one, write one word or short phrase for each setting. Draw a circle around each one.

Fourth, relax and gaze, one at a time, at each setting. Each setting is an image. Allow memories and emotions associated with each setting image to freely arise. 

Fifth, around the circled setting you’re gazing at, write one word or short phrase to record the associated memory and emotions as they arise. Allow associations to arise until they stop. Circle each one. Now draw a line from the setting to each association to connect them. Make your drawing look something like this:

Complete all five steps above for each important setting, person, action, and event.

Interpreting Your Dream

After you analyze and record the elements of your dream, you’re ready to interpret it.

The images of your dream—the settings, people, their actions, and events—are words. Instead of words written in letters, they are image-words.

The image-wordsand their associated memories and emotions are the language of your spirit. Your spirit uses them to speak to your mind.

The definitionsof the image-words are the associated memoriesand emotions they stir up in you. Specifically, your emotions tell you what the image-words mean. 

As you attend to the image-words and emotions, you allow your spirit to speak to your mind. Focus your mind’s full attention to what your spirit is saying to it. Listen. Listen deeply.

Make notes of any connections between the emotions stirred up by the image-words of your dream and your awake reality. If you feel fear in response to an image-words in your dream, how does it relate to your awake reality? Is something threatening you in your awake reality? If so, how are you addressing it? 

If you feel anger, sadness, guilt, or any other emotion in response to other image-words in your dream, how do they relate to your awake reality? What action do you need to take?

Attend to your whole dream and all of its image-words. Allow the meaning of your dream to come together and emerge out of the process of mentally attending to what your spirit is saying to your mind.

Write the meaning of your dream and take its message seriously. 

Your Dreams: A Life Therapy Perspective, Part 2 of 3

In Life Therapy, not all dreams are the same. There are at least seven different types. The outstanding feature of a dream determines its type. The types include—

Process dreams: Process dreams feature events of the previous day or two. They’re generic, neither remarkably good nor bad. Your emotional responses are mild. They’re forgettable.

They’re often narratives about difficulties getting where you want to go, falling, being busy, going different places, or being in crowds of strangers. They might or might not give you insight from reflecting on them.

Pleasant dreams: You wake up smiling after pleasant dreams. They feature pleasurable stories about things in safe places, being loved, sexual pleasure, receiving help or gifts, and other enjoyable experiences. They stir up emotions of contentment, gratitude, desire, and gladness. Milk them. Get every drop you can out of them.

Nightmares: You wake up feeling troubled after nightmares. Sometimes they shock you awake. Some are toxic and infect you the rest of the day.

They feature troubling stories about being threatened, wronged, doing wrong, not getting what you desire, being repulsed by horror, and tragic loss.

They stir up intense and painful emotions of fear, anger, guilt, disappointment, disgust, and sadness. They’re also mentally confusing and difficult to understand.

Message dreams: Message dreams feature stories in which you receive information. The information might be an insight, guidance, or foreknowledge.

• The insight might be an answer to a question, solution to a problem you’re struggling to solve, or knowledge of something that just happened to someone you’re emotionally connected with.

• The guidance is often a directive that either warns you against or encourages you to take some specific action.

• The foreknowledge gives you preview of events to come. Like many insight dreams about something that just happened, foreknowledge dreams are often about someone you’re emotionally connected with.

Visitation dreams: Visitation dreams feature narratives of visits with people you know. You usually have a strong emotional connection with them: family members, lovers, close friends, or pets. Often those who visit you are deceased and come to comfort you. 

Recurring dreams: The outstanding feature of recurring dreams is their recurrence. You dream the same dream two, three, or more times. Rarely, if ever does a process dreams recur. A recurring dream is usually a pleasant dream, nightmare, or message dream. But it is the same every time. 

Lucid dreams: Any of the above six types of dreams can be lucid, but the outstanding feature is how vivid and realistic it is. Regardless of the story, it is like it is actually happening at the time.

Your Dreams: A Life Therapy Perspective: Part 1 of 3

Dreaming Dog

If dreams fascinate you, this three-part series is for you. It gives you a new perspective on dreams.

This three-part series is about dreams from the perspective of Life Therapy. Life Therapy views things from a human perspective. It focuses more on describing phenomena than on analyzing and interpreting them. It has a unique view of what dreams are, their different types, and how to interpret them.

First, consider what dreams are. In Life Therapy, your dreams have at least five characteristics, maybe more.

Your dreams are natural phenomena.Humans and other animals dream from the earliest to the latest years of their lives. Perhaps plants and other living things dream too. They’re fascinating mysteries of your life, well worth wondering about. 

Your dreams are yours.You dream them, no one else. They come from within you, your own spirit. You know them in your own mind. They’re not something separate from you. Even if someone makes you dream dreams, you dream them. They’re yours.

Your dreams are stories: Your life is a story, so are your dreams. They’re narratives intimately associated with your life-story, not static symbols with set meanings apart from the context of your life-story. 

Sometimes they’re complete stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end. More often they’re snippets of stories already in progress when you join them.

Your dreams are unique: Your life and each day of it is unique, so are your dreams. No one else dreams your dreams. They are unique to you.

The dreams you dream each night, except for the occasional recurring dreams, are also unique. You haven’t dreamed them before nor are you likely to again. 

Your dreams are informative: Your dreams are both informed by and inform your unique life-story. The meaning of your dreams is in your life-story itself. It’s in you, not a dream dictionary or professional who analyzes and interprets your dreams for you.

Part 2 of series describes seven different types of dreams you have.

The Story I Tell...

Hear these words. Take them to heart and live by them:

Wonder of wonders! You are alive!

What a profound mystery! You are alive rather than not!

Be wondered by the mere fact that you are alive!

You’re alive and you’re not alone. You’re alive with others.

Among all the others, you aren’t just rare. You’re one of a kind. You’re of inestimable worth.

You are living a once-in-forever, here-and-gone life. You get no rehearsal. This is your one chance to weave your life-story into the grand, living tapestry of life. 

You have no script to follow. You must improvise and make it up as you go. You have only the life-affirming desires of your heart to guide you.

Live from your heart and spirit, the core of your being. From there improvise the life that’s yours alone to live.

Compelled by the life-affirming desires of your heart, weave your strand in the grand tapestry of life. Your life-affirming desires compel you to do what you must do, what is necessary for you to do.

In the grand, living tapestry, your life is necessary. Everything depends on the life-story you weave.

All of the life-stories woven in the grand tapestry before you, make you necessary. The life-story you’re weaving now, makes everything after you necessary. 

You must weave your necessary strand. Only you can.

You weave your necessary strand in the grand, living tapestry by what you actually do. What you actually do matters above all else. It affects you personally and everyone else too.

Do what values your life and everyone else’s too. Do what fulfills the life-affirming desires of your heart. That’s what you must do. Let nothing stop you.

Give yourself whole-heartedly to fulfilling your life-affirming desires. Do your best weaving the necessary, life-story that is yours alone to live.

What I say to you is for all others too.

Spread the word!

_______________

When you’re ready to heal your hurts, use your strengths,

make your way to a better place in life, and

fulfill your unique life-affirming desires,

contact meat mark.w.neville@gmail.com

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