How to Analyse Your Dreams
by Ronnee Ruselle
This is the second article in a series of three - the first is: Prelude to Dream Analysis.
Factors that can affect your dreams
As you no doubt know, your brain is an organic computer. It needs to process the information from each day and add it to what you already know. It does this every night, but on some nights, other information that is more important for your conscious self to be aware of will be shown to you - these are the conclusions or the realizations that the brain comes up with. It is the result of information coming together like pieces of a puzzle to create a clear picture.
Although there are some elements in dreams that can have common meaning, those same elements can also have an altogether different meaning from one person to another. Life's experiences, our opinions and beliefs will influence what the meaning is for each of us. Your brain will take in your views, your emotions, what is happening around you and how you feel about those events. These things are all entirely unique to each individual because they come from all of your experiences and your feelings, that's why the most efficient dream analysis will come from yourself only and also why although you can find some answers from dream analysis books and lists, those are only suggestions of what it could mean - not definite answers or interpretations. Only you alone will know for certain whether an interpretation is correct and you can do this by trusting your 'gut' feelings. As you roam through several possible meanings, you'll get a feeling as to which is most likely to be correct. Your brain works in conjunction with your energy to say "Yes, this is the one." Time and practice makes this process easier.
The next best dream interpretation you can get is from a 'dream worker'. This is a psychic talent. It's a reader ability where the intuitive person will receive information from the energy that comes through when you tell them about your dream similar to a psychometrist will with the energy from an item and this can reveal the most amazing information. You will be able to feel whether this information applies to you. Do not ever just 'agree' or accept another person's analysis of your dreams simply because you can't decide its meaning. Keep working on it until you feel that you have the most likely meaning.
Dream workers are not common. I expect more and more people to claim they are 'dream workers' as the concept becomes more popular, but the truth is, it is not that common and most likely requires someone who has the combined talents of psychometry and is a medium or channel although I've yet to confirm this. I am a dream worker and I also find that on occasion, future events can reveal themselves in your dream energy. The ability allows the dream worker to see an instant picture or pattern of what the dream is trying to tell you.
Dream Information
To make dream analysis simpler, it helps to classify the source of the information and the types of information you can get. This allows you to break each part of the dream down into smaller, easier to understand pieces. One dream could carry any number of messages or focus on any number of subjects and this will help you to determine its meaning.
Sources of Dream Information
Over the years I have found that the information will generally relate to, and come from several different areas. The information will not necessarily fall into just one of the following categories, but it can be made up of any amount of each which is why dreams can be so different. Those areas are: processing daily information, outside immediate events, astral projection, spirit communication, events around you and past or prediction.
Processing daily information
Dreams can reflect the actual events that happened over the course of the day or they can be strongly influenced by them. This is the brain processing the information from that day. When you just process the daily information with no overriding conclusions or awareness coming through, then this is a good sign that there is nothing that you need to be aware of so the information process is showing through. For example, I once played a video game that I was really enjoying and that evening, my dream was about the characters in the game and the song from the game kept playing through my dreams all night. As this was the major influence upon me that day (it was pretty uneventful - chuckle), this was the information that showed up in my dreams. You'll find that the information that has the most impact on you will be the overriding influence in your dreams. For example, if you are worried about an element of a relationship, that will tend to be the major focus overriding less worrisome things.
It is possible that there could have been a message in my dreams that night and that the images and music from the game were being used to pass on that information in a symbolic manner, but it wasn't in this case. Use your instincts to tell whether there is anything special in your dream that requires your attention. Please don't assume that every single dream will carry intense messages or special meanings as they are often just your mind reflecting its' daily processing of information. You can however, gauge from your dreams what your state of mind, health and happiness is like and that's good to monitor.
Outside immediate events
Named for the fact that the information is related to an event that is happening immediately outside of yourself or the dream. Even though you're sleeping, your body's senses are still active and your energy's warning system still works. Should there be an emergency situation arise around you, you can sometimes find that a feeling of 'fear' or the need to awaken will suddenly enter into your dream and will be sort of like having a message appear for you in the middle of a movie. It will attempt to draw your attention strongly enough for you to awaken and deal with the situation at hand. This is often the case for people whose homes are being broken into or if an alarm goes off in the distance, if someone is calling for help or if you have spirit presence that should not be there.
Astral Projection
In short, this is projecting your energy in the astral plane, but I use it to describe the action of your energy moving about with some conscious recognition of it. Sometimes your energy can visit a location and this location or the action of moving around can appear in your dream. Many flying dreams are in fact your true experience of your energy flying around. I had a client who had a nap one day and dreamed that she was at her local supermarket in the freezer section where she saw a friend and tapped the friend on the shoulder. She later had an amazing realization when sharing this 'lifelike' dream with her friend and her friend confirmed that she was in fact in the freezer section of the supermarket when she suddenly felt that someone was with her, but couldn't place who it was or where the feeling came from.
A piece of helpful information from a client of mine who was quite accomplished at astral projection during her sleep is to 'avoid powerlines'. She told me that they will throw you around badly and possibly back into your body. Oh, by the way…the sudden 'jolt' that you experience when you waken in the morning is your energy returning to your body. Sometimes the body wakes up before the energy has returned and it returns in a rush. Sometimes your body experiences a shock of surprise with it as we often aren't even aware of our energy being 'out and about'.
Spirit Communication
Spirit communication or visitation can be represented in your dreams. This could be one of several possibilities:
Visit from someone you know - Because you are at rest and your energy is not required to move all of the muscles around your body etc. that it does during the day when you are active, your energy is free to roam. Sometimes if you are in the thoughts of someone you know, their spirit (which is their conscious energy) will float towards you and they may connect with you in their sleep. You may even share the same elements of a dream and recognize each other in the dream. This can be called spirit visitation because it's their spirit which is visiting you. Some people deliberately practice doing this, but it's better to try and experience your astral projection without seeking to involve others otherwise it could interfere with other elements that may be important to each of you in your dream state. Of course if it happens naturally, then it's fine and meant to be.
Visits from Dearly Departed or other spirits - When you are asleep and your energy is roaming, it often removes some barriers of the physical world that are experienced by those on the other side. This can make it easier for those you love who have crossed over to connect with you, allowing them to send you a message which could come to you in any form.
Also, if they come to visit and are in your physical presence while you're asleep, your dream can reflect that by showing them appearing in your dream. Your senses are still active even while you sleep so they will pick up on events happening around you and report to you, letting you become aware of loved ones around you.
Guide messages - This can be quite intricate and a lot of guided messages will be symbolic. This is to help you receive the information without realizing that it comes from a guide. This can be for a variety of reasons. I would be likely for those people who might tend to become reliant upon their guide/s if they are aware of how easily they can connect with them. It could also be that this is the best way that you will understand the message they are sending to you. It could be to grab your attention to their message and sometimes they use your dreams to just send comfort. Sometimes the guide himself/herself may appear in the dream in some form and lead you to something that is important for you to learn or be aware of. It is the same for meditations. I recall one day I was meditating and a guide approached me in the form of a baby deer so that I would not feel intimidated or surprised by her sudden appearance. She then led me to something that became an important message for me. You can also experience healing from the guides being in your dreams.
Your guides can also channel information and learning to you in your sleep so that the information is available to you whenever you need it in the future. You'll never know what this information is in relation to and try not to assume that this is what is causing the disruption to your sleep or dreams. It is just handy to know in case you've eliminate all other reasons for the side-effects it can have on you. The side-effects are that your dreams will be very active and you may even find it difficult to sleep because you will be having energy channelled into you and it's similar to having a big energy boost.
Events around you
Your brain is taking the information from your experiences along with what your senses have picked up (including your 6th sense which will pick up things you're not necessarily aware of at first) and put simply, it will put the information all together like putting together pieces of a puzzle. This means that your brain will become aware of situations before they happen and can let you know through your dreams. This is not prediction. This is simply having enough parts of the information to see a clear picture forming about something that is going on around you. Being consciously aware of these little factors will soon have you being able to avoid trouble. For example, if you saw a child riding his bike at full speed down a dead-end road, it wouldn't take much commonsense to realize that he has a chance of crashing so you would draw his attention to it in an attempt to help him avoid that. Your brain sees situations like that for you and the awareness of it comes from your subconscious into your dreams where you can have a chance of becoming consciously aware of it.
Past or Prediction
Time is a physical thing, not spiritual, so when your energy roams, time is no barrier to you. You may inadvertently find yourself suddenly in a past life. It won't necessarily be yours either so don't assume that it is, no matter how emotional it may be for you. It could be the result of your energy sharing the emotions of the person whose life you are seeing rather than a memory of it being your personal experience. When this happens, your energy sort of 'steps into' the person and you're seeing things through their eyes, hearing their thoughts, feeling their feelings. Sometimes you can tell the difference between whether it's your experience or theirs. You may even recall a time in your life when you felt like you weren't looking through your own eyes. This could be someone else's energy from their sleep state which has accidentally 'connected' with your energy and is harmless. Over time, if you have a series of such events, you may find it easier to tell the difference between an experience that is yours and one that is not. If you don't, well that's okay too. Until then, assume that they are not yours unless you have such a strong feeling of certainty that it is undeniable. This is something that is likely to happen with people whose energy is suited to dream work or 'time' work such as being able to connect with the past. Remember that there could also be messages tied up in any of these experiences and just as easily may not - they could be your energy just 'turning up' unexpectedly in the particular location at that particular time.
The future is also an element of 'time' dreaming. People can have the ability for connecting with either the past or the future. Sometimes people will have the ability to connect with both the past and the future so you may see events that have a feeling of the future around them. This is where déjà vu comes in. Déjà vu is the awareness of a possible event in someone's lifeline. You can experience any number of Déjà vu events when you are sleeping and you may or may not have a memory of them until the event occurs. This does not make the event special. It simply shows that you have a talent for prediction that works in your dream state or in a subconscious capacity rather than a conscious one. Of course those who work consciously with prediction may experience déjà vu as well.
Déjà vu is important at those times when you remember the dream and receive a message or warning about it as well. Those are amazingly helpful and should be written down otherwise you'll recognize the déjà vu moment when it happens, but you may not remember what the warning was. It could be along the lines of which direction to head in with a situation or to avoid something to do with the event. It's not out of the realm of possibility that such easily recognizable situations can be helpful messages from your guides, but again, don't automatically assume that they are, because your energy alone has the talent to do the same thing.
Types of Dream Information
Simple information - will be things that appear in your dream that you can easily work out the meaning of. They may not necessarily depict something in an exact way, but they're obvious enough that you can easily work out their meaning. For example, in real life, you may have no problems with being able to talk, but you could be unable to talk in your dream and it's meaning may be immediately clear to you that it represents you not being able to talk to a particular person or to voice your concerns about something.
Symbolic information - will refer to things that are not real or actual around you, but are a representation of it. For example people who are obviously standing in a manner that clearly represents a square would not necessarily be telling you that they will stand that way in real life. It could mean that you are feeling 'boxed in' or could represent a location that is fairly stiff and follows lots of rules.
For another example, you may dream that you have the Taj Mahal in your front yard. Of course, in reality you don't have the Taj Mahal in your front yard, but you may have something close to you that you consider to be magnificent or wonderful.
The energy tells me that it could also represent a jewel of some sort. This information comes from the gut. The energy just told me that the Taj Mahal would represent a jewel to me or something rare and precious. Of course, this is what it would represent to me, but it may represent something different to you such as something awe-inspiring or if a negative feeling comes with it, it could represent something that you consider to be intimidating or too big to deal with.
Symbolic information is usually the hardest to analyse simply because of the numerous possible meanings for each piece of symbolism, but keep reading and I'll give you some helpful tips on how to determine its' message. Combine this with time and practice and it will get easier.
Literal information - this is information that actually is what it is representing for example, your relative that appears in the dream may in fact be who the dream is about or the thing that happens may in fact eventuate. This is the sort of information you get with déjà vu dreams. Be aware that these dreams can be accompanied by a feeling of 'time'. For example, you'll get a clear feeling that the information is attached to the future, the past or something happening around you in the present. The strength of the feeling can sometimes give you an indication as to how far away the timeframe is that the info applies to. At other times you won't get a timeframe and will only recognize it when you experience the moment that it is referring to. We often recognize déjà vu when it happens even though we don't recall the original dream.
Literal information can also be present in your dreams with visits from loved ones and guides. Although the dream can be filled with all sorts of action and symbolism, a loved one may walk through the middle of it and hug you or tell you that he/she loves you. This is your brain picking up on their message when they visit you in your sleep and passing it onto you through the dream. When you are in the dream state, it may be easier for a loved one to get a message through to you as you don't have the distractions and responsibilities of day to day life to draw your focus away from it.
Analysing - What To Do
Write it down
Basically the trick to analysing your dreams is to see 'the big picture'. Firstly, write down absolutely everything that you can think of about your dream. If you've already read the article "Prelude to Dream Analysis" then you will already have seen a list of the types of things you're looking out for when writing about your dream. Use this as a guide and then add as many things as you can to it for your own list of what to look out for and write down about your dream.
Break it down
Take each single step of your dream and see what it contains. Take into account what you see, what you hear, what you feel emotionally about the dream generally and about each part of it, what your gut instinct tells you about it. Take into account colours, shapes, movements, attitudes, facial features or expressions, body language, words, weather conditions, timeframes, settings, surroundings - everything! Look at each bit of it.
Use the information above to help you see where different parts of the dream are connected to others - remember, you can have several things going on at once in a dream - and make sure that you again use your gut instincts to help guide you with this as well because clues are placed with you to help sort it out so trust them.
This seems like a lot of work doesn't it? Well, it is, but it is well worth the effort and this is truly the only way you'll learn to become an expert at analysing your own dreams. The effort will be a short one, because the harder you work at this to begin with, the faster you'll learn it and you'll quickly interpret a lot more easily with less effort.
Reconstruct it to find the new story
Once you've got it sorted out, you will begin to see a pattern emerge. When you've worked out what all the bits and pieces mean, then put them back together in an order that creates a story for you. You will see while you're doing that, that the whole thing really does become quite clear for you.
So it's like taking a bunch of cards with a message written in Japanese words on them, interpreting them into English and then putting them back together again so that you can read the message.
Expect some bits to not make sense. If this is the case, then look again at it and see what other possible meanings it could have. When you're satisfied that you've found it, put it back in it's place (or it may belong in a different place) in the course of events and continue onto the next piece that doesn't make sense.
It's important that you don't 'over-analyse' too. Most often with dream analysis, the obvious meaning is the meaning and you only need to pull apart the different events in the dream and look at the colours, actions, mannerisms etc. of those so be careful to take it event by event or meaningful item by item, not by colour, action, behaviour etc. or you may confuse yourself.
Below I've given you a very basic example of a possible dream and its analysis. It's off the top of my head, so it's not too in depth.
Interpretation Example...
The following is an example of how a dream may relate a situation around you that you have become subconsciously aware of due to little bits and pieces of information that your brain has picked up. This information comes from what you've seen, heard, 'felt' and experienced. It delivers the information to you in the form of a dream and correct interpretation can make you consciously aware of the situation rather than having to experience disappointment when you look back on and realize that the signs were there, but you didn't put them together. Much of this example is using symbolic information to get the message across.
The Dream: In your dream, you are out walking in the street and the neighbours around you all say hello as you pass by. Suddenly after passing one neighbour, he walks up to another neighbour and they both look at you carefully. Because you're looking back at them, you trip on a rock on the road in front of you and nearly fall, but save yourself just as a third neighbour who is like a sister hugs you hello, then waves goodbye to you as you continue to walk down the street. She proceeds to walk over to your house and break into your letterbox.
Analysis - this is how it could be analysed:
Location - Walking in the street - To begin with, you're walking in the street so you're not at home indicating that this is a situation most likely to be outside of your personal life or yourself. The fact that it is close to your home though (outside it, in the street) means that the situation could be close in proximity or time to you. These two pieces of information suggests that it could be social or work related.
The street is outside of your home, so it's on familiar ground. This is referring to some place that you're comfortable with or very familiar with. This is a location that you know, so bearing in mind that it's likely to be related to work or your social life, it could be telling you that the situation is occurring at your workplace or a place that you visit regularly and are comfortable in such as a friend's house or a club you go to every week.
Neighbours - The fact that you have neighbours around you suggests that either the issue is to do with something that is around you all of the time or it is to do with familiar faces that are around you often (considering that neighbours are a fairly permanent fixture). It could also mean that you are surrounded by supportive and familiar faces so it could be a message of support.
They're waiting until after you walk by to look at you carefully, so it could be that the dream is telling you that there could be others who are aware of the issue and are watching what is going on. It also tends to remove the idea of support.
Tripping over the rock - indicates that you're not seeing something that is in front of you with this situation. Yes, it really can be as simple as that. The dream will be a mixture of simple, symbolic and literal messages.
Friendly Neighbour - The friendly neighbour could return the idea of support to your analysis and the fact that this neighbour is like a friend suggests that someone you trust is involved and it's likely to be someone who displays their friendship towards you (when comparing her behaviour to that of the other neighbours). For me, the fact that this woman walks over to your letterbox and breaks into it as you walk away, shows a definitely indication of somebody who is betraying you. I say this because the letterbox is where your personal mail is plus the fact that the mail is private. She's not attacking you directly or she would have been likely to break into the house. This suggests that someone is causing some form of trouble around you and it's affecting you personally as theft of your mail would. It also indicates that the issue would be more likely to be work related than social. I say this because work related situations (depending upon how you see the role of work fitting into your life) tend to be shown with things that are associated with paper or money. Contracts etc. can also be represented in this way. If it was social, it would be more likely to be associated with a party, fun, friends, decorations or a location that is going to have a lot of people around it such as a store.
She does this without your knowledge because you are walking away and unaware so it's likely that the betrayal is going on behind your back rather than an issue that is glaringly obvious that you are avoiding.
My analysis of this dream would be to tell you to be aware of a situation around you that involves work or some other obligation or responsibility. There may be a trusted person around you who is betraying you and that you've noticed it, but it hasn't registered with you.
Once you think about it, you may begin to recall the situations that are the puzzle pieces the brain has put together or if you don't know who it is, you at least know to be more aware of what's happening around you so that you don't blindly walk into trouble. Of course this is a made up example and a very simple one.
Taking notice of the small events around us
The information that you've noticed which has brought about your subconscious recognition of this betrayal would be likely to have come from noticing strange looks or attitudes, or feelings that you've picked up from those around you, but not had the time to acknowledge and get to the bottom of. There are many little signs that we push aside because we don't realize at first that they are important. In time we can learn to recognize them more easily and be aware so that we can avoid the problems more quickly. Dream analysis will help you with this.
Other things that can impact your dreams
Your state of physical, mental or emotional health can have an impact on your dreams and what they are about. Those who are ill will be more likely to have dreams that are unpleasant than if they were healthy. As the situation they are dealing with eases, so will the unpleasant dreams. This is not always the cause of an unpleasant dream but it's important to note because it can help you understand whether analysis is needed or recognition of your emotional, physical or mental state.
Often what at first seems like a dream with a negative or unpleasant message can in fact turn out to be very positive. Practice and time will help you learn to determine the difference. As many are aware, a death could mean a new beginning - out with the old, in with the new or it could mean you're getting ready to end something (not necessarily your life, by the way).
Can't do it?
It's commonsense that not everyone is going to be great at dream analysis. Please don't beat yourself up if this is the case for you. Most people who live in homes have taps in their houses, but they don't necessarily know how to fix them like a plumber would. It's the same with dream analysis. It does NOT mean that you are stupid. The ability to analyse dreams is tied up with how your energy works. If you find that you can get a basic understanding, then great! That could be enough to help you. If you find you're getting really frustrated and would like some assistance, then find someone to lend a hand. Get on the forum and ask for help or email me and I'll lend a helping hand. As my time is limited, just give it a go first and let me know what you came up with - you never know, you may have hit the nail on the head.
The next article in the Dream Series is: Dream Events - possible meanings for your dreams.
Enjoy!