Dreams are a natural and efficient way for accessing the meeting of the unconscious and conscious worlds.
We all have conscious and unconscious scripts, ideas, images, that affect our vision.
The lens through which we are looking reflects how we live.
Our dreams are an important tool on this journey.
As we take dreams seriously and pay attention to remembering, writing them down, and saving them, we find the dreams speak with astonishing clarity.
Even though a dream may seem to be without logic, yet it is a key that can open the lock.
Like a key, a symbolic understanding can allow us to decipher its message.
Likewise, the energy the dream figures represent become available to us at a conscious level.
Each dream is mostly interpretable by us, the dreamer, and really not as accurately by anyone else.
Whether you understand it entirely, ultimately you are the final authority on your dream and its meaning in your life.
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist in the twentieth century, was known for making sense of what might look like bizarre dreams.
In the service of this idea, Jung stressed the importance of sticking to the image by exploring in depth our own associations to it.
This involves elaborating on the dream images and symbols in order to find their significance to us.
He cautioned against ascribing general meaning to dream symbols.
In other words, you do not just look them up on goggle but the meaning ascribed to them must ring true to yourself and your life.
Otherwise, the dreams become pointless.
By writing down our associations, feelings and thoughts about the dream, we prevent dream analysis from devolving into a theoretical and dogmatic exercise and keep it close to our own psychological and emotional situation.
Dream-work is essentially subjective, a viewpoint of our unconscious presented to our conscious world.
We can describe the dream as a play in a theatre and directly related to the life of the dreamer.
The dreamscape includes the scene, the players, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the observers.
And, all these represent as well the personal and collective aspects of the dreamer.
A life challenge, crisis or change of any form may feel overwhelming, maybe like a failure that leaves us shattered and in pieces.
We may feel uncertain, isolated and confused.
How we coped before works no longer and the former attitudes, beliefs or ways we perceived ourselves are inadequate.
The problems reflect what is discordant and unassimilated in our personality.
Paradoxically, these are the very obstacles that can become the incentives and openings to unknown possibilities.
And, the answer can be found by exploring the world of dreams.
Each of us harbors within our universe a number of characters, parts of ourselves that can cause conflict and mental distress when not understood.
We are relatively unacquainted with these players and their roles and yet they are constantly seeking a stage on which to perform the tragedies and comedies, personal and collective.
Dreams communicate to us using image combinations.
These images and symbols appear in our dreams and become understandable through our dialogues with the dream characters and associating to the situations and settings presented in the dream.
In these ways, the dream is an instrument for the diagnosis, research and treatment of our emotional problems and strengths.
For example, if we repress feelings of anger or rage in waking life, we may dream rage-filled, angry dreams to compensate for this.
The dream has a balancing effect by producing another point of view for us and often giving us some tools for coping, if we stay with the images long enough.
The dream is not an isolated event and tends to compensate or create a balance to our conscious attitudes and personality traits.
As such, the dream is an inner drama at the same time as it also reflects the outer world.
This becomes apparent when people dream of disasters before they occur.
The dreams prepare us and help us cope.
By paying attention to dreams we learn how to work with the forces that blow us about, and also bring direction to our lives.
The point of attaining inner knowledge is not to become different from who we are, but to help us recognize and discover ourselves.
In the process our personality expands and we realize what has always been there, but not fully lived or known.
Through caring attention to the dream images, we gradually begin to integrate qualities-good and bad-into our personality.
This means accepting what was unacceptable and also managing and developing the newly discovered qualities.
To transform ourselves requires retrieving our lost or undeveloped personality parts that can be revealed through our dreams.
A goal of dream work is to bring awareness and understanding of what was formerly unconscious and blocking development.
Dream recall helps us engage with ourselves, others and life to our fullest potential.
A woman at a crossroads of her life dreamt she was on stage and asking the question about what should she do now.
The dream answered she was to just be there and pay attention.