How to Interpret Your Dreams

Learning to interpret and understand your dreams is something many people would like to accomplish. Many dreams are especially vivid, even bizarre, while others may not even be remembered after you wake. While we have different types of dreams, we usually wake up not being able to understand what the dream meant or stood for. Every dream has a structured meaning and can supply you with information that may provide answers to questions that daily plague your life.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Evaluate how many times you dream per night. Every dream is different and evokes a diverse set of emotions. Your ability to remember dreams can be overwhelming if there are many details or characters involved in the dream. You can begin to record your dreams on a piece of paper, then pick out one specific dream you would like to interpret.
2. Choose the dream that gave you the most emotional impact to evaluate, whether it was fear, caution, sadness or excitement. These types of dreams most likely occur when you are experiencing life changes such as divorce, marriage, new relationships, having children, moving to a new location or other changes that affect your emotional state of mind. Nightmares may only be an illusion of a fear you have developed in your personal life.
3. People tend to have dreams about issues that are of great concern to them. Each dream usually represents a pressing problem or a solution you want to happen. Examine the dream in full, every event that happens, the environment in which it happens, and the characters within each dream. Ask yourself, how does this dream mirror the current events that are going on in your life?
4. Think about what is new, different, or the same in the dream, that may also be new, different or the same in your own individual life. What insights does the dream carry that may affect you in a physical, mental, or spiritual way? Every dream has meaning and may be a statement about your life or certain events going on in your life.
5. The dream maybe a statement about a relationship you have with others, an object that you have lost, or events you may need to change.
6. Example: You have a recurring dream about wandering through a deserted house and entering each dark and deserted room, where everything is dusty and covered with spider webs. At the end of the dream, you enter a lighted room filled with beautiful furniture, a warm and inviting table set with food. This particular dream may represented a part of your life where it seemed as if you are going nowhere except through those empty deserted rooms, yet at the end of the dream it shows you that you will find a good room or a good place in life. Think long and hard about the details of each dream and think about how they line up with the details of your personal life.

Tips & Warnings

• Choose only one dream a week to interpret.
• For a variety of dreams, see if they all have similar conclusions.
• Try to recognize the many variations the dream is conveying.
• See the dream as a problem solver for a problem you may be having in life.
• Remember not all dreams are taken literally, but may illustrate symbols to convey a message. Example: A recurring nightmare of you falling out a window does not mean you are literally going to fall out a window. However, it may mean that you are having troubles at work and feel as if you are going to lose your job.
• Never ignore a recurring dream because it may mean you are ignoring the messages the dream is conveying.
• If a dream points to a recurring problem in life, take immediate action to find the remedy.