Your Guide to a Healthy, Carefree Vacation
(Health Secrets) Dream analysis can help you understand your inner self and discover your true feelings and motivations. To do dream analysis, it is important to appreciate the synergy of the dream. The interaction of the individual elements of a dream combine to produce a total effect or understanding that is greater than the sum of the individual elements.
Dreams work for our own good, but sometimes we are resistant to them because of our ingrained habits and thoughts. Making the choice to revisit a dream as a tool of dream analysis is an effective technique for overcoming that resistance . It is important to realize that the dream has levels of meaning that will continue to reveal themselves over time. One of the best reasons to write dreams down is that you can revisit them at any time for dream analysis.
By demonstrating how I approach working with a dream, I hope to encourage you to use dream analysis to improve the quality of your life.
My Dream:
I am driving my car up a steep hill. I am too short to touch the pedals, so I am wondering what is making the car go fast. Because the hill is so steep and I am so short, I can barely see over the hood of the car or up the road. There is a person sitting on the passenger side. We are driving through a neighborhood. She (the passenger) yells, “Slow down—Stop!” The neighbors are also yelling at me “Slow down—Stop!” I yell that my feet aren’t touching the pedals. The people look daggers at me—in their minds they are saying, “Why do you have a car? Why are you driving so fast?”
The person next to me yells, “Don’t you see the family in the street and the Santa Claus talking to the children?” I strain to be taller. I see them. But when I try to reach the break pedal again, I can not see what is in front of me. I think that I will have to swerve the car into something to stop it. I swerve toward a light pole and a bunch of trash cans and come to a stop. My passenger and I get out of the car to speak to the family. I think now they will call the police. Then I woke up.
Upon waking, I felt frustrated. I know that cars represent my physical body moving through my physical life. I have had many dreams about driving cars and I was really irritated that I was having another dream in which I am feeling like my life is not under my own control. And I was angry because the next logical step in the dream would have been to apologize to the family and explain my actions to the police. I felt relieved I had awakened before the apologies and explanations, because I am tried of justifying my actions and myself to others. It was a disgusting feeling to wake up and say to myself that I feel as if I am totally inadequate even in my dreams. And then I wondered why I could not just have a restful sleep—why does the world ( society) judge me harshly even in my dreams?
I decided not to write the dream down and went back to sleep.
However when I woke up later, the memory of the dream was still there. That told me I need to write it down and work with it. I wrote the dream down but I was too frustrated to analyze the dream images. So what to do in a case like this?
I relaxed into a meditative state, put myself into the dream, stepped back and let the dream continue.
I like this process of working with dreams because when I am frustrated it puts me back into a productive focus. Our dreams always work to the service of our own good, but the ego tends to forget this truth. In this meditative process I wrote the images and actions down as they presented themselves and I made no effort to analyze or be introspective. I simply scribed what I saw.
The Dream revisited:
I am driving my car. I make myself larger. Now I can see. I put on the brakes and I park the car. I greet the family. I greet Santa. Santa pulls a package from his bag and hands it to me. The package is wrapped in gold paper with a pink ribbon. I open the package—inside is a diamond heart.
I decided to look the images up in a dream symbol dictionary because I was not ready to accept the gift—it seemed too wonderful. The fact that I was feeling that way told me to remember that every element of any dream represents pieces of myself.
Now as I write this I say that yes, I was the driver in the dream. But I was also the critical passenger. And I was the critical neighbor, the children, the parents, and even Santa Claus. The road I was driving on was obviously my life path. When the people looked daggers at me they are not criticizing—they were telling me to see the point, look sharply. Slow down and stop, notice the life around you.
The actual life context is that I have just made a complete 90 degree turn in my career life. My decision might be judged by others in my society as representing laziness or a lack of professionalism. Truthfully I worry about the opinions of others more than I should—this is a life long lesson.
At this point in my life I feel like my feet really do not touch the pedals—I feel like I do not have control of my own life. When I strain to make myself taller, I am straining to make myself different from what I am. I cannot touch the pedals and see the road ahead at the same time. Swerving the car and stopping represents an action I have just taken in my life. The choice of running into a light pole or of running into trash cans says I can view my choice as being enlightened action or trash (something wasted.)
By revisiting the dream and accepting the present from Santa, I am giving my self a gift. The diamond quality represents that I have gained information, insight, and an idea of great value, something hard, stable and indestructible. The heart represents love, stamina, feelings, desire, energy, and the place of my emotions.
The synergy of the dream tells me that what I thought I wanted was not my true life path. I should slow down and stop, notice the life around me, look sharply and see the point. There is nothing inherently wrong with making a 90-degree turn to a different choice. The value of the choice lies in my point of view. Do I see this as an enlightened action? Do I view what I was doing before as time wasted, or something of value? The gift from Santa (the gift from me to me) is that I am valuable and what I do is valuable. The strength of what I do lies in the quality of love that I bring to the situations in which I choose to participate.
Honor your resistance to your dream before attempting dream analysis. Do this by acknowledging that the dream has something important to tell you. Don’t judge. Be empowered by the dream to heal, explain and create emotional growth. The logical mind does not need to explain everything for the inner self to know peace.
For more information:
http://www.dreamdictionary.org/
