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I’ve had a habit of writing down my dreams every morning since the age of 10. I did it for years, out of curiosity and to have a record of my life, but then I stopped because it became more like work than an activity I did for fun.
Now that I’ve found out about dream analysis, which uses complex techniques to derive meaning from your dreams, as opposed to psychoanalyzing them which is much more simple, I might start doing it again.
First though, I want to try and understand what dream analysis is.
What is Dream Analysis?
Dream analysis is the process of interpreting dreams by means of the unconscious. It’s the study of your inner dreams and how they are related to yourself, your life and the world around you. This makes it a little bit like Carl Jung’s psychology which deals with the unconscious and also a little bit like mythology which deals with what is below or beyond our level. Both of these disciplines deal with understanding aspects of your personality or psyche that you can’t understand on your own, whether they be supernatural or metaphysical phenomena or simply images that came from someone else’s imagination rather than from yourself.
Dream analysis is the process of analyzing the dreams that you have, whether they are from the night before, or from your childhood and which have become a significant part of your life. It’s also called an archetypal dream-work because it attempts to understand what your basic patterns are.
Dream interpretation uses and aligns with many other disciplines like Mythology, Alchemy and Astrology. Dream interpretation often concludes with a crucial part of psychology or philosophy: recognizing yourself as a symbolic being in a world full of symbols. This can be represented by the famous medieval philosopher Paracelsus who said: "We should not look for scientific explanations for our dreams but instead we should find them sacred. It is our own inner beings that we have to understand."
The core principle of Dream Analysis is the beyond-the-ordinary state of consciousness. It’s the idea that if you are awake and alert, you can observe your dreams with an analyst or partner. This comes from a concept known as lucid dreaming, where it’s possible to "wake up" in a dream and control it. The same principle applies to normal everyday life: if you are alert, attentive and aware of what’s going on around you then it becomes possible for your unconscious mind to show its true face.
So what is an archetypal dream? This means that many different dreams have similar themes and symbols. For example, dreams about school often represent the challenges of growing up or meeting challenges in life – but they are also symbolically related to issues within your personality, your relationships and your life.
The symbols used in a dream often include:
1. Family relationships: Parents, siblings and other family members are often symbolic in dreams. They might mean you have family problems or issues to deal with or don’t have any. They might represent part of your childhood and an important connection to a bigger picture within yourself. They might be related to aspects of people you know and things that happened long ago. The same applies to groups: symbolizing political groups like countries can also be represented by the images of groups with similar ideals (e.g. a family like the Kennedy’s).
2. Physical settings: Dreams often take place within a setting, such as a house or forest. These are called settings, and they usually have some kind of meaning that is connected to your character and inner self. They might represent your personality or the things you do in life, the way you spend your time or the way others see you.
3. Outer looks: In dreams, you see yourself or others having physical features such as blue eyes or being very tall. This represents either how you see yourself or how others see you. Sometimes it reflects features of people who are important to you, like having a strong resemblance to someone who has passed away. It might also refer to an aspect of your personality, reflecting how others see you or your own persona.
4. Objects: The things that appear in dreams are called objects. These can be simple items like keys, books or sharp objects like knives. They can also be more abstract objects like a situation or dilemma. Just because they are simple doesn’t mean they have less meaning – sometimes the simplest of things can be the most symbolic and relevant to you. Objects aren’t always good or bad, but instead can help you understand the deeper meaning behind various problems you have in life and what needs to be done to solve them.
5. Symbols: Symbols are things that are used in a dream and represent something else. They might be something physical like a knife or a piece of clothing, or something more abstract like people, places or events. Symbols often represent something or someone from your life that you have either lost touch with or are preparing to lose touch with – either emotionally, physically or both. Symbols can also reflect how you see yourself and how others see you, and they can even warn you of danger by relating to the issues in your life.
6. Emotions: Dreams are often filled with strong emotions – happiness, sadness, anger and so on. These are all considered to be an important part of the dream because they reflect your personal feelings about a situation. Emotions can have a very deep impact on your life and how you deal with situations, and they often reveal a lot about you, your relationships and actions.
7. Your real personality: A dream can also show what you really think, feel or want to do in life. You might be too scared or shy to do certain things but in a dream these problems disappear and you become courageous enough to achieve what you want. You might not be able to say what you really want in life because it’s not completely connected with your inner self. Dreams help you figure out what you need to do to reach that goal.
These are just some basic themes, and the key is that the dreamer is awake and aware of them, which then creates a window for other aspects of their personality to show up in a more transparent way than usual. In this way we can uncover something about ourselves. While it sounds like an easy process, interpreting dreams can become really complicated: sometimes dreams seem obvious, but then later on we find that they were very symbolic or even related to our childhood.
And of course, these are just the basics. There are many, many other types of symbols and symbols that relate to specific historical, cultural or social issues. These interpretations will appear in quite a simple way to the dreamer because they have the benefit of being awake in a dream – but experts will see them as highly complex and meaningful. It’s important to remember that even though dreams are creative expressions of our unconscious, they still need interpretation by someone else.
Dreaming is one of the most profound ways you can understand yourself and your life, so try to interpret your dreams as much as possible. It’s a big part of the practice of dream yoga and taming the wild horse.
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