1. Trust Your Feelings
Always pay attention to how you feel when you wake from a dream.
Your feelings and bodily sensations may be your best guide to the relative
urgency and importance of a dream, and its positive or negative implications.
2. First Associations
In keeping a dream journal, you will want to get into the habit of
jotting down your first associations with the dreams you record. What floats to
the surface of your consciousness in the first minutes after waking may come
from layers of the dream that have eluded, or from deeper levels of
dreaming
3. Reality Check
Compare what is going on in the dream to the
rest of your life, including the life of your imagination. Always ask whether
it is possible that any part of the dream will manifest, literally or
symbolically, in physical reality. Though dreams are inner experiences,
they often contain accurate information about external reality. In both subtle
and unsubtle ways, dreams incorporate signals from the outside environments.
4. Dream Reentry
Dreams are real experiences, and a fully remembered dream is its
own interpretation. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. By
learning how to re-enter dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify
messages about future events, resume contact with inner teachers, and resolve
unfinished business.
5. Dialogue with Dream Characters
One of the best ways to work out what your dream characters are
telling you is to ask them. You can do this through dream reentry or simply by
sitting down with a pad and pen, imagining that the dream figure is in front of
you, and opening a conversation.
6. Tracking Your Dream Self
Who are you in your dreams? Are you the protagonist or simply an
observer? Are you younger or older? Male or female? How does the situation and
behavior of our dream self compare with that of your waking self? The character
who appears in all of your dreams, even if only as a witness, is you.
7. Symbol Exploration
Although the dream source tries to communicate with us as clearly
as possible, it must often speak in symbols in order to carry us beyond the
limitations of the everyday mind. Symbols take us from what we know to
what we do not yet know. You'll be inspired to track your symbols far and wide,
and may discover that your personal dreams embody timeless myths from many
traditions. Always remember that the best encyclopedia of dream symbols is your
own journal, kept over time.*
8. "What Part of Me?"
Dreams make us whole. They show us the many aspects of ourselves
and help us to bring them under one roof. This is why it is often useful to ask
"what part of me" different characters and elements in a dream might
represent. However,this approach is rarely sufficient since dreams are
transpersonal as well as personal. If you meet a tribal shaman in a dream, that
may be an aspect of yourself and an actual shaman. If you meet
your departed grandmother, that is more likely to be Granma trying to
communicate than merely a part of you that is like her.
9. Dream Enactment
Dreams require action! You may take creative
action, turning a dream into a story, a picture a collage.You may do some
shamanic shopping, to get shoes or earrings your dream self was wearing or a
sculpture of a deity you saw in a dream. You may use the dream as GPS on your
life roads. You may accept dream assignments, seeking to translate that strange
word or find that obscure place on a map of this world or another world. At the
least, you can harvest a bumper sticker or action phrase from the dream that
will help to move its energy into life.
Adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.
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