Dream Dictionary

Online Dream Dictionary & Encyclopedia

by Tony Crisp

The Spanish Dictionary is all the work and effort placed in it, as well as many excellent dream interpretations all by Anna Hoser,

Introduction

The latest edition of the Dream Dictionary and Dream Encylopedia is the result of some sixty years experience of working with dreams and their understanding. The Dream Dictionary encompassing articles on a vast range of topics. This gives the reader an unparalleled insight into the study of dreams and the inner life. But there are an enormous amount of Features in the Dream Encylopedia that cover a range of topics about dreams and the inner life.

The aim of the Dream Dictionary is to help you make connections between your dreams and your everyday life; to discover more fully the powerful emotions and reactions that unconsciously direct your decisions and responses in waking. This is not an attempt to give you merely ideas to play with, to agree or disagree with, like fortune telling. It can lead to real insights which empower you to make more of yourself, and find your way through the many decisions with which life confronts you.

Useful Links

Your Guru the Dream

Your Guru Your Body

What Are Dreams

Learn how to Interpret Your Dream

What does my dream mean? – How to explore your dream meaning

Personal Dream Interpretation

A Note About the Author: Tony Crisp

Mind Watching and Dreams

Introduction to Using the Dream Dictionary

Using the Dictionary

The Discovery of Dreams – Things We Need to Remember About Us

Gaining Insight into Your Dreams

Acknowledgement to this Edition

What Is Offered In The Dictionary

The Discovery of Dreams

Deepening Dream Understanding

Seeing under the Surface

Exploring Inner Space

Things I Wished I Had Had Been Taught Earlier in My Life

Features Found on Site: this is a full list of the topics covered by the Dream Encyclopedia (not a list of dream dictionary words). 

  What Are Dreams?

Dreams are one of nature’s miracles, not the result of a wandering mind in sleep. A dream is an interface between the process of life, our core self and our conscious personality. Life existed quite capably for millions of years before the self-aware human personality came on the scene. In all that time the ancestors of the modern human being survived without having a rational mind to reason with, or self consciousness to ask such questions as ‘What do I do about this?’ Nevertheless survival strategies were still developed in their unconscious intelligence. Dreams express this unconscious wisdom that was developed in humans and animals through millions of years of Life experience.

Life’s age old unconscious processes are still the major part of our being, yet we seldom consciously meet them – except in dreams. As our physical and psychological health depend upon a reasonable co-operation between the spontaneous processes of life – such as breathing, digestion and the thousands of other life sustaining activities and our conscious decisions and actions, the encounter in dreams is vital. As I often point out to those I am advising we are a human face on a long line of beautiful animals. In fact “You ride an ancient beast.” The ancient beast is your body, and your conscious self is the modern and recent rider of it. Some ‘riders’ do not understand their animal needs – and the fact that we have several levels of brain that are independent of each other proves this. Still active in us are our Reptile Brain, Our mammalian Brain, and our Human Brain, and the reptile and mammalian brains are still very active and constitute a large part of our human unconscious. See  – Brain Levels and Dreams –  Life’s Little Secrets and Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking.

So, no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. To meet this ancient self try using Opening to Life

That suggests that dreams cannot be defined under any one heading. Like human beings, they are enormously varied in what they express. Just as one cannot say the human mind is simply a system of memory, one cannot say dreams are just the reflection of experienced events. The mind also deals with problem solving, predicting outcomes of action, playing with possibilities via imagination, creating the new out of old material, replaying traumatic and disturbing events in order to find ways of meeting them constructively. Dreams, being the mental phenomena they are, deal with all of these issues and more. The following definitions give the main functions observable in dreams.

Dreams are:-

1. Dreams are one of nature’s miracles, not the result of a wandering mind in sleep. A dream is an interface between the process of life, our core self and our conscious personality. Life existed quite capably for millions of years before the self-aware human personality came on the scene. In all that time the ancestors of the modern human being survived without having a rational mind to reason with, or self consciousness to ask such questions as ‘What do I do about this?’ Nevertheless survival strategies were still developed in their unconscious intelligence. Dreams express this unconscious wisdom that was developed in humans and animals through millions of years of Life experience.
2. Recently I have come to see dreams as the lonely voice of Life calling out to us in our often frantic search for meaning. It calls out from its vastness that is beyond our understanding, and in its loving efforts gathers the fragments of our memory and associations and forms dreams with them. It does this in its efforts to instruct, guide and even heal us; but often we miss seeing that just as Life reaches to us from its vastness using things we might understand, we too must reach beyond our often pitiful understanding to move toward and touch the wonder of Life within us.
3. An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream. See: body; body dreams; Kasatkin_Vasily; consciousness-mind body split.
4. A link between the sleeping mind and what is occurring externally. For instance, a person may be falling out of bed and dream of flying or falling.
5. A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, a breakdown in mind and body quickly occurs. This type of dreaming, or even nightmares, can often be a safety valve releasing tension and emotion not dealt with in waking life. See: compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; science and dreams.
6. An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held in our unconscious to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present to us summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb.  See: creativity and problem solving in dreams.
7.    That insight comes from an amazing ability dreams have. Mostly we are lost in being aware of this moment or cares of recent events, and of our present environment, but the dream process has another view, that is of our whole life, like flying high and so have a huge view. We have taken in so much life experience, but many of  us have not learnt the amazing lessons we gained by it. But the overall view we get from dreams, visions and our intuition gives us a view that synthesises or whole life and highlights its wonder, its destiny, our real purpose and our life’s real work. See Intuition – Using It
8. A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and as a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness. See: compensation theory.
9. In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are gradually upgraded. See: computer, computer-dream process as a; Evans, Christopher.
10. Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built. See: imagination and dreaming.
11. An means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfill this need. See Opening to Life
12. An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. Humans have an unimaginable ability to absorb information, not simply from books, but from everyday events – for example science now tells us that we collect information at an enormous rate, millions of bits every second, but unfortunately we do not synthesis it to see what it means, for most of it is unconscious, only dreams access and use it. With it they constantly arrive at new insights and realisations. Humans frequently correctly predict the future – not out of a bizarre ability, but from the information gathered about the present. All these abilities and more show in our dreams. See: esp in dreams.
13. A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams. See Creative Dreaming and Problem Solving
14. A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change. See: abreaction; compensation theory; nightmares.
15. In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness. See: individuation; LifeStream.
16. A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. This type of dream may indicate a link between the present person and people who had lived in the distant past; or between the dreamer and all existing life. Some of these dreams present powerful insights into how the transitory human personality may arise out of an eternal consciousness. They thus deal with the spiritual aspects of human nature. See: Dimensions of Human Experience; Buddhism and dreams; Cayce, Edgar; collective unconscious; Bible and dreams; esp in dreams; hallucinations; history of dreaming; religion and dreams; yoga and dreams; Dream Yoga. 

Learn how to Explore Your Dream

I know how much you might like to skip the Introduction to Dream Dictionary, and if you are tempted to do so, I wholeheartedly ask you to read Summing Up. Without understanding the things given there you are likely to completely miss the point of understanding your dreams. The best technique to enter you dream world – Peer Dream Work

You can start using the Dream Dictionary by entering the word you wish to research into the Search Box on the top right of most pages and clicking the search symbol – or you can read some fuller information below about the dictionary and how best to use it.

But the quickest way is to put your word in the search box. 

Your dreams can become vortexes of power to transform your life, and to enhance your perceptions. There is no ‘wave a magic wand’ route to this. It will not happen because you read a great book or look at a good dream dictionary. Those things might help, but the real magic lies in whether you can enter into your dream in the right way. (Try using Being the Person or Thing and Meaning of Your Dream).  

What does my dream mean? – How to explore your dream meanings

It is important in reading the definitions of dream images to realise that not every possible meaning can be covered in this dictionary. So please see if you get the idea of what is being said and allow your own imagination/feelings to fill in the meaning.

There are several ways you can understand the meanings held in your dreams, and there are several levels.

The first is an easily understood level, followed by greater depths:

For instance, speaking as an object or dream person, one needs to take time with it. Learn how to actually describe what you are as that dream object or person. If I dream of a dog, don’t simply describe what you think a dog feels like, but actually take time to tune into the dream image and describe the dog dreamt about. Is it an old or young dog? What is it doing in the dream? Listen to your feelings and describe what it/you feel. Remember that each image is a creation of your own mind and unconscious, so you are really describing yourself. Say whatever comes and consider its value afterwards. Below is a quote from Tiziana Stupia’s book Meeting Shiva 

Tony taught me a process in which a dream could be interpreted and understood by assuming that everything, people and objects alike, in a dream represented aspects of the Self. Sitting cross-legged on the squishy, old-fashioned sofa in the living room of my sadhu’s cave opposite Tony, I’d close my eyes and mentally return to a dream I had the previous night. He would ask me questions about the dream, which I’d answer in the first person. So if I dreamt about a tree, I would ‘become’ the tree, assume its personality and respond from its viewpoint. He’d ask ‘So what kind of tree are you? Are you big or small, old or young? What do you look like? Where are you growing? Why are you in Tiziana’s dream?’

This sounded like a silly exercise at first, but I was soon enough convinced of its validity. It was fascinating to discover a wealth of insight and emotion emerging from my responses, and understand how they related to my current situation. They also pinpointed exactly where I was in my growth process. Sometimes, the dreams would uncover unconscious fears and intuitions. Often, they also held important clues and offered solutions to my problems. It was like doing detective’s work – arduous at times, but rewarding beyond belief.

So below are listed several ways to gain insight and information from your dreams. Take your time with each approach until you get the feel for it, and then experiment with other approaches.

You can enter a key word in the search box. The Dream Dictionary contains interpretations on almost any type of dream subject. So, if you dreamt of a flying saucer landing in a field, and aliens getting out and taking a baby, a snake, and a pregnant dog back into the saucer, you could search separately for each of these subjects in the Dream Dictionary. Find the entry for flying saucer; then the entry for dog, baby, snake, pregnant, and so on. For each entry, find further related entries by looking under ‘Similar Articles’ on the right-hand side of the page. Then see Techniques for Exploring your Dreams.

Each entry gives the general meaning of the dream subject, just as an encyclopedia or dictionary does for a word. Several possible meanings are given. This is because as with our speech the position of the word – the context – gives it special meanings. So, a hot dog would be quite different to a black dog, dog-end or dead dog. Therefore, when you read an entry which has several different meanings, sometimes with a ‘;’ between, it simply means any one of them could apply, which means you need to think about the feelings in your dream, the context, the other imagery used. Please do not fall into the trap that one reviewer made of saying that the whole dictionary is about sex. Of course, sex is one meaning among many others. So, use your own sense of your dream as well as any definitions given.

To really explore the meaning, it is useful to use the Dream Dictionary as it is designed, rather than arrive at a ‘thought out’ interpretation. To see a working example of this see ‘Dream Interpretation Example One‘. 

Personal Dream Interpretation

I no longer offer a personal dream interpretation service, but only occasionally if you manage to send  an interesting dream I will respond – the reason is I am getting past my sell by date being 84.

Note: comments that have any adverts or links to other sites will be deleted.

In the meantime, here is a way to work out your own dream – Getting at Your Dream’s Meaning.

Please note: this a not-for-profit site and it offers real dream interpretations, not dream dictionary features that are not real interpretations. We ask no payment for these interpretations, but it would be a great if you wish to donate anything. I do not ask a fee for what I do, but if you wish to donate you can click on this Paypal Donation  

A Note About the Author: Tony Crisp

I have been interested in the health of mind and body since my early teens. I began writing about these subjects in 1956. My fascination for what lay under the surface of the mind led me personally to explore the unconscious using dreams and other mental and physical disciplines. From 1972 – 94 I worked as a psychotherapist using an eclectic, Humanistic Psychology approach which included dream work and releasing the secrets the body holds. My books include Do You Dream; Mind and Movement; The Instant Dream Book; Dream Dictionary; Life’s Little Secrets –Liberating The Body  – and many more. See My Books.

During those years I worked as a dream columnist for The Daily Mail and She Magazine. I was the regular dream interpreter for the London Broadcasting Company; I ran Teletext’s dream page on UK television’s Channel Four; and for New Zealand Teletext, and now I run this website giving dream help in the many replies to peoples dreams and in as well as many features on subjects connected with the human inner world. See Features

Throughout more than five decades I have been involved in a personal search for the secrets of mind and spirit. In those years I have also taught thousands of people techniques of deep relaxation, meditation, and methods of self exploration using dreams. Wanting to dig deep I explored the use of dreams and taught individuals and groups of people how to use these visions of the night to discover and heal the deepest issues in themselves, and to touch the high ground of their spiritual awareness. I worked for twenty years as a psychotherapist using several approaches, one of which was a way of honouring the body as a doorway to the unconscious mind, the emotions and spiritual experience. See Self-Regulation –  Recognition – Life’s Little Secrets – The LifeStream and Opening to Life

During the sixty years of seeking the wild wondrous beasts of the mind and spirit I dared my own inner adventure. But I also travelled with other people as an ordinary person, not a therapist, sharing their experience of fear and wonder as they unveiled and set loose their fountain of perception. I have travelled countless dream pathways, traversed the timeless with those using awareness enhancing drugs, and wrestled with the vitality of the body as people mimed and shouted their deepest intuitions through movement, dance and voice. See Tony’s Biography

My aim has always to share my findings – actually what I was shown or given from within – was given freely; I never had any teacher or attended a course, of course I read an enormous amount, so I cannot ask for money. If you wish to donate anything to the running of the site you can do so by clicking on https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JYTWAMC4LQLQ4&source=url 

My teacher has been from exploring dreams and occasionally touching the wonder we were born as – not from words written in books about that but by meeting it. See Enlightenment  

Introduction to Using the Dream Dictionary

Diccionario de los Sueños

Profundización de la comprensión de un sueño; Introducción

What Is Offered In The Dictionary

In a similar way, by observing dreams and laying bare the emotions and associated ideas and memories we have with the dream imagery, we gradually define our personality, its strengths and weaknesses, we discover new abilities and we grow beyond our old problems, and that in a depth we had never managed previously. I have called this mind watching, but it covers every aspect of human nature, not simply the intellect or thinking.

This mind watching through observation of our dreams first presents information about our personal experiences and memories and how they influenced our growth and influence present responses. Gradually the information arising from such watching leads beyond ones personal self. It shows in many cases how our unique self has arisen from, and has indissoluble links with our forebears, with our culture, with the past as a whole, and with the cosmos itself. It leads from oneself to the edge of the known, and perhaps helps us take a few steps beyond that edge into the unknown, to create new understanding.

This mind watching gradually reveals to us the many aspects of the mind’s working, and with such insight may come the growing ability to use these facets of ourselves. Not only may we discover great vistas of personal memory, but also the roots of our creativity, the subtle senses of our emotions and unconscious, and the treasures of experience we have gathered. See Your Amazing Circle – Self Observation 

So how can we get into this magical world of our dreams and start to harvest the possibilities held there? The following pages of this book are designed to help, guide and inform on how to do this. The book is also a counsellor on what you may find in your dream adventure.

The information about dreams presented in this book has been gathered during fifty years of working with and studying dreams and the dream process. It synthesises the experience of personally helping hundreds of individuals explore their dreams. The examples used have been taken from a collection of over 8000 dreams put onto a computer filing system. The filing system was also used to define general associations with commonly used dream images.

The major input for definition however has arisen from the actual exploration of dreams undertaken by individuals. These are either people I have worked with personally who have deeply felt the emotions and issues behind their dreams, not simply talked them over and come to an intellectual interpretation but a deep insight, or are people who have written up their findings arising from similar work. Added to this is the commonly held associations we have through our language and the way we use imagery within speech. Of course your personal dream imagery may not be using the commonly held associations, or those used by other people, and so you must read the definitions with care and consider if these fit what is implied or dramatised in your dream.

In the entries in the Dictionary are explanations of the many different types of dreams and dream images. Despite some people’s attempt to explain dreams in one simple formula, dreams cover a huge range of phenomena and human experience. Amongst subjects covered in the book are thousands of entries on the researched meaning of the things, people, creatures and places we dream about. There are also many entries on special subjects such as symbols and dreaming; interpreting dreams; recurring dreams; nightmares; sex while asleep; teenage girls love dreams; precognitive dreams; talking in ones sleep; the dream as an adventure; Occultism and Dreams; science sleep and dreams; and many more.

There are a compete list of these Features and the  Archetypes covered.

Therefore, if you have dreamt of such things as your teeth falling out; being chased; or your marriage partner dying, you will find an explanation of your dream in the following pages.

The aim of the book is to help you make connections between your dreams and your everyday life; to discover more fully the powerful emotions and reactions that unconsciously direct your decisions and responses in waking. The book is not an attempt to give you merely ideas to play with, to agree or disagree with, like fortune telling. It can lead to real insights which empower you to make more of yourself, and find your way through the many decisions life confronts you with.

But you can move directly on to Using the Dictionary – or better still read Meaning of Your Dream. 

The Discovery of Dreams

Dreams are a magical mirror in which your innermost hopes, longings, fears/terrors and genius are made real. They are made real as external environments, people, animals and relationships. It is as if all your deepest feelings, hopes, fear and wonder are projected outward onto a multidimensional screen. It is a world of virtual reality that you feel is real. Unfortunately this wonderful virtual reality world is usually felt as dealing with other people, as externals, like something that can damage us, or something like the Devil that can possess us.

But the greatest truth I have found in exploring dreams – not interpreting them – is that we are alone with ourselves in the world of our dream. If we can acknowledge and admit that our terrors we dream are actually our past hurts that we have not faced presenting themselves for us to heal; that the ghosts and demons that can rampage about our night are embodiments of our fears; that our wonderful visions and insights are an expression of our own infinite potential, then we can walk a pathway to finding what we really are. Audio Introduction to Exploring a Dream

1. Dreams are virtual realities that we create in our sleep. Even the wonderful dreams of God and angels are an external virtual reality, and mirror of our own inner immensity and our enormous variety. Unfortunately people either accept them as externally real, or as fantasy. But they are reflections of your potential, that cannot be seen in your daily life that is so dominated by your physical senses and hungers and fears.
2. See The Magical Dream Machine. So the images and fears we experience in our dreams are projection upon the vast screen of our mind. They are all projections from you. Running from them is like trying to escape from yourself.
3. In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.
4. While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
5. This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See ESP in Dreams; Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind.
6. This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive.
7. Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.
8. Life, if you look around you at Life’s creature, they can take any form. So Life itself is without form. In fact the recent advances in quantum physics suggest that what gives us existence is beyond space and time – beyond understanding.
9. So dreams do not come from the human unconscious, but from the formless origins of Life – our Core Self. To express in a way that is understandable to us as a person with limited understanding, dreams use all the common imagery and ideas. So people who say that dreams are a mish mash of common everyday events are mistaken. See LifeStream; Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking; .
10. Our core self can be explained by realising that we are all dependent on the universe. We often feel that the universe is way beyond our understanding, but a few simple facts may help. The first is that the universe as we know it began with what had been called the Big Bang. But before that there was a situation prior to the creation of time and space. That situation is very much like the experience of Edgar Cayce who had an awareness reaching beyond time and space. See God and the Big Bang are the Same Thing
11. Irish physicist John Stewart Bell put forward a quantum theorem that has revolutionised the way reality is considered. In brief, the theorem states that when two sub-microscopic particles are split and moved to a distance from each other, the action on, or of, particle ‘A’, is instantaneously reproduced with particle ‘B’. This interaction does not rely on any known link or communication and is considered to stand above normal physical laws of nature, as it is faster than light. Prior to such findings it was thought nothing could transcend the speed of light. Nick Herbert, in an interview published in High Frontiers writes: ‘THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS that are being kept from the public as far as the subjects of physics and consciousness are concerned. Bell’s Theorem was proved in 1964, and it is still not taught in physics classes, and you don’t hear it on your science news programs. A theorem is a proof, and no one has found a flaw in this theorem. It’s such a simple proof that a high school kid can understand it. So physicists can understand it. They have various ways of trying to ignore it, but it can’t be refuted because it’s so simple.’

Our Core self is that amazing part of us existing beyond time and space, and was within us from the start of our universe.

1. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.
2. You cannot be killed in a dream. All you can experience is the anguish and perhaps fear of dying, but in dreams you cannot die – or drown, or burn or any other threatening thing. We make the mistake of taking our very real values from our outer life into our inner life of dreams.
3. In dreams, what ever moves away from you in our dreams is going out of your awareness or even life; and whatever moves toward us is emerging into consciousness. Whatever it is that is coming toward us is giving us something whether it is energy, insight, or a frightening dream that is trying to shock us to wake up and clear out the inner mess we are in.  The fact we give it a frightening image is because we are brought up to be scared of ourselves and to not trust Life/Core. If you know the tenets of the AA, you will see that is what they are about – to trust Life.
4. Most people are frightened of life. I see this in so many dreams sent to me. They do not trust themselves to the powerful action of Life flowing through them. See Life’s Little Secrets.
5. We have been brain washed to believe that our existence depends upon nothing but accidental events, the survival of the fittest, the chemical and biological mechanical actions. Yet every time I have gone deeply into my ‘unconscious’ and yet maintained awareness, I have found a wonderful power of Life there.
6. So if your dreams frighten you, I want to say you are frightened of something wonderful that could have grown you and enlarged your experience of yourself. The thing that was full of fear was your own fear put into an image, and yet was a wonderful gift that you avoided receiving.
7. I too was full of fears and often woke up screaming. Then I learned to trust Life. It is like learning to swim. So please go back into your dream and let the fearful thing be fully experienced instead of waking up in fear. Then it will unveil itself as a thing of light and love.

Deepening Dream Understanding

I suggest you only try one method at a time and use it until you are capable or it or it doesn’t work for you, then move on to other methods taking time with them until you find what works best for you.

Although the process of dreams might not be a direct attempt to present MEANING, a dream may nevertheless have a great deal of INFORMATION in it. This becomes clearer if we remember that not many years ago it would have appeared highly superstitious or suspect to claim to be able to tell a person details of their health and parentage from a sample of their urine or blood. Today it is common practice. We accept that a growing amount of information can be gained from these unlikely sources. Blood doesn’t contain meaning, but we can gain information from it. In a similar way a sample of our dreams can also tell us an enormous amount. Sometimes this data is obvious, sometimes it needs processing to uncover, as with urine and blood.

Dream Processing – The following dream needs no deep techniques of processing. The word ‘processing’ is used throughout the book instead of analysis. Analysis has the connotation of giving our own thoughts or opinions to the dream. Processing is used to suggest extraction of information which leads to insight. With this particular dream, all it needs is a few facts brought to it to make clear what information it holds. The dream is that of a young woman, Mrs C. L.

It is a bright sunny day. I am walking across a large concrete car park. It is empty except for a huge trailer from a truck. It has BOOTS written on the side, and stands high off the ground. Being 4’ 9’ tall myself I decide to walk underneath. As I am half way the trailer starts to be lowered on top of me. I try to shout but cannot. I get onto my hands and knees and the trailer still kept coming down. I am now lying on my stomach, convinced it is going to crush me. Then it suddenly stops a couple of inches from my head. I wake feeling terrible.

The dream is interesting, although the information it holds may at first not be obvious. But with a minimum of processing the dream information will become clear. The first technique of processing the dream is to recognise some of the key statements within it. These are I AM WALKING – I TRY TO SHOUT – CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO CRUSH ME.

The reason these are key statements is because the dreamer is saying ‘I am walking’ – ‘I try to shout’ – ‘I …am convinced’. The word ‘I’ is important.

This form of processing has not added anything to the dream. It has simply drawn attention to the information already there in the dreamer’s description of her experience – this is why it is useful to write the dream out fully. If we add a little more information which the dreamer herself connects with the dream, then it becomes even clearer. Mrs C. L. says, ‘I work for BOOTS the chemist. The employees at the shop I work in were told at the beginning of the year that Boots are selling our shop. When that happens I will be made redundant. We were supposed to finish on May 26th. It is now the end of July. The deal fell through so we are now just left hanging indefinitely until a new buyer comes along. I feel very unsettled as I can’t make any plans for the future.’

Having read these comments, it would be difficult not to see the dream as relating to the woman’s work situation, and to her strong anxiety connected with it. She herself says – through her dream – she is ‘convinced it – the situation – is going to crush’ her. She also feels her strong emotions about this – expressed in her attempt to shout – are not being expressed or ‘heard’. From just this one dream, we can be forgiven if we assume that dreams may express in dramatic form our feeling reaction to the circumstances of our everyday life. Taking this dream as information, Mrs. C. L. could see she is feeling crushed by the situation, yet not stating her feelings loudly enough to be heard. She might therefore speak to the manager to clarify the situation for herself.

Here is an even shorter and less complex dream. It has been left just as it was written so its information is immediately apparent. The key words here might be TRYING TO CONTACT HIM and NOT UNDERSTANDING WHY HE LEFT ME. The dream is from Mrs C. J.

Years ago I lost my first husband at twenty nine. I had the same dream continually of being in a phone box trying to contact him, not understanding why he had left me. He died of cancer. Later I remarried and this husband died of a heart attack. Once again the same dream came back so much.

On speculating about the dream from what is immediately apparent, we might say that although it is irrational to continually  try to contact her husband when there has never be any success, nevertheless, her desire to be with him continues year after year. This same part of her cannot understand why he died. We might put such feelings into words as, ‘But what had he done to die so young? Why should it happen to me twice?’ We can also assume that her desire to understand these questions, which is what contacting her husband represents, is expressed in the dream as the telephone.

The dream process has dramatised her situation and inner feelings – given them form and made them experiential. Looking at this dream helps us see how an image, such as the telephone, performs exactly the same sort of function as a spoken word, although in a different way. Namely, it represents feelings and thoughts. That the woman’s questions remain, that her problem is unsolved, is apparent from the fact she does NOT make contact on the telephone, and does not find peace. Understanding her dream shows her the importance of the questions she continually asks herself, and the need to release the emotions behind them. With this she could be free of the dream. If she cannot manage this by herself, taking advantage of the professional help of a therapist might help.

To make it clear how everything is a dream holds personal information, to give an example, I was recently asked by a man who had given no thought to dreams how on earth you could extract any meaning from them. He was wearing a fairly old T-shirt, so I said, “OK, let’s imagine you dreamt of your T-shirt, what would you make of that?”

After a while he said, “I don’t know that I would make anything of it.”

My response was to say, “Right, but now tell me where you bought the T-shirt, and what memories it has for you.” Whereupon he told me memories of being abroad, and that the shirt was part of those memories, and he wasn’t prepared to say what they were as they were so personal.

The important point is that everything we see and deal with, every person, every imagined scene, has such a background of feelings and perhaps memories. It is exactly this background of feelings and information that the dream weaves its story from. To understand it you need to become aware of the usually unconscious feeling responses you have in connection with every thing, place, person and animal you fill your dreams with.

For fuller Dream Processing – Below are described simple techniques that make it possible to quickly gain information from your dreams. They have been put as a series of questions. If you take time to consider and answer the question you will find your way into a new experience of dream understanding.

Read it in: Processing Your Dream  

Seeing under the Surface

Acting on your Dreams – Extracting more from your dream by letting your body and feelings express it can provide a remarkable release of insight. There are several ways of doing this.

Do see the instructions see: Acting on Your Dreams

The Peer Dream Group – This method is the most powerful and deepest method. It includes some of the other techniques mentioned.

The way of working known as the Peer Dream Group came about from our experience that dreams are largely self explanatory if approached in the right way. An exterior expert or authority is not necessary for a profound experience of and insight into dreams and into oneself if certain rules are respected and used. The dreamer is the ultimate expert on their own dream  and themselves but only when we break through to what is usually unconscious mental states, and when treated as such, and supported in their investigation of their dream drama, they can powerfully explore and manifest the resources of their inner life.

To use it see: The Peer Dream Group and What I Have Seen In Dreams

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