Monday, March 30, 2009

Personal dream image inventory for your journal


Let’s say you’ve been journaling your dreams for some time now. Your recall and vividness of dreams are becoming sharper and your dream entries contain more detail because you remember more of your dreams. You will reach a point when you’ll feel ready to begin re-reading your entries. Keep an eye out for recurring themes, images and symbols. Underline them in your entries.

Start a new journal entry and list these images. Such images can be characters, themes, objects, locations, situations or sounds. Try to remember the context in which these images appeared and the emotions that surrounded them. What do these images mean to you personally? Do they relate to anything going on in your waking life? What do you think some of your dreams are revealing about yourself?

Most sleep and dream experts discourage “dream interpretation” books or dictionaries, insisting dream images are all extremely personal and can only apply to the particular person dreaming them. If you go to the bookstore and look through various dream interpretation books, you might notice that these books will usually not agree on the meaning of any one image! Many of the dream symbol interpretations are based on older cultures in more closed societies in which everyone thought along the same lines. And every different culture had their own interpretations. In today's mixed societies of individuals, it's a much more personal story.

Robert Moss, author of the highly recommended The Three “Only” Things, said, “You don’t want anyone telling you what your dreams mean. Dreams bring many gifts of power and you don’t want to give that power away.” You are the best judge and interpreter of your own dreams.

Dreams are not prophecies, largely, but are instead a means of finding out more about how you really feel about aspects of your own life. And dream journaling is a way to record and reflect on these dream issues.

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1 comment:

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