Finding answers in your dreams.
Every dream poses a question about your life, and gifts you the opportunity to discover the meaningful answers you seek.
The dream question is usually somewhere near the beginning of your dream (if you have remembered the whole dream), and it probably looks nothing like any question you’re asking yourself in life. For example, your dream might be about searching for a lost cat, in which case the dream question might be, “Where is the cat?” or “Why has the cat got lost?” or “Did I let the cat out?” Or “How can I find the cat?” In waking life, you might not have a cat, but you might have a feeling that you’ve lost something precious, or that you’re trying to find something, or that you have a sense of being lost or losing yourself in pursuit of an adventure. Your dream might use the lost cat story to explore the question of loss in your life.
The Dream Academy courses show you how to identify the question – or questions – a dream poses, whether the dream you are exploring is a whole dream or a tiny, remembered fragment of a greater dream that evaporated with the morning light.
Once you’ve identified the main question and related it to a situation in your waking life, you then return to the dream to look at the answers it explores.
In the example of the lost cat dream, you might spend your time in the dream walking around the streets calling the cat’s name, or asking other people if they’ve seen the cat, or putting a super-tasty treat outside your door to entice the cat home, or – given that this is a dream – asking the unicorn to find the cat and fly her home on her horn-broomstick, or getting down on all fours and prowling, cat-like, into a hidden cave to find the cat and nestle up beside her. See? Lots of possible dream answers to finding the cat, regardless of whether they’re successful in the dream. Your job is then to translate these dream metaphors to identify the answers your dreaming mind was exploring in relation to your waking life question.
But should you follow the answers you decode from your dreams, or might they lead you up the wrong path?
This is where it can get tricky. Let’s go a little deeper:
Dreams process your conscious and unconscious experiences of the last 1-2 days, comparing them to similar past experiences and, sometimes, projecting into possible future scenarios so that you can try out new approaches based on what you’ve learned. Ideally a dream updates your mindset based on your latest experiences, but, more often than not, your mindset refers back to your earliest experiences and decides to stick with your oldest beliefs. It can take a lot of work to shift from your foundational beliefs and move into new territory, no matter how convincingly your most recent experiences argue for change!
A dream shows you how your mindset processes your life. It shows you the various ways in which you try to find answers (or try to solve a problem), and it may also throw in some new ways of approaching the question if your mindset is changing.
Your job, when interpreting your dream, is to uncover your unconscious mindset, those unconscious belief patterns that drive the way you try to resolve a problem or find answers to a question. In the lost cat dream example, you might discover that your unconscious pattern when feeling lost is to look for magical answers (a unicorn with a horn broomstick) rather than find out why you are feeling so lost and address the issue at that level. (I am over-simplifying here, but you get the picture!)
The tools you learn through my online courses help you to discover these patterns and identify your blind spots when looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems in your life. The tools also help you to free yourself from these habitual patterns and blind spots and enable you to see more effective solutions or insightful answers.
So, a dream doesn’t give you direct guidance. It gives you something much more powerful: the opportunity to identify your conscious and unconscious mindset and understand how it is affecting the way you deal with a problem, and why effective answers seem to be eluding you. You are then a stepping-stone away from freeing yourself from old limiting mindset shackles and seeing life in a new light. And oh, yes, the occasional dream does reveal new breakthrough answers which may very well be worth following.
