Dream Symbols and Meanings
Mastering and Understanding the Language and Symbols of Your Dreams
Dreaming reveals a language all its own, lush with images and symbols which seem perplexing in the conscious realm. Here are some keys to interpreting them.
Individualy, we are each our own mythology and have our own unique way of relating to and disseminating ourselves in comparison to the world around us. Understanding this can be a challenge in the waking world, let alone the dreaming one where all of the boundaries and rules seem to shift into a magical and often nonsensical framework. Such is the nature of dreams.
This is one of the reasons that understanding and interpreting dreams and their meanings can prove elusive. Unless you learn to comprehend the language of your Self, the symbols of dreams will continue to elude you. But mastering the complexities of the unconscious dreamworld is really a lot simpler than you might imagine, using the steps below.
The Discipline of Journaling
Almost every dream authority agrees on this one specific precept - you must develop a consistent discipline of writing down your dreams. Taking this a step further, a good practice is to set aside some time every evening to synopsize your day. This is not a literary exercise, so take no pains to ensure your diction and grammar are perfect - those are not important. What is important is inclusion and detail of the day itself in no more than one or two paragraphs, with an overall mood themed for the day. An example:
"Mood: Uncertain
Highlights: Got up, did Yoga. Daniel visited early in the morning, we argued about the move to London. Felt stressed over trying to decide what to do. Ate Lunch with Priscilla, felt self-conscious about my new hairstyle. Came home and discovered there are two bills I forgot to pay. Drank wine and fretted over my life."
In recording these feelings and events daily, it will become much more apparent where your particular conflicts and thoughts are over a given period of time, and much easier to relate your dreams to key feelings and events.
Immediately on waking, use the remaining portion of the page to record any portion of the dream that you remember, no matter how unrelated or trivial it might seem. Over time, you will come to correlate your own language and symbols accordingly by associating patterns and themes - something that Dream Dictionaries can never approximate, no matter how good that they are.
On Dream Symbols and the Collective Mind
"We do not assume that each new-born animal creates its own instincts...and we must not suppose that human individuals invent their specific human ways with every new birth. Like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited." - Carl Jung
Any mention of dream symbology would be remiss without referencing one of the great, preeminent dream scholars, Carl Jung, who believed that some symbols were universally held and possessed a specific meaning. Fire and Water being two representative examples.
When interpreting your own dreams then, using a dream dictionary can prove to give insight and clarity into areas where you are stuck or require more enlightenment. The cautionary note being only that your own individual relationship to the thing in question must first be given consideration. If, as example, you are a competitive swimmer, dreaming about being in an endless ocean may very well represent the infinity of femininity - but the importance of dreaming it in the first place will be far different from someone who is absolutely terrified of water.
Recording Your Own Dream Dictionary
Any contiguous study of dreaming should include an ongoing and living Dream Dictionary where the your own feelings, relationships to and understanding of the symbol or thing in the conscious world is defined as reference. Over time, these meanings and definitions can and will change, growing richer and deeper with complexity as you begin to further understand your own patterns of dreaming and the unconscious realm where you are not merely participant and observer, but very much creator as well.
