Dreams Don’t Mean Any One Thing, They Mean Many Things ($)

Dreams are sleeping meditations on emotions; waking meditations are dreams of thought.

“[Dreams] take patience, and sometimes they require you to dig down very deep.
Be sure you’re willing to do that.”
— Harvey Mackay, author and columnist

I have become dream enabled. It may have started with Covid two years ago. Since that time, my sleep has been broken, as I wake once or twice each night with dream memories.

I advise people who want to remember their dreams to set an alarm that will wake them during their dream cycle before their usual waking time. If you wake during your dream, you’ll remember it. You’ll need to jot down a few words.

Remembering dreams has been happening naturally, more than in years past, and it has given me a rich dream life. Because of the lack of sleep, I’ve taken to napping in the afternoons, which yields even more dreams.

Dreamwork is work. The recollection is disruptive. Waking earlier means you have to give yourself more time to sleep and some extra time when you awake. Most people don’t do it because remembering your dreams is just the start of dreamwork. Dreamwork is actually lifework.

Big Mistakes

Dreams are built of memories, but they’re not built from memories you normally remember. For the most part, dream images are situations you’ve never had before and, to confuse matters further, the scenes don’t conclude. They’re not meant to conclude. They’re not meant to pull things together. They’re meant to pull things apart.

Dreams are disintegrative. You rarely wake from a dream feeling resolved. That is because whatever you believe in waking life, you’re likely wrong. Dreams tap you on the shoulder to remind you of your ignorance, and sometimes they’re rather rude. This applies to everything.

Your mind’s natural inclination is to further buttress your point of view, and so to become further wrong. Your dreams scatter ice on the curves in order to send you over the guardrail of your imagination.

This would not be the case if your thinking was perfect and your conclusions precise, but they are neither. Our thinking is a jumble of assumptions, mis-recollections, and magnificent inductions that make cubist paintings look like real life.

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If you’d like to talk to me about dreams, I’d be happy to oblige.
Schedule a short, free conversation with me at:

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Interpretation