How to interpret your dreams

And what your dreams can teach you

“Jockey,” by painter Tom Anholt, whose work often draws on allegory and otherworldly landscapes

Dear You,

Have you heard stories… of people who dreamed they were unexpectedly pregnant, only to discover that in fact they were? Of dreams that seemed to predict the future? Or revealed to them the answer to questions that had long been troubling them? Or helped them make a difficult decision?

If you’re a bit of a skeptic, like me, you might be tempted to dismiss such accounts. But - as the authors of a new book, DREAMWISE, show - there’s nothing supernatural about these stories; there is, instead, the fascinating, mysterious terrain of the unconscious mind.

As the authors put it, “the unconscious takes in information consciousness misses and tells us through dreams what we have missed and misjudged. Because the unconscious is ahead of consciousness, dreams can alert us to possibilities and probabilities that may lie ahead….Consciousness is not as trustworthy as we would like to believe. Like a spotlight, it provides a bright but limited focus.

“…Your dreams may be strange and difficult to understand because they originate from a part of you that is mysterious and inscrutable, yet they are indisputably yours….A nursing mother’s body knows how to create milk that is perfectly adapted to her baby’s changing age, developmental stage, and even immunological challenges. In a similar way, your dream maker produces exactly the right dream for a particular moment. Your dreams are the medicine formulated by the dream maker to help you address a specific problem.”

In other words: if we want the truth, we should turn to our unconscious.

And we should consider acquiring a few techniques (think of it as learning to read a compass) to help us explore the terrain of our dreaming selves.

“Dreams”, by the incredibly gifted Komako Sakai

This past Sunday, we were extremely lucky to host the authors of “Dreamwise” — Joseph Lee, Lisa Marchiano, and Deborah Stewart — for our Candlelight Chat. The authors describe their forthcoming book as a practical guide to dream interpretation, and they were wonderful; many of you said that it was your favorite Candlelight Chat so far. (If you missed it and would like to watch, we’ll be sending out the recording later this week to paid and scholarship members of The Quiet Life; it will also live permanently under the “Candlelight Video” tab at TheQuietLife.net, where you can find all our previous Chats, and watch them any time you like.)

In the meantime, here a few key ideas from DREAMWISE, on how to interpret your dreams (there are many more, inside the book):

1. The most important thing you can do is write your dreams down, as soon as you wake up. As the Dreamwise authors say, dreams are “the soul’s exhalations and waft their way only briefly into consciousness.” You have to catch them before they disappear for good. It also helps to:

• have a notebook, pen, and lamp by your bed

• record your dream in present tense, so your mind feels that you’re still in the dream, even as you write it down

• Give your dream a title

2. Why do we have so many dreams of imminent death (falling, a tsunami, a gunman pointing at ourselves or our loved ones, etc.)? Do these dreams predict that we or our loved ones are soon to die?