Psych 101:The Wisdom of Your Dreams
Dreams are just as natural a part of the human experience as anything in our waking lives. Despite their oftentimes (seemingly) illogical turns, dreams are also in many ways a clearer and broader picture of our reality than the events of our days.
Dreams serve us in quite practical ways. They bring unforeseen solutions. They reveal things that we may have been aware of but haven't examined very closely. They can also reveal things that we were never aware of. The wisdom, knowledge and perception of dreams surpass the reach of logic. Dreams have long endured a dubious reputation in many circles. They've been described as the repositories of repressed emotion and the discarded rubbish of the psyche. Unfortunately, those people who hold such attitudes about dreams will, because of their very beliefs, probably never experience their wisdom. The gift of the dream only becomes apparent when we step into it with openness and respect. Curiosity can be helpful, too. For most of our waking hours, the majority of us live on the surface of our minds. Occasionally, material bubbles up from the deeper regions of the psyche in the form of intuitive hunches, artistic inspiration, and sudden bursts of insight. But even these messages can be ignored, especially when they don't fit in with our beliefs and most basic assumptions about reality. The wisdom of the dream has oftentimes fallen victim to this discriminatory kind of thinking.
The better you know yourself, the clearer the messages of your dreams will be for you. You have to have some working knowledge of your own feelings, attitudes and beliefs in order to understand what any particular dream symbol means for you personally. For example, a dream about water will have a much different meaning for a person who associates it with refreshment than it will for a person whose who lost a loved one to a swimming accident. This is one reason why dream dictionaries are often misleading. Books about dreams and their symbols (especially those that provide literal and generalized interpretations) often miss the essential point that dreaming is a creative endeavor. One shouldn't trust any "key" that purports to provide the definite meaning of certain dream symbols for everyone across the board. Your dream is a personal and highly intimate matter. To put it in simple terms, it is a discourse between you and your soul.
Various schools of thought attribute dreams to God, the unconscious mind, or even to helpful spirit guides. The act of dreaming is a creative one, however, which means that the wisdom of the dream is something that belongs to us. We're endowed with full creativity within the dream state just as we are in waking life. Parts of our inner selves are given voice and form so we can interact with them. We also interact with people who have departed from this life and perhaps even with past-life personalities of our own. The dream state exists outside of the rules of time as we understand them. Some dreams can cause us a certain amount of distress until we finally realized what they are trying to bring into our awareness.
The wisdom of the dream gets us better acquainted with ourselves. It puts us in deeper touch with our feelings, our core beliefs about life, and our mental and spiritual capacities. Dreams never give up on us, even when we may give up on ourselves. That's why they never fail to return to us, night after night.
