Dreams are your subconscious’ way of communicating its messages to you. This language is like a human fingerprint – it is unique to every person on earth and encoded and very eloquent. Often there are incidents or moments that we consciously don’t notice because of the measure of awareness we are missing. These incidents or happenings get pushed into our subconscious. Our subconscious gets a “voice” when the “lower mind” or what we commonly know as the analytical mind goes to sleep. This “voice” is what we call dreams.
Dreams are of many different kinds. The best description I have found is one by Osho in his book called Awareness. But it is towards the end of the book he describes 5 types of dreams:
- 1st type of Dream – Rubbish for which he says, “…Don’t pay much attention to them.And by and by, as your awareness grows you will be able to see what is dust”
- 2nd type – Wish fulfillment for which he says, “Listen to the second type of dream and meditate on it, and it will communicate to you what is your need.Fulfill the needs and don’t bother about desires. With this you start changing your consciousness, you start changing your your behavior, you start changing your life pattern”
- 3rd type – Communication from the superconscious for which he says, “it is very very rare.Meditate on it because that will become your guidance, that will lead you to your master.”
- 4th type – Past lives for which he says, “From this dream you become, by and by, aware of your past lives.[Hence]…many things will become meaningless and many new things will become meaningful”
- 5th type – Going forward into the future, for which he says, “Rare, very rare. If you become aware of your dreams, someday you will become aware of this possibility also – the future looks into you”
I would recommend you to go through it.
There are also times when, in the course of your day, you get flashes of the circumstances that you are witnessing in that moment, giving you the sense of having already witnessed it, or having participated in it – commonly known as déjà vu (literally translated from French as “already seen”). The explanation I have become aware of is the theory based on free-will and choice, that we have already “lived” every possible choice of an event and from what I understand, we parallelly live out every alternative state of a reality. What we choose at the present moment with a conscious mind becomes the “most true” for us and hence sometimes we get a feeling of having already lived a particular moment. This theory is very well elaborated and explained by the masterful author,Richard Bach in his book “One“.
How to interpret dreams?
This is like asking how to recognize your own language. The best way I have experimented and discovered is, by keeping a dream journal next to you. Record your dreams as soon as you wake up or even stir in your sleep. Do this for forty days atleast and you will begin to see the patterns through them. Of course, you have to resist to the temptation of thinking that you can recognize the pattern even before the forty days are over! Wait for the complete forty nights until you sit down and do the pattern recognition. To help understand what different things mean, do the Non-Dominant Writing technique that I often use in Inner Child Work healing – ask the meaning of the symbol by writing it out with your dominant hand, and then spontaneously start writing with your non-dominant hand.Remember, just accept the meanings of different symbols that come to you intuitively.
For e.g., I often get buildings/structures in my dreams. They signify to me a set of beliefs or a premise. I also get dreams of zombies and dead people. That for me signifies a lot of old energy being cleansed. So you see, this is not as per any external book. You are the best interpreter of your own dreams.
Healing through dreams –
As you advance in meditation you will see that there are of course times when you are traveling “astrally”. You must have heard this from a lot of meditators. While I am not very aware of this process, sometimes I do become aware in my dream that I am traveling through the house of someone who I know, or through my own house. But you will intuitively understand when the 2 types of dreams happen and how they differ, especially after the 40-day dream work. There is a distinct out-of-body-experience (OBE) that you can “feel”. It is quite palpable!
There are also times when you travel to other dimensions, or other parts of the world or go on to “live” a parallel reality on different planets. This becomes evident when you wake up having a sense of knowing a “science” beyond the one that exists on our planet and seems too elaborately explained to your conscious mind to be imagination.
There could also be times when you can wake up in the middle of the night to write down the dream and then go back to dreaming. That happens after you are so finely tuned to the mind’s cycle of slipping into the alpha and theta states (simply put, the states having a lower and lower thought rate) that you are able to sustain the alpha state while you are writing out the dream. This comes naturally with practice though.
Later on, you can even “control” your activities during the dream.
For e.g., there are times when I regress into a past life during a dream. At that time, healing happens significantly faster than during a conventional PLR session. Of course, it is always followed up by writing. Writing “seals” the healing process that took place through the dream.
More on healing through dreams –
- Set an intention before you sleep at night on what you choose to heal. A good technique to enter into sleep is through vipassana meditation – focus on the breath – keep bringing your attention to your breath as you sleep. Something what I learnt through shavasana in yoga. You can even repeat the intention in your mind as you sleep, gradually slowing the words in your mind as if a tape is on “slow-forward”. My favorite intention is – “I choose to receive the highest healing that is most required for me now”. It works the best!
- Set an intention to remember the dream in the morning.
- When you wake up from a strongly emotional dream, you are often prone to carrying this emotional energy into your day. So when you wake up in the middle of a strong dream (rather than ‘bad’ dream), sit up, focus on your breath, then visualise/imagine the end of the dream in as much detail as possible that would ‘feel good’. This brings closure to the emotion that you were experiencing in your dream. I have found a 100% success in healing emotional issues when I have meditated on the dream, especially the emotion and the visuals and then directing it, like a movie, to its proper end.
- I recently read somewhere that children keep their eyes closed for atleast 5 minutes after they have woken up. They take time to wake up. I have found this practice to be very healing, especially if I have had a strong dream. I generally put on harp music by Erik Berglund at night so that even when I wake up in the morning, it is in gentleness. Focusing on the sounds and the silence when you wake up before opening your eyes is also intensely, beautifully restorative.
- If you take any sort of healing session, your transformation is supported by your dreaming state. Often after my PLR/Inner Child work sessions I ask people to record their dreams for the next 21 days atleast.
- It is often easier to recall your dreams when you are in a hot bath/shower esp. if you bathe immediately after waking up rather than brushing, bed tea, etc.
- Lighting candles by your bedside is a very good practice too. It has helped me when I have been going through some strong issues, or even when there is a lot of mental chatter. It helps ‘burn away’ excess thought. I was recommended this by my spiritual teacher who learnt it from Leonard Orr to start with adding up candles until you get the feeling of ‘enough’. Then gradually you can increase the number as per intuition. My current maximum is 7 candles.
- Morning 2am to 6am is the time when maximum astral activity takes place. Leonard Orr suggests that we take a bath at 2am and go back to sleep and this facilitates in healing at very high levels. I have personally not tried this, but as a teenager I would often wake up at 2am, take a bath and chant the gayatri mantra for an hour or more.
- Keeping crystals under your pillow works wonders! I always have a huge rose quartz and a clear quartz and my angel cards, fairy cards and celtic rune cards under my pillow. It works even when I don’t use the pillow.
Dream therapists –
I personally also know of someone who can get into people’s dreams and heal/help them. So there are people who do what can be called “dream therapy“. This, however, is quite like the concept in Inception ( 🙂 ) with an obvious difference that the participant who wants to undergo this therapy is aware of the therapist’s involvement in the dream and the whole intent is to heal, rather than conspire, with the responsibility of healing with the person involved rather than the healer.
Hope this sheds some light on what dreaming is about, spiritually, without getting into the psychological aspects of it.
Please feel free to write your feedback on this. I especially encourage you to do the 40-day exercise as I have done so myself with amazing results.
Sleep sweet and … dream as a way of Awakening! 🙂
Wonderful! I Love Dreams. I haven’t really understood the meanings of all my dreams yet, still I feel very happy after dreaming. Yes, I did have a dream journal for nearly four months continuously. But later, I became lazy and stopped it. It had a really good effect on me. I saw 4-5 of my past lives in my dreams. Also, I saw whats gonna happen 3 days later, in a sign/code one day. After it has happened, I decoded the dream. After reading this, I am gonna start my dream journal once again. Thank you very much!!!
hey nice article about dreams. I liked it…
But can we discuss on som topics or share som experiences…
Tell me how we can interact…
Actually i want to know the meanings of my experiences. Most of the times I understand what they mean but, its only that, I believe that through discussions we can gain more!!