Working with Your Dreams

®	Integral BEING.org applied transpersonal study

Suggestions for Working With Your Dreams

Recording the Dream:

1. Make a written record of your dream as soon as possible after dreaming it, while details remain fresh. Record your dream in the present tense (“I am walking in a park …”) in order to preserve the emotional immediacy of the images. Write down the date of the dream, and any comments on pre-sleep thoughts or impactful events of the previous day.

2. Be descriptive and explicit: What is the setting? What is the quality of light? Time of day? Who is present? What is the mood? No detail is too insignificant to record. It’s all relevant.

3. Pay attention to the emotions, sensations, thoughts and spontaneous images and/or memories that arise when you are remembering and recording your dream. These are some of the ways in which the dream communicates with your waking consciousness.

4. Be aware of an internalized censor (who will want you to delete images or details that your waking self finds unsavory) – and override it! Nothing in the dream is meant to be taken literally; it’s metaphor. So be brave. Practice looking into the dark. You will reap great benefit in terms of expanded self-awareness.

5. Even if all you can remember of your dream is a snippet, write it down. It is often the case that a single sentence or image, as you are recording it and pondering it, will produce rich insight.

Opening to the Dream’s Meaning:

6. Ask yourself: What does the dream’s setting call to mind? Who do the characters remind me of, and in what way? How are they like or unlike myself?

7. See #3 above. Ask yourself: What is familiar about this feeling or sensation? When may I have felt it recently? In what way is that incident related to this image? What is the connection between the memory that was stirred as I was writing about this dream image, and the image itself? Etc.

8. Be alert to metaphor, the primary language of dreams. For example: a cell phone that doesn’t work when you try to call your friend, may be pointing to a feeling of not being able to communicate effectively with him/her at present. A house on stilts may be picturing a sense of being ungrounded or lacking foundation in some important way. A derailed train may be saying: “I feel off-track in my life.”

9. Enter into a dialogue with a character or even an object in your dream. This is especially useful when the person or image is somehow frightening, unpleasant or just puzzling. Ask a question and listen for the response in an attitude of undefended, unprejudiced openness. You will often be connecting with the voice of a disowned part of yourself that is ready to be reintegrated.

10. Experiment with giving expression to your dreams in a variety of ways. Poetry, art and movement may extend the experience of the dream beyond what writing can do. Look for a way to externalize the insight you have derived from the dream – to ground it in the outer world.