Dreams - your very own inner teachers

Your dreams can be one of your most valuable teachers on your path of personal growth. They allow you to experience another type of reality that can be an amazing experience in itself and the wisdom they offer is unsurpassable. Dreams are available to all of us, every night, or any time we sleep, and they are free. Everyone's dreams are equally wise, powerful and informative - they are probably the most universally available and undepletable resource there is. What a gift!

If you don't remember your dreams, research shows that that is a recall issue and does not mean you are not dreaming. There is information available about how to help remember dreams (look up "remembering dreams" on Google or at Amazon.com and you will find plenty of resources).

Dreams are mainly symbolic and many of these symbols are common to many people but each of us will also have a personal meaning attached to the symbols which will influence the meaning of a dream. So to find the meaning of one of your dreams you need to look at what the parts of the dream mean to you personally - this meaning will also be culturally and socially influenced.

There are many ways to interpret dreams but the one I have found the most meaningful and useful uses the Psychology of Selves. To interpret your dreams using this model, you basically look at the characters in your dreams as the various parts of your personality, the various inner selves that constitute your psyche. The person who is you in the dream, is your primary self, which is the part of your personality you identify with in waking life. How you interact with the characters in your dreams reveals how you interact with the other selves in you. So dreams are rarely about other people; even though other people appear in our dreams, they do so to represent a part of your self.

Your dreams can reveal to you which selves you are identified with, which selves you have disowned, how the disowned selves feel about their predicament, how your primary selves feel about things. Dreams offer pictures of your current state, of how you are handling a particular situation, and they give you guidance in what you need to do to become more whole.

Dreams show you where there is tension between the various parts of you and give you indications of when and how to resolve that tension. Dreams go hand-in-hand with the self-awareness technique Voice Dialogue because they illustrate your current situation and offer suggestions of what issues to work on. You can even dialogue with your dream characters and discover how they function in your psyche.

Here is an example of a dream to illustrate how you might go about interpreting a specific dream using this technique:

Mary dreams she is in a large house with many rooms that she has previously been unaware of, and in these rooms are various people - adults and children. She walks through the house and meets the various characters there. Some she likes but others she is afraid of. Some seem content and others are not.

With this type of dream, the house represents the personality and the rooms represent different parts of her personality. Because in the dream she is 'discovering' these rooms this would indicate that in her waking life she is in the process of discovering different parts of herself. In one room there is a happy child playing and Magdalena likes this child and has a pleasant interaction with it. This would indicate that Magdalena is in touch with her own inner playful child and her primary self is okay about this.

In another room the door is only slightly ajar and peeking in Magdalena can see a large angry snake locked up in a cage. She fears this snake but finds that the longer she is willing to be with it, the less angry it becomes. A snake traditionally represents sexuality/instincts and spirituality. So if this was your dream you would have to look at how you are identified normally in order to understand it. If you are not in touch with your sexuality then this dream would probably mean you are now able to be with it but it is still locked up and angry - yet becoming less angry as it realises you are paying attention to it. On the other hand, if you are normally a non-spiritual person, the snake might represent your spiritual nature requiring your attention and release. Snakes might also mean other things to you, such as cunning, slyness, power. So there is no one way to understand a dream - your own dreams need you to be the one to understand their real meaning.

The Psychology of Selves provides a valuable framework for dream interpretation, and is one that can be used by anyone once you become familiar with how to apply this framework to your dreams.

For more information on the Psychology of Selves and Voice Dialogue visit www.voicedialogue.com