A while ago I was given a lucid dream. (A state of knowing your dreaming while still in the dream.) In front of me stood a large, wood-clad restaurant. Large statues of Buddha’s, colorful paintings of Chakra’s and Jesus’ lined the walls. I could sense an unseen presence beside me.

On the front of the restaurant hung a sign that read: “Soup, Ring, Bean Restaurant.” I loved it! But still couldn’t help but wonder why the odd name. The personage beside me telepathically told me to say the name out loud. I did. “Say it again faster.” the personage said. “Soup-rin-been?”, ” Souprinbeing?”, ” Supreme Being!” I could hardly contain my laughter.

Dreams are inner truth

At first, other than being entertained by the dream I was at a loss as to the dream meaning. Then it hit me. Dreams are inner truth! The dream was trying to tell me that I needed to be edified more by spiritual food and less by clinical observation. Who says the cosmos don’t have a sense of ha, ha! When attempting to recall your dreams it is important to think in terms of images and not spoken language.

As the subconscious mind deals mostly with imagery and less with linguistics, the brain likes to output information the same way it comes in. Close your eyes and roll them up and toward the middle of your forehead. This is the area known as the third eye. The third eye is commonly known for being the center of psychic activity in the brain.

How to remember more of your dreams

This center can also aid in the recovery of dream memories. Begin to SEE the memory of the dream in your minds eye. Once your are able to see it, you are then ready to translate it onto paper. The amount of details you thought you could not recall, but begin to recall, through the process of writing will surprise you.

To help ensure that you will remember more of your dreams, suggest to yourself before falling asleep that upon awakening you will remember your dreams. Place a note pad and a pen on your night stand or within easy reach. When you wake up and recall partial or entire dreams, record it immediately no matter what time it is.

If you think, “I’m too tired, I’ll write it down in the morning.” you won’t, at least not in the detail that you would when it was still fresh in your mind. The next step is to analyze your dreams. Dream books, a dream dictionary, which can prove helpful, cannot encapsulate the dreamer’s individual symbols all of the time.

Although some dream symbols are uniform throughout most dream books, such as the dream symbol of the snake meaning sex, many interpretations vary radically from one dream book to the next. Everyone attaches dream meanings to objects, people and events that are different for each individual.

Lettuce, for example, reminds you of salad is a correct statement for most people. Yet, if you spent your summers as a teenager on a lettuce farm where you experienced your first kiss, then lettuce could mean something all together different to you. Dream books can give dream meaning; general dream meanings of salad or lettuce that would suffice for many but not for all.

It all depends on the individuals personal associations that cannot be taken into account by a book. Dreams usually convey an overall impression or feeling. If a particular object recurred throughout the dream, think of what that object means to you. For example, if you had a dream of a cat chasing a dog through the meadow as people watched, you would rate each symbol in order of importance or degree of puzzlement to you.

If you found the meadow to have the most dream meaning, then your dream is trying to convey something to you about your environment. If the dog being chased by the cat is perplexing to you, then the dream is trying to tell you something about your relationships and in this case that a role reversal may be occurring.

How you feel about that role reversal will be determined by how you felt when you first saw the cat chase the dog. The people watching are symbolic of how you feel others view that particular relationship from the outside. So as you can see, it is not only the symbols that are important to the interpretation.

It’s the meanings and feelings attached to those dream symbols that make the dream interpretation correct. By keeping a record of your dreams, these themes and dream meanings will become apparent over time.

Everyone has the ability to interpret their own dreams by analyzing them in this way. Dream meaning can be very important. You will know when the right dream interpretation is found, since you will almost feel a sense of remembrance, like, as they say, ‘when something is right on the tip of your tongue.’

The inability to recall the information just moments earlier, suddenly seems silly. That is the feeling of a good interpretation. What is not confronted and dealt with in the waking hours will seep into our dreams, and what seeps into our dreams will affect the quality of our waking hours. The good news is we are not powerless over this cycle.

The key to overcoming this illusion of powerlessness, associated with dreams, is to know that, YOU ARE NOT POWERLESS OVER YOUR DREAM STATE! Once this concept is internalized as a part of your belief system, you will begin to be able to alter small details of your dreams and eventually, with practice, larger details will be at your command.

I don’t know if I would have fully accepted this rule in the dream realm if I had not first been plagued by anxiety dreams. If you have ever suffered from them, you know how debilitating they can be. You CAN Program your own dream work because dreams are inner truth!

Small children also suffer from anxiety dreams in the form of nightmares. When kids are taught that they have the power to change a monster of a dream into a little fuzzy bunny, for instance, it’s funny how they react to this by looking at you like, now ya tell me! They don’t even question it.

They just do it, and do it well! In my opinion, children who learn to control their dreams feel an increased sense of self-esteem that comes from knowing that they have the power to interact, shape and mold their dream states.

Be patient, you can’t rush your dreams!

One morning as I was about to awaken, I was thinking, why is it that I am reading all these enlightening materials and yet I feel I have made little progress? I still yell at the kids, fight with my husband and cringe when I see the neighbor who likes to talk about the price of toilet paper coming to my door.

I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t I be beyond all that by now?” The message I received was ” don’t rush the brush.” Being a novice (and not a good one) artist, I had heard that term before and immediately knew its meaning. It meant if you rush the brush, your painting will lose its focus and the result will be much less than satisfactory.

If we are determined to remember our dreams, they will once again begin to guide, warn, amaze and even amuse us, as well, we will begin to unlock fathomless doorways and pathways of outer and inner realms of learning.

Remember, dreams are slippery things. You are not in the land of one-to-one correspondences and literal interpretations. Symbols are open to interpretation and context is highly important. You are always the best authority on the meaning of your own dreams.

But if you’re having trouble understanding a dream to talk it over with someone and do so within the first few days of the dream while it’s fresh in your mind. Sometimes, the very act of talking the dream over will help you break through a block you’ve had in understanding it.