The Dream Log Ezine

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5 Steps to Understanding Your Dreams


Interpreting your dreams is not rocket science! You don’t need a dictionary, or a therapist, or even a psychic to gain those valuable insights.

Read on and learn how to translate your dream images with ease....

Dreams are basically projected images from our brain as it brilliantly sorts through our current emotional experiences and sort of re-learns them. Our brain will do this for us night after night whether we care about it or not.

So, if that’s the case, then why do we go to all this trouble to interpret our dreams?

We do it because we want and need to understand ourselves better in waking life. We all have a lot of unresolved emotional experience at any given time and our dreams are a wonderful source of information to help us with this by broadening our viewpoint.

Step-by-step instructions are helpful in getting going on a process, but they are not written in stone. Feel free to modify this as you go along…whatever works for you is the way to go.

First Step – Think of your dream as a parable, or symbolic story about yourself that illustrates the current events in your life. The following steps assume you have already written your dream down, including a title to describe your dream. You should also have a few sentences about what was going on in your life at the time of your dream.

Second Step – Underline or list any symbol, or symbolic action that you feel is important. Keep the list short. Dreams are repetitive and symbols can be redundant, so just pick the ones that appeal to you. Then list the main emotion in the dream…not every emotion…just the one that fits the story the best.

Third Step – Do NOT get your dream dictionary out…yet. You are learning to trust your own language, so practice doing so. (I rarely look at a dictionary anymore and I have a whole shelf full of them!)

• Look for obvious metaphors such as: dropped a ball or carrying a heavy pack. Dropping the ball is a metaphor for Quitting. Carrying a heavy pack can translate as Burden. You don’t have to do anything more with the metaphors, consider these symbol meanings solved.

Go on down the list and for the ones where a metaphor doesn’t fit, follow this association process:

• Say your symbol out loud with the main emotion in front of it and jot down the first impression that comes to you, even if it makes no sense.



• For example: Anxious (emotion) Ship rolling over (symbol). My first impression of an anxious ship rolling over was the Titanic. Titanic reminds me of ‘Tragedy’…and so on. Do this for the rest of the symbols. This is translating the subconscious language to the more logical conscious one.

Fourth Step - As you are working on this association process, think about how it fits into your current life situation. You may gain some insight about yourself and your current beliefs about your life that you never considered, or simply confirm what you already knew on some level.

If this process doesn’t work for you at all, THEN get out the dream dictionary for help.

If nothing works, then let it go. You might figure it out all at once while you’re doing the dishes or something. Insight has a way of showing up out of nowhere sometimes.

Fifth Step – Write out your final dream analysis. If there are repeated symbols or characters from other dreams, add them to your symbol index. This will help to cut down on interpretation time for future dream work.

Read your dream journal now and then to refresh your insights. They tend to fade over time, but you can help yourself just by reading them again.

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