A very common experience we all have is to wake up with an emotion that we don't know where it came from.  You might wake up feeling usually happy even though it is a routine day with nothing extraordinary to explain your elation.  On the negative side, you might wake up feeling worried, nervous, depressed or frightened.  It is when the emotions you have coming out of sleep get this intrusive that you need some way to explain these emotions.  They can interfere with your life and create problems for how you conduct your day that you have no rational way of explaining.

What is happening is we are having dreams that are leaving behind those residual feelings.  But without the ability to interpret our dreams, we are victims of whatever our subconscious mind might have dug up to have us dream about.  And without the ability to recall and then understand those dreams, we will never be able to take charge of those random emotions and attitudes that may have come from a dream that is not relevant to your daily life at all.

Perhaps the first step to take to begin to interpret what your dreams are telling you is to get a better idea what your dreams are.  Most of us forget our dreams within moments after we wake up.  The emotions left form the dream might linger on but we quickly lose the content of the dream.  So a system to capture that content for interpretation is in order.  Keeping a dream journal is the primary tool psychologists advise to help us get the details of what was happening in the dream.

The journal does more than just capture that dream you can remember when you woke up.  It is a way of training your subconscious and your conscious mind to work together more closely.  If your conscious mind knows it needs to wake up and record important dreams that the subconscious generates, you will be less likely to just sleep through dreams that are very meaningful.  The subconscious will "break through" to the conscious world more often.  Then you can wake up, record the dream and go back to sleep.

Dream journaling is not an easy habit to get into.  You might wake up in the middle of the night with a dream to record and get lazy and tell yourself you will capture it in the morning.  But you know how dreams work and it will disappear by then.  But by keeping a notepad or tape recorder by the side of the bed, you can capture the important aspects of the dream.  When you do that, you give yourself the content of the dream to be interpreted and not just the residue of emotions that are left over from it.  Then you have something to work with and you can make progress understanding your dreams and resolving issues that they bring up.

The study of how to interpret the dreams we have can be come a real passion and hobby if you let it.  There are literally hundreds of books out and thousands of web sites that devote themselves to helping you put some meaning to the sometimes strange images and situations you find yourself in during your dream life.  Some of these dream image dictionaries and interpretive methods are based on studies done by credible scientists like Freud and Jung and some are not.

Knowing how the author or the web site or book came to this system of rules for dream analysis and how to interpret dreams will help you decide if his ideas are worth considering when you decide to interpret your own dreams to look for meaning beneath the surface.  You can actually find people who have written entire books giving detailed rules for Dream Analysis and how to interpret the images of dreams with no more knowledge of psychology or cultural imagery than you or I.  If the author of the book discusses his or her "method" for understanding dreams and it seems to involve revelation from some strange far away source or it is based on the author's personal genius alone, that may not be a guide to knowing what your dreams mean that you should follow.

Similarly be careful if the approach to understanding dreams that the book or web site you are looking at base their understanding on psychic readings, the occult or unusual religious texts.  Unless this is your orientation, those kinds of Dream Interpretation are as much fronts to "convert" you to their way of thinking of the world more than helping you understand what your dreams are telling you about your own mind.

The study of dreams and what they mean to you in terms of how your mind works and what your subconscious is trying to tell you is a legitimate field of study that is part of psychology and medical science and that has been subject to scholarly research for many decades.  This does not mean that your dreams do not have hidden meanings. 

In fact, the chances are they do.  But it does mean that there are reliable and legitimate sources of information out there to help you analyze your dreams correctly and then interpret what they mean.  You deserve that kind of high quality help with this important part of your life so make sure you insist any guide to your dream life lives up to that high standard.

Have you ever put up with a repeated dream?  Most of us have had them from time to time.  The very fact that it is a dream that you know repeats means it is a dream you remember.  We know that we all dream lots of dreams throughout a given night of sleep.  But only a few dreams poke through to our conscious mind so we are aware of them.  So if a dream can break through that barrier, that is a persistent dream that has more power than most dreams because it can blow down that wall between sleep and being awake and get your attention.

If a dream blows down that wall over and over again, that is the kind of dream that is really trying to get your attention.  So if you can find out what the meaning of that dream is, the first good of it is that it will help you resolve whatever your subconscious is trying to tell you to fix.  But maybe the best outcome is that when you resolve whatever is so important to your subconscious that it keeps barging into your conscious mind, that dream can finally go away.  And in most cases, we are darn glad to see those repeated dreams disappear.

To try to "decipher" what your subconscious is trying to say, first put the dream, whether it is a one time dream that was disturbing or a repeating dream, in the context of your life.  If you think about your dreams or you keep a dream journal (which is a very good idea), you will identify connections between events that happened the day before the dream or within a week that are directly connected to the dream.  Hence, if you are going to start a new job, move to a new town or start a new school, you will often have a dream where you are in a place you don’t understand and you are trying to figure it out.

There isn’t a lot of action you need to take about that kind of dream.  But it helps to understand that your subconscious mind is just coping with the same level of anxiety that your conscious mind is trying to get through.  By knowing the simple meaning of that dream, you can see what is going on in your subconscious and you can make the connection to your real life.

The subconscious "thinks" in ideas and emotions and reactions to events.  Fears, doubts, misgivings, hurt feelings, myths and paranoia will all live full lives in your subconscious mind.  By connecting those images to the real life events that caused those feelings and emotional thoughts, you can resolve the emotional difficulty in your subconscious simply by "having a good talk" with yourself.  And when you do that, you release your subconscious to tackle the next big problem in your life.  That is good management of your dream life by knowing the meaning of dreams and what to do about them.

We take for granted the little dramas we witness in our sleep that we categorize under the broad title of "dreams".  Maybe its because people dream from the womb to the grave and for all we know beyond that point too so it is a common human experience.  In fact, if you have domestic animals, you can see them dreaming when they sleep.  We have watched our dog sleep and his paws move like he is running and he even barks at a dream cat or squirrel in his sleep.

So dreaming is a natural part of how our minds work in a sleeping state.  Medical science has done a lot of work to explain what dreams are and why we have them from a medical point of view.  But no scientist can hook up an electrode to tell you what you are dreaming about of, more importantly, why we dream what we dream.

If you asked ten strangers what dreams are, you might get some strange answers.  Besides the other definition of a dream representing your hopes and dreams, the nocturnal kind of dreaming is a vision you might have during your sleep hours that takes the shape of a scene, a conversation with someone or some other kind of episode.  But even that is a little too specific.  You can dream in concepts, in music, in colors.  They say that Helen Keller told her friends about dreams she had and she was deaf and blind from birth so having images in not a requirement of dreaming.

Dreams are the expressions of the subconscious mind.  Psychologists tell us that our subconscious minds are active all the time.  At night while our conscious minds rest, our subconscious minds process the information from the day and deal with left over emotions, anxieties or causes for celebration that were not adequately handled by the conscious mind.  The results of this additional processing are the dreams we have.

So we know what dreams are.  The real question most of us want to know more about when it comes to the topic is, "do our dreams have meaning to us?"  While you can draw your own conclusion from a religions standpoint whether dreams are a conduit for spiritual communications, most of us have dreams that seem to be very meaningful in terms of the daily activities of our minds. 

Experts have confirmed that the imagery of dreams is meaningful because the human subconscious communicates in symbols.  So there may be messages our subconscious minds are telling us through dreams.  That means it is valid to pay attention to your dreams and analyze them for what you might learn from your own subconscious.  By being more intuitive to what our own minds are trying to tell us, we all might learn a lot from that side of our personalities.

The internet is an amazing source of information that has ushered in an information age like nothing we have ever experienced.  When you need to learn something new, we now turn to the internet first and to book resources after that and then only as a last resource.  So it stands to reason that when you want to learn more about how to analyze and interpret dreams, you would come to the internet first.

There are two levels of helpfulness that the internet can help you with when you want to know more about how to interpret dreams in general and how to interpret your dreams in particular.  The first level of helpfulness is in the area of education.  Dream analysis is a huge field of study that has had a great deal of scholarly work done on it by some of the finest minds in medical and psychiatric science.  Ever since Freud and Jung brought Dream Interpretation into the mainstream of psychology, the field has exploded with interest and study.

The outcome is that, like many areas of expertise, you can find huge volumes of data online about what has been learned about the subconscious and how the substance of our dreams can be interpreted to learn more about the mind and what is going on under the surface in the subconscious.  While the goal of seeking to learn all you can about dreams and how to understand them is entirely valid, there is a level of caution to be used when you look to the internet for that information.

Dream interpretation is a field that seems to attract a lot of people who do not handle the topic in a scholarly way.  And since the internet is a breeding ground for anyone with the money to buy a web site and a theory to promote, you can easily stumble into a lot of dream analysis sites that are promoting far fetched ideas, concepts of interpretation that take you into fortune telling or the occult or just crazy theories that people come up with that have no grounding in science.  So be alert that when you seek to expand your knowledge about Dream Analysis using online sources.  Be careful who you study so you only deal with respectable sources.

The second level of research that you might use the internet for concerning the understanding of the dream life is how to interpret your own dreams.  This gets trickier because if you are seeking an actual diagnosis of what your dreams might be telling you, using an online resource for that diagnosis is questionable at best.  Now, you can tap online dream dictionaries to understand the cultural imagery that may be appearing in your dreams. 

But dreams are very individual things so there is a limit to how specific an online analysis web site can get about what your dreams really mean to you.  If you know that limit and know how to use the internet wisely without letting it take you places in your interest in dream interpretation, the interent can be a wonderful valuable tool to help you take one more step to understanding the life of your subconscious.