Although you don't always realize it, you spend a portion of each night letting your unconscious spirit dance through your dreams, weaving elaborate scenes with shreds of your past, present, and (imagined) future. When you remember these images, they may fascinate, confuse, or frighten you. "Where was I?" "Who was that person?" "What does it all mean?"

From the very first documented dream in 3500 B.C. to the present day, people have been intrigued, mystified, guided, even governed by their dreams. Dreams may be fragments of an unresolved event from the past or of subconscious desires for the present. Your spirit may be trying to rise above your current situation and move forward into the future. Dreams can wreak havoc with peaceful slumber-or bring harmony to your life.Throughout history, the fascination with dreams has been universal. Ancient Egyptians approached dreams with religious reverence.

Greek writers and philosophers including Plato and Aristotle believed that during sleep humans and divine beings communicated, and that dreams were the memories of those conversations. Traditional Hawaiian culture teaches that during dreams, the human soul travels on journeys, meeting others and having important experiences.

But it is important to remember that each dreamers journey is a personal one. Only you can decipher the meaning behind the images that appear during unconscious slumber. Your spirit speaks to you at night through your dreams. Listen to its messages. Use the guide to help interpret dream meanings. Unravel the mysteries of your mind and sail with your creative soul on a ever sweeter dream journey. When we are awake, we think in words. When we are asleep we think in images.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/spirituality-articles/understanding-dreams-330582.html

Author: Bryan Burbank

About the Author:

http://www.elovemagic.com

Sometimes a Cigar

What is the connection between your dreams and your waking life, present and future? Do dreams really come true and what is their meaning? Can the dream books interpret your dreams accurately?

  We all wonder about dreams and most of us have experienced them in one form or another. Dream guides and experts tell us to monitor our dreams, keep a journal and look for patterns from one dream to another. In this way we can begin to interpret our dreams and correlate them with what we are experiencing in our waking life.

Dreams can be tricky and often elusive and misleading. But all of them are subject to interpretation. The books are not definitive and because we are trying to explain the subjective in objective terms, there is a vast margin for error and misinterpretation.

Some of the better books are based on research. Subjects keep track of their dreams and the researchers correlate the results with current or past events in a subject's life. So if fifty people are dreaming about flying and they have similar life experiences then a statement about dreaming can be made. I pulled three dream books from my library and looked up flying and I can see why reading these books and applying what is written to your own experience can be difficult and most frustrating.

The Unexplained Store!

Dreams I believe, are a close personal experience that is created for you, by you, and is in itself an interpretation of your thoughts, not the other way around. They are manifestations of a life in a different realm of existence which may or may not have anything to do with your waking state other than you remember some of it. They are also an opportunity for you to create a connection or meaning to them or not.

Because we are creative beings, our creations only have personal significance and that changes the more we think about them as we recreate our creations differently. Thinking about a thing is like adding another ingredient to the recipe, it becomes something different.

There are people who are very passionate about their lives. They are passionate about their futures and where they see themselves, and they dream about it. It is a constant companion during their waking hours as well. So these thoughts spill over into their dreams. They dream of the future and they see things and these things are manifested into their waking experience. So passion may be the grease that moves things along. If one is passionate about a thing, then they are totally into it, it is a state of being that excludes anything else. It is the passion that has life, not the person, it is the idea being born that takes precedence over ones own personal being. Thoughts are in fact life - things are the manifestation of thought. You are the result of a thought and it is your thoughts about your life that are real, not you.

Dreaming may or may not have any significance in your life, and does it really matter? I believe that some of us are here as observers and not participators. Personally I don't dream about my future. I have always been a loner although I am always involved with people in one way or another. I became an author eight years ago, and I am now a published international author of books, articles and websites. I have never dreamed about my future. I have a desire to be a recognized, accomplished international author, and I have set that as my goal. I have a new future in site, but I have to constantly remind myself of it. I don't see into the future and I don't dream about it, even though it comes naturally for me and therefore a part of who I am. I have the connections, the expertise and the desire, but not the dreams.

With all the people I have around me, I stand alone, an observer and possibly a portal - the one that holds the door open, a beacon with no hands. Or a light that shows the way, but not the driver.

There is no meaning to life other than the meaning you give it. Dreams have no meaning unless you think they do. And again, as Freud put it, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Sometimes things are - just because!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/spirituality-articles/sometimes-a-cigar-278551.html

Author: Roy E. Klienwachter

About the Author:

Roy E. Klienwachter is a resident of British Columbia, Canada. A published author, a student of NLP, New Age Light Worker, Teacher and Phenomenologist. Roy's books and articles are thought provoking, and designed to empower your imagination, and take you to places you would never have thought of.

Claim your copy of Roy's new book at: http://www.yourlifewasnevermeanttobeastruggle.com

Visit Roy at: http://www.klienwachter.com

If you have asked a question when you have had a particularly vivid dream about whether that dream might be trying to tell you something, you are not alone.  Most of us have the kind of dreams every so often that seem full of meaning.  The feeling of waking up feeling a sense of urgency because our dreams were trying to communicate something important to us is a common experience in all people.  We don't often talk about how powerful our dreams affect us like this because we don’t want our friends to think we are crazy.  But we store away these questions in our minds and in our hearts and the wondering about what we dream can become a haunting area of missing knowledge that you would feel so much better if you understood it all.

It helps to think through where dreams come from in the first place.  Psychologists tell us that we have another entire side to our minds, which is our subconscious side.  We know that is true because that side of our minds is so active all the time.  In fact, experts in sleep and dream research tell us that when our conscious mind takes a break, the subconscious mind is very active processing all of the information and events of the day and what is going on in our lives. 

They tell us also that the subconscious is as much a part of how we make decisions and "think and feel" about things as the conscious mind we think with.  Both sides of our personalities are always communicating in ways that we cannot always understand or even recognize.  Sometimes that feeling of having a "gut feel" about a decision is coming from your subconscious mind.  But psychologists also tell us that dreams is another way that the subconscious is presenting information to the conscious side of our brains and that there can be a lot of information and meaning in those dreams.

It might be pushing it to say your subconscious is "trying to tell you something" in your dreams.  Instead, there is good reason to believe that your subconscious is always communicating to you and dreams are one of the ways it expresses itself.  That means there may be lots to learn from dreams that can tell you about yourself and about your "true feelings" in regards to relationships, job, you worries and stresses and what is going on in the world.  And if there is information in your subconscious that can help you cope with those big challenges in life, why not understand it and put it to work by learning what dreams are saying and what we can learn from them?

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 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.

One of my big memories when I was a young boy was when my dad helped me understand how to take charge of my nightmares.  He told me something that if I was a skeptical adult like I am now, I would have said, "yeah right".  He said that I could seed my dreams.  The process he taught me was simple.  I was to decide what I was going to dream about.  Then the half hour before bedtime, I would put that thought into my head.  So if I wanted to dream about unicorns, I would read a storybook or watch a video about unicorns.

Then as I drifted off to sleep, he said to literally command my subconscious "Tonight we will dream about unicorns".  That, in theory would result in a nice pleasant dream about unicorns.  Now you are asking, well did it work?  Sometimes.  Like all impressionable children, I tried the technique with all my heart.  Sometimes I would dream about unicorns three night later when I was busy giving my mind something else to dream about.  And sometimes it really did work.  But one thing that happened when I took control of my dreams that I really didn’t realize until many years later.  By being proactive about making my dream life do something fun, the nightmares went away.

Now not all nightmares are that easily managed.  But what dad taught me is an important thing for us to know about our dream lives and that is that our subconscious minds are very responsive and very impressionable.  Your subconscious does not necessarily filter the difference between watching a scary movie or being involved in an actual scary situation.  Both go into the subconscious as data to be processed after you are asleep.  So by using your evening time to give your subconscious something to work on, very often it can help you have "sweet dreams".

The other big "bubble" that burst for me when I realized my dreams could be manipulated was any idea that dreams were somehow messages from beyond or even tremendously reliable as sources of information.  If my dreams could be reporting something they learned from watching "Alien" on television just as well as they could be telling me about the big job promotion I want, that is not a reliable guide for life.  Just knowing that can change how you feel about your dream life and how you handle it.  And it can give you control over that dream life to some extent.  And that is nice to have when you lay your head down to dream the night away.

As a Christian, we have to look at our dream lives in a different light.  After all, in the Bible, it is not uncommon for God to speak to a person through his or her dreams.  It happened all the time.  So the question comes up, "Could God speak to you through your dreams and if so, how can you tell?"  Perhaps you have spoken to someone at church who said God told her what to do in a dream.  If so, you probably had mixed feelings about that.  But as Christian people, we want to be open for God to speak to us in any way He wants to.  If that is through a dream, we need to be prepared to hear what he has to say.

At the same time, you don’t want to jump the gun and think that every dream you have is the divine voice guiding your life.  We need some rules for how to listen to God that don't send us off on a wild goose chase just because we had a dream that was dramatic.  We all have lots of different kinds of dreams and many of them can cause us to be emotional or feel like we are in a transition in life.  If that is the voice of God speaking to you, you have to be able to tell the difference between a prophetic dream and just a dream that is dramatic and meaningful but not necessarily divine in origin.

Yes, it is true that in scripture God did speak to people through dreams.  So we have to grant that this is one way that God might speak to us.  God can be very creative in how he communicates to people and you could hear his voice in the breeze in the trees, in a message coming through your pastor or even in a casual statement made by your child.  The key is to have that "sensor" on in your spirit that alerts you when it is the voice of your master speaking.  When that alarm goes off, then it is time to pay closer attention whether the message comes through a dream or another source.

Do we have to seek interpretation if we have a dream that we think might be from God?  Well we have to remember that when that happened in the Old Testament, they did not have the ability to understand God's voice directly as we do in our New Testament relationship with him through Christ.  God is capable of speaking clearly to you if he wants you to know something.  So you can ask him to interpret directly and if he is really talking to you, you will come to understand the message.

Biblical Dream Interpretation

There is ample evidence in the Bible when God talked to someone through a dream.  In some cases, there was a need for the interpretation of that dream.  Maybe the most dramatic example is when Joseph was given a spiritual gift to interpret dreams, which he used with the King.  That episode saved many lives and blessed God's people.  So as a child of God, it is appropriate to wonder if God might use you in that way and if so, how can you tell and what should you do?

There is no question that over the span of time covered by the Bible, the way He communicates with people has changed.  Most of the episodes of God speaking to his people through a dream happened in the Old Testament although not all of them are in that part of the book.  But since the coming of the Gospel and the introduction of the new birth along with Christ' teaching that the Holy Spirit will teach us directly, the need for God to talk to his people through dreams has diminished.  After all, if you have your morning devotions each day and God can tell you point blank what he wants you to do, why go through all the drama of a dream revelation to accomplish the same goal?

But, as we mentioned, there are New Testament evidences of God talking to someone through a dream.  The one that comes to mind is when God gave Peter the vision of the animals being lowered to him to eat in the book of Acts.  And we know God talks to us in strange ways all the time.  So to rule out dreams being used as communication would be hasty because we cannot limit God in how he might choose to talk to you or I.

There is another approach to a biblical approach to interpreting dreams.  That approach is to gauge what God tells you to do against the measuring rod of scripture.  If you have a dream and you think God was giving you direction, you must seek to confirm that it was God talking and that what he said "sounds like God."  We all have a lot of weird dreams and we cannot run around thinking every time we wake up with a dramatic image in our heads, that must be God's voice.

We need a measure to confirm that the dream was from God.  That measure is scripture.  God will never contradict himself.  So if he gives me directions in the dream, that calling must never go against God's law or come in competition or conflict with the Gospel.  If I think God is telling me to pray for my neighbor and the when God opens the door to do so, to share the Gospel with her, that is a perfectly valid dream calling.  That is in keeping with the Great Commission and it is in line with scripture.  Using the Bible as a measure by which all inspiration from God must conform, you are giving yourself protection from wrong callings or hearing God wrong.  And that is a very valid use of the bible in dream interpretation.