The legitimate science of interpreting what dreams mean to you and I has its roots in the birth of modern psychology.  The fathers of modern psychology are without dispute Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  Both of these brilliant men redefined psychology, as we know it.  They were contemporaries and at different times good friends and bitter enemies.  But their philosophies of how the mind works are so different that to this day, if you pick a psychologist, you pick him based on whether he is a Freudian or a Jungian therapist.

One of the things that both psychologists agreed on although in different ways was that dreams are an important window into the inner working of the mind.  They also agreed that dreams carried meaning and by finding the proper interpretation of your dreams can open up new information about what is going on in your psyche and perhaps lead to better mental health.  This is all good news if you have suspected that your subconscious is sending you messages through your dream life.  So the key is to learn to use the psychology of dreams to learn what your dream life is trying to tell you.

If you set out to get all the books on dream interpretation, you could fill many bookshelves with your findings.  Of course, many of these sources are not trustworthy.  Dream analysis methods that are not grounded in psychology but that base their approach on psychic events, communication with spirits or on something someone who has a web site came up with are no more help than for us to just guess what our dreams mean ourselves. 

But if you did compile that library, some of those books would include dream dictionaries, which will give you a detailed guide to what the imagery in your dreams means based on cultural stereotypes.  Jung himself put together an extensive dictionary on this topic himself.  There is some validity to this approach because we all do learn common symbolic imagery.  For all of us, the symbol of the cross means one thing and the symbol of the flag of our country tends to be easy to understand.  So if we see those images in our dream life, a dream dictionary will probably interpret that correctly.

But we must not overlook that our dreams are all based on our own experiences and our own personal language of what things mean.  Any good guide to interpret dreams starts with what state of mind you are in as well as the state of your relationships and your stage in life.  Your psychology is all deeply rooted in who you are and your dreams will reflect that. 

By using that orientation, you can often find the meaning of your dreams because it is grounded in the meaning of who you are and what your subconscious wants to tell you about that identity.  If you start there many of your most profound dreams can carry very important messages to you that are worth understanding because they can change your life in profound ways.

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.