How to interpret your dreams

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.