Why Pay Attention to Your Dreams?

Dreams have always been a big part of my life.  So much so, that it seemed like a good idea to write a short post about why you might want to pay attention to your dreams, if you don’t already do so.

Our nightly dive into the dreamworld can provide insights about what is going on in our life.  Dreams can inform us about our health, relationships, our job, an ongoing problem, the future, the past, about anything and everything. 

They communicate by being literal, figurative or symbolic, or a combination of both.  Our nightly images can tell us about deeply serious issues as well as inform us about the lighter side of ourselves.

Origin of Our Dreams

Dreams can originate from the subconscious, superconscious (High Self), our guides (angels), the Divine (God), or a mix of sources where our dreamscape can reflect the complexity of the events of our waking life.

Whether simple or complex, the experiences of our nightly exploration can provide us invaluable insights and information about ourselves and the reasons why things happen the way they do in our lives.

As a personal note, although some of my complex dreams have provided me with a better understanding into perplexing circumstances at the time, it has been my simple dreams, including daytime visions, that have been the ones to offer the deepest insights about myself or a life situation. 

Higher Guidance Uses Our Dreams

As we begin to pay attention to our dreams, our subconscious and higher guidance will quickly take note of that fact.  They will immediately increase the use of dreams to communicate important information that is waiting for us to discover, and uncover.

As discussed in our blogpost Intuitive Readings from Our Guides’ Point of View, when we start paying attention to our dreams, “…the possibilities for transformation are at hand, and your guides know it!”  Although that quote was talking about intuitive readings, the same holds true when we start paying attention to our dreams.

Guides Seize Every Opportunity

Our guides, angels and other higher guidance are continually looking for ways to get us to pay attention to them. 

Before we came to earth, they committed themselves to help us move as far along as possible in the goals of our life.  Dreams are an excellent way for them to help us learn (become aware of) what we need to know to grow more quickly toward being more like our true self, our High Self.

Dream Language is Not Obvious

Dreams often use symbology to communicate information.  There are universal symbols that are called archetypes of the collective unconscious.  They were brought to light by the groundbreaking works of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.  These symbols and patterns are found in the subconscious of all humankind and are accessible to everyone.

There are also cultural symbols that would mean one thing for a person from one region or country and something else to someone from different cultural heritage.  For example, a dream about a grizzly bear would have one meaning for someone of Anglo-Saxon descent but quite another for a person of American Indian background.  Additionally, meanings can change for the same symbol between the different indigenous (tribal) cultures.

Some symbols are unique to us.  Dreaming of bread could have a totally different meaning for someone who is a baker than it would for an electrical engineer because of the personal association for the baker of preparing bread.

We Need to Learn Our Dream Symbols Language

Joseph Campbell referred to myths as the public dreams and our dreams as private myths.  That is, our extended consciousness utilizes a mix of archetypes, cultural and personal symbologies to create our own dream language — our own private mythology.

It is important to find a dream dictionary reference that reflects who we are as a person as well as what group we identify with culturally.  Are we of Native American background?  If so, which one?  Because Eskimo symbology is not quite the same as it would be for someone of Hopi Indian descent.

Higher Guidance Knows Which Book We Use

With that said, our subconscious and our higher guidance will use the symbols from whatever reference we decide to call our own.  If we keep utilizing a particular dream dictionary, our subconscious and higher guidance will increasingly use the symbols as defined in that book.

Again, archetypes are the exception to this as they are part of humankind’s collective symbol set.

As an example, I found The Dream Dictionary authored by Jo Jean Boushala and Viriginia Reidel-Geubtner when visiting the Edgar Cayce Institute back in the 1980s.  The minute I saw the book, I was intrigued and knew it was for me. 

However, as time went on, I have been called to obtain other dream dictionary books that have slightly different interpretations for the same symbols.  When reviewing a particular dream, I am often guided to read all three books until the correct meaning for that dream resonates as I read the symbol description.  And yes, it resonates even when I don’t like the particular interpretation.

Start a Dream Journal

If you are called to pay attention to your dreams, it can be extremely helpful to start a dream journal.  Keep it close by your bed so that you can write down the dream sequence immediately after waking up.  As we review and capture the sequence of events of our dreams in written form, it helps anchor the dream in our conscious mind so that it doesn’t fade as the day goes on.

Over time, most people who keep a dream journal find there are recurring themes that show up.  Seeing those themes over a period of time can help us be proactive in an area that needs to be addressed before it creates a new problem in our life or relationships.

Keeping a dream journal communicates to our subconscious and higher guidance that we are serious about learning our life lessons.

Dreams Accelerate Our Learning

As we listen to our dreams, we can use them as another source of information for our spiritual growth and insights about the events in our life. 

The more we listen to our higher guidance, and the more ways we listen to that guidance, the more we will find that the evolution of our life path will reflect the principles of Spiritual Quickening, as mentioned in our Reincarnation, Fact or Fiction? blogpost.  Our growth can unfold much faster as we gain insights more rapidly by receiving them from multiple spiritual sources who are intimately familiar with the uniqueness of our particular life path.  Dreams are one of those excellent sources.