|
One of the best ways to work with your dreams is simply to write them down. Give your dream a title, date your dream, include a page number, and start an index in the back of your journal for easy access to find your dream later.
Paying attention to your feelings is important when working with your dreams. Upon awaking from a dream, you will always notice a feeling left trailing from the dream; grab it! Feelings are helpful in determining the message of your dream.
It is also helpful to ask yourself questions about your dream. Writing down the answers helps too. I call these questions Dream Reflections.
Dream Reflections:
What is my gut feeling about my dream upon awaking?
How do I feel when I reflect back on the dream?
Does this dream remind me of anything going on in my life right now or in the past?
Do I have a future plan that I associate with this dream?
What do I desire to focus on in this dream?
What is the main theme of this dream?
What associations do I have with the theme of this dream?
Reflect back upon the answers to your questions; from your answers amazing clarity will come. Doors will be opened for you and you will be invited into new areas to explore your self.
As Jeremy Taylor writes, "all dreams come in the service of health and wholeness." Dreams contain metaphors. You will find your dream contains a detail or idea that is attention catching and may be somewhat askew from the story of the dream. You may want to look at this detail as a metaphor, a word or phrase that is a symbol and denotes one kind of object or idea that is used in place of another to show a likeness between them. I had a dream that contained a metaphor of fermenting apples beneath a classroom floor. To work with this dream metaphor, I used a technique I call Dream Mapping.
When I map my dream, I write my Dream Theme, or the focus of my dream, in this case"fermenting apples", on the center of my journal page. Then, I brainstorm and write down every association I have with the theme around it, on the page. Using a standard dictionary to look up a particular word in your Dream Theme can bring useful associations, that you may not have considered, to your Dream Map. It can be helpful to write another's idea down if you are sharing your dreams with others. But remember, the dream is yours; no one can tell you what your dream means. Then I take a colored pencil and draw lines to each association that seems related to another. (In the case of "fermenting apples", I connected "chemical change with effervesence' to "ideas that are percolating in my life." This had significant meaning to me as the dream occured in a classroom, this speaks to me of something important I need to learn that will come to fruition in my life.) As you write, what begins to emerge is a "map" of related ideas that become pathways to explore. Sometimes the pathways even weave together. I use a different color for each new "path" of associations. By performing this exercise, you will end up with a "visual" of the interconnectedness of your dream and your waking life. I find it interesting to see how often associations with a dream maetaphor are connected, even things I wouldn't normally suspect to be so. Dreams can bring to you great clarity around the ways in which your life is woven together, telling your story.
|
In Dreams We Fly by Kellie Meisl, 2004
 Bella Loona by Kellie Meisl, 2007
 Heron Dreams by Kellie Meisl, 2003
|
