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TOOLS & TECHNIQUES > Nine Keys to Understanding Your Dreams
(from Conscious Dreaming, by Robert
Moss)
1. Trust Your Feelings
Always pay attention to how you feel when you wake from a dream. Your feelings and bodily
sensations may be your best guide to the relative urgency and importance of a dream, and
its positive or negative implications.
2. First Associations
In keeping a dream journal, you will want to get into the habit of jotting down your first
associations with the dreams you record. What floats to the surface of your consciousness
in the first minutes after waking may come from layers of the dream that have eluded, or
from deeper levels of dreaming.
3. Reality Check
Though dreams are inner experiences, they often contain accurate information about
external reality. In both subtle and unsubtle ways, dreams incorporate signals from the
outside environments.
4. Dream Re-Entry
Dreams are real experiences, and a fully remembered dream is its own interpretation. The
meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. By learning how to re-enter dreams, you
will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, resume contact with
inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business.
5. Dialogue with Dream Characters
One of the best ways to work out what your dream characters are telling you is to ask
them.
6. Tracking Your Dream Self
Who are you in your dreams? Are you the protagonist or simply an observer? Are you younger
or older? Male or female? The character who appears in all of your dreams, even if only as
a witness is you.
7. Symbol Exploration
Although the dream source tries to communicate with us as clearly as possible, it must
often speak in symbols in order to carry us beyond the limitations of the everyday mind.
8. "What Part of Me?"
Dreams make us whole. They show us the many aspects of ourselves and help us to bring them
under one rood. This is why it is often useful to ask "what part of me"
different characters and elements in a dream might represent.
9. Dream Enactment
Write a dream motto: See if you can come up with a one-line statement that
summarizes what the dream is telling you.
Confirm your dream messages: Especially if you dream seems to contain a warning
about a situation looming up in external reality, you may want to take steps to check the
information.
Dream fulfillment or avoidance: If your dream seems to promise good things, you
will want to figure out practical ways you can help to bring them to pass. If your
don’t like a future event you have glimpsed in a dream, you will want to consider how
to get off the path that is leading you toward it.
Personal Rituals: Making a poem out of a dream report, drawing or painting the
images you have seen, or constructing a personal shield or dream talisman are all
excellent ways to honor the powers that speak to you through dreams.
© 1999 Robert Moss. All rights reserved. |
