Awaken to the Gift Your Dreams Offer in Waking Life

Aside of the glaringly obvious and well documented health benefits of sleep, this week I’ve been delving deeper into the dreamscape as a way to get me out of my own way; let me explain.

I am here, like each of you, for the joy of the journey and the growth that occurs as a result. As you might know, I’ve spent the last four years specifically focusing on foraging out the fragments of authentic me; the one that lies beneath the decades of experiences that entrenched beliefs I had no choice but to adopt in childhood.

The journey to me will no doubt unfold over my whole lifetime, which is the best part. Without anything to work on, where would the challenge be? But I do like to think of myself as a balloon ready to bob about in the air, contemplating life as one big smorgasbord, so I am on a mission to lighten the load as much as I can.

Having become more consciously aware of the thoughts and feelings within me, regularly meditating and contemplating, and focusing on wheedling out any recurring thought patterns that really aren’t serving me, I’ve come a long way. And yet there are still areas of my life that I know could get a lot lighter, for example, I still have chronic muscle tension in my right shoulder.

There are lots of ways to alleviate muscle tension, but I want to unlock it. And there are so many tools out there that can help, looking at the metaphysical causes of pain and tension or using Applied Kinesiology can provide some big clues, I can also get a deeper understanding from meditative or hypnotic states or using techniques such as Family Constellations, among many others I am sure.

But when I heard Charlie Morley talking about Lucid Dreaming recently, I was reminded about the untapped potential that lies within the time I’m already sleeping each night. In that unconscious state, that we spend around a third of our lives in, our mind is processing through all the interactions of the day. It is completely unhindered by any constraints we place upon our reality in waking life, so there is huge potential to get to the heart of any issues or ongoing themes.

I started keeping a dream diary. If you are a person who rarely remembers their dreams, it’s more about deliberately focusing on their recall. Dreams happen at the end of each sleep cycle throughout the night (typically we have four or five cycles per night, about 90-120 minutes long) at the end of which we are closest to a waking state.  

A friend of mine was asking how I record the dreams, since they happen when I’m asleep. I literally put some paper and a pen next to my bed each night and, having set an intention to capture some details, in a semi-conscious state at the end of the dream I remember to reach out and scribble (with my eyes closed) a brief summary before submerging back into the next cycle.

It then takes me about ten minutes each day to translate these spider-scribbles and record them. Some dreams I remember others I have zero recall of. 

There are a few different components to our dreams that are worth capturing: the plot/actions, feelings, symbols and word play. This helps in the translation. I usually use my intuition when it comes to interpreting them, the key is not to get anxious about it, some I might not be able to make any sense of, others are useful.

Some examples might be: if I was feeling panicked in a dream, I’d look at what was making me anxious in waking life; if there was a distinctive item, character or colour standing out (like the blue velvet shoes I saw in my dream last night), does it have any symbolic significance to me? What about double meanings, if I was being pursued, is there anything in life I’m currently pursuing? Or the overall theme of the dream might represent something I’m working through, like a loss or a failure.

Our dreams are like a virtual reality that depicts what is really going on with our inner life, they don’t lie to us the way we can lie to ourselves when we are awake. If I am unhappy about something, I can deny it and gloss over it when I’m going about my day, but the feelings will haunt me in my dreams.

My best tools for dream interpretation seem to be Google search plus intuition. For example, I keep having recurring dreams that feature lifts/elevators in them. If I Google “Meaning of lifts in dreams” it gives me a variety of options and I just scroll through a few until I find one that fits.

What I found most interesting when I started doing this was the reality check of my overall thought patterns. While awake, it’s easy to address the things that really trigger me and delve into those more, but when I’m asleep the more chronic – less observed – patterns emerge in the dreamscape.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the keywords I’d captured over a five-night period: striving, out of time, worried, being ignored, out of control, failure, unappreciated, outraged, pleasing others, survival, isolated, stressful, up against time, frustrated, harrowing, drowning, and can’t get a grip.

Wow. If I’d have done this exercise five years ago, this would have come as no surprise. Yet the same thought patterns are obviously still playing, albeit at less intensity. They are the white noise of the day, the thoughts in between the ones I’m more conscious of.

After a bit of contemplating and diving into what some of my favourite teachers (Teal Swan, Abraham Hicks and Eckhart Tolle) have to say about dreams, what stuck was something Teal said about being a person who ruminates on the negative aspects of my day.

This is true, I’m a perfectionist in many respects so I’m pretty hard on myself and always striving to do better and be better (particularly when it comes to parenting).

Her advice was to compensate by starting to focus consciously on the positive aspects of the day and how those felt. Now that I’ve started doing this, and writing them down each night, I can see the dreamscape changing from something that felt stressful to something that feels a lot better. As Charlie Morley points out, the more positive our dreamscape the more likely we are to wake up feeling refreshed and revitalized.

This brings me back to the lucid dreams, ones in which we are aware we are dreaming and may even change the dream outcomes; these are the ones we often remember when we wake up without even trying to.

It hadn’t occurred to me the huge opportunity to talk to myself in these dreams. If the dreamscape is our unconscious mind unraveling everything in our psychology and emotions, that means I can get stuck in and ask my unconscious self for answers to questions like “why is my shoulder chronically in pain?” and I’m more likely to get an accurate answer than in a waking state with all my bias and limitations.

The possibilities are endless.  Charlie gives an example of a guy who, while dreaming, became aware he was in a dream. So he asked one of the characters “who are you?” and she replied “your brain”.
He asked his brain about his health and the character said “you’re in perfect health but do us all a favour and stop smoking”. So he asked her to help by making him think of something else every time he felt like a cigarette and she said “Sure, that’s easy”. Since that day he has not smoked another cigarette.

In his book Lucid Dreaming Made Easy, which I’ve just started, Charlie goes on to teach how to have a lucid dream and how to interact with it. I was quite thrilled when his advice to do a reality check worked.

One of the techniques to check you are actually dreaming is to look at your hands then flip them over and back again. The dreaming brain doesn’t have the processing speed to reproduce an identical projection of your hand twice in a row, so you can get some funny variations.

So there I was, in my dream, speeding into a harbor on a boat and I looked down at my hands, then flipped them over and back and the fingers were all misshapen and blurry; I recall feeling pretty pleased in the dream that it worked but was having so much fun I forgot to ask my unconscious mind about my shoulder. Another sleep, another chance will arise.

With a third of our lives spent in slumber, there is so much opportunity to tap in and leverage the wisdom that takes its form in the strange and bizarre landscapes of our dreams, it just take focus. Take out a pad and pen and pop it on your nightstand now, give it a go and see what comes up. Let the dream realm point you in the direction of your best life.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The Most Honest Feedback You Will Ever Get - Dream Messages. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog