There are many myths and beliefs about dreams (the ones we have at night) and their meaning. I won’t be debunking them here. Instead, I’d like to offer a different view of dreaming and how to use it for something very beneficial.
Be honest—do you own a dream dictionary? Do you search for the meaning of your dreams? Do you expect your dreams to help you solve the most complex questions of humanity—or at least your own life? They might… at least in the second case.
I want to share how I look at dreams and what kind of “magic” you can do with them.
Did you know your dreams can greatly support healing?
How?
To understand healing through our dreams, we need to understand the mind. We know the mind is split into two basic, unequal parts.
The conscious mind lets us think, focus on tasks, learn, and enjoy the present moment, …
The subconscious mind handles a million other things. It takes over when we run on autopilot, regulates the heart, and essentially manages every part of the body. It lets us walk, digest, and serves as a database of our knowledge. The unconscious mind also often (mostly) decides for us, which can sometimes be a problem.
It doesn’t do this with bad intentions. Its main job is to do everything to keep us alive and protected from harm. “Harm” also means shielding us from memories, unpleasant experiences, and the need to consciously monitor everything.
Imagine if we had to consciously control our heartbeat—we wouldn’t last long before our head “exploded.”
Remember your very first driving lesson? To move off, there were so many things to watch: the right pedals at the right time, turning that big wheel, signaling, shifting correctly, and once in normal traffic, tracking what feels like a thousand cars all moving faster than they seemed from the passenger seat.
But after you’ve driven long enough, it can happen that you recall getting into the car and then getting out—and the rest of the trip is a blur. Your subconscious took over the driver’s role while your thoughts wandered.
Your unconscious mind simply did what it does safely. Your acquired skills became automatic, so you no longer had to pay attention to the basics—only to the unexpected things that might arise on the road.
Even though the subconscious is our loyal friend and protector, it has one big drawback… perhaps.
For some reason it doesn’t align with our upbringing or schooling and refuses to communicate the way such a friend “should.” Our subconscious has its own language, and it won’t learn to use our educated one.
If we truly want to understand it, we must adapt to it and learn its language. For every language on earth there are textbooks and schools to help us communicate. For the language of the subconscious, however, “textbooks” are in short supply.
We adults often hunt for logic and try to figure things out, but that doesn’t work perfectly with the subconscious. The language of the subconscious isn’t always logical. That’s why we admire small children, who can create incredible inner worlds—and navigate them well. Their language and the subconscious language are much closer than ours as adults.
So what is the language of the subconscious?
Our subconscious communicates using what it has: recorded data, experiences, and memories from life. These data are stored in several formats and are tightly connected to our representational systems: visual (images), auditory (sounds), kinesthetic (physical sensations), inner dialogue, as well as tastes and smells.
This is how we process and then encode everything in our lives.
When we try to solve a problem stored in the subconscious, we often can’t access or interpret the information well—or it’s buried under layers of other data and the path is winding, breadcrumbs eaten by birds and tracks washed away by the tide.
Sometimes the trail is so hidden it seems almost impossible to find exactly what we’re looking for. I’m talking about the causes of our problems buried deep within when using less advanced ways of working with the subconscious.
Sometimes, though, we get truly lucky, and if we know how to look, we can receive an amazing gift that the subconscious hands us freely—in the form of a dream.
Dreams are a vivid, clear message from our deep subconscious that is trying to tell us something.
If we have an unpleasant dream, we have a remarkable chance to heal something very deep and make a change.
We can recall our dreams (especially if we write them down immediately upon waking) and then transform every negative feeling, emotion, image, sound, and the entire plot into something different and beautiful.
We don’t need to search for a hidden meaning in such a dream; just work with it—and then observe where and how change appears in our life.
If you’re serious about changing your life and healing what troubles you, I strongly recommend this:
Get a dedicated notebook and keep it on your nightstand. When you wake up and a dream is still vivid, write it down immediately. Don’t wait—dreams can fade within minutes after waking.
When you have time, use your notes to revisit the dream as if it’s happening right now. Feel what you felt, see what you saw, hear what you heard, …
Notice how you know that something inside the dream bothers you, and change it—for example with tapping, or with other techniques.
Remove every single negative element you can find. When it’s gone, try to bring all the negative aspects back—if you can.
If you can, go back and work them through again.
If you can’t, keep going…
When there is nothing negative left in the dream, and if it doesn’t spontaneously flip to the positive, create a scene that feels good.
Over time you’ll find that problems and stress in your life fade, your body begins to heal, pains disappear, and you feel fresher, younger, more radiant.