Ever had one of those really bizarre dreams that you’re flying, that the house has flooded, people are chasing you, you’re missing the plane, or snakes are slithering around you?

Before you dismiss your dreams as something crazy but totally irrelevant to your every day life, you might want to think again.
You see, dreams are mirrors of our current emotional state and every element, thing, person in that dream has some sort of meaning.
With that, dreams can often provide answers to problems that we’re facing in life. They can give us clarity, help us make decisions, and provide a wake-up call relating to our behaviour while we’re awake.
Now, that’s only half of it…

It’s possible to go one step further. By healing that recurring dream you can actually heal the corresponding emotional issue that occurs in real life.

I’ll share a dream I had about two years ago but before I do that I’ll let you know that up until having this dream, my dreams usually featured those kind of annoying occurrences like missing planes or losing things or running away from scary people, or houses with broken footings. You know the ones.

Without going into too much detail this kind of symbolism meant, missed opportunities and a lot of self-sabotaging behaviour that was going on in my waking life (which was very true at the time).

Then one night I had this dream …

I was walking through a fairly poor suburban neighbourhood. The houses were about 30 years old and many were rundown and all of them were grey in colour. Suddenly I saw a dark and foreboding alley and decided to walk down it.

The first house I came to in the alley was one with a massive sweeping staircase (like something you would see on Gone with the Wind) and the whole home was made from solid gold and there was a girl polishing the railings so they gleamed.

The staircase stretched off almost into the sky and at the top of that staircase was a golden light which was so beautiful that it almost brought tears to my eyes. The home sparkled like diamonds and I knew I had come home.

It was a stark contrast to my usual dreams, I can tell you.
Here’s how I interpret that dream…

The home represents me body. The staircase represents me moving upwards towards enlightenment. The solid gold symbolises treasure and wealth. The girl polishing the railings is my inner feminine who is full of aspiration working on my inner self. And not so funnily enough, that’s what I was going through at the time. Some massive transformation was taking place in my life and especially on my inner self.

At the time, in my waking life part of me at the time was wondering whether I was heading in the right direction. This dream confirmed for me that I most definitely was.

Ever since then if I have been confused about a situation I would go through a pre-sleep kind of exercise and time after time I’d dream about the solution (in an odd kind of symbolic way, of course). Wild kind of stuff!

Then - if issues cropped up in my dreams there’s an exercise I do when I wake up to help resolve that conflict in my dreams and in my waking life. We’ll address this in more detail in a future article.
Dream analysis has been around for many years and the “flavour” that I resonate the most with is the Jungian version, developed by famous psychologist and philosopher, Carl Jung.

Carl Jung believed that all dreams contained symbols and the meanings of those symbols tend to have universal meaning.
The key with dream analysis is to interpret every symbol in your dream and give more weight to the ones that you found to be of greatest significance then interpret the overall meaning of the dream as a whole which gives you an overall meaning.

The other point to consider is that the specific meaning of the dream symbols is the meaning that YOU give it … not the meaning given to it by a dream dictionary. In other words, how a specific archetype relates to YOUR life.

From time-to-time we will be sharing more thoughts on dream analysis and give you access to some tools that can help you decipher your own dreams.