Lesson 1 - "Dreams are pictures of feelings." Since prehistory human beings have attempted to interpret their own dreams and the dreams of others by defining the symbolic meanings of dream images and events. But the symbolism of dreams is individual, not universal. We need to examine our own feelings about the people, places and things that appear in our dreams to comprehend the true meanings of our dream images and to understand the messages contained in our dreams.     Our feelings about what is occurring in our lives generate the images and events in our dreams. Feelings of fear generate fearful dreams, feelings of desire generate dreams about things we desire. We are not always honest about what we fear and what we desire, either in our waking life or in our dreaming life, but the feeling in the dream is an honest reflection of our true feelings. That is why comprehending our dreams is so crucial to our self-understanding.     When my daughter was in elementary school she had a friend, David, who dreamed every night about the Dallas Cowboys, his favorite team. The conflicts, triumphs and frustrations of his life were played out while he slept in fierce imaginary football games. Roger Staubach and Mean Joe Green represented different aspects of his own personality struggling against adversity, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. Freud and Jung would have been stumped by David's dreams, but not Howard Cosell. That's how personal is the imagery of dreams.     When you have a dream that you remember, think about the feelings you have toward particular images in that dream. Try to recall the overall feeling of the dream. Was the dream vivid and strongly felt, or weakly felt and dimly perceived? Keeping in mind that dreams are pictures of feelings, what were the pictures and what were the feelings?     I was recently told a dream that was filled with powerful feelings and powerful imagery and dramatically illustrates how these two elements are connected. Tex's marriage was breaking up, but he and his wife were still together when he had the following dream: I dreamed I woke up in the middle of the night. There was a storm outside - there was rolling thunder and lightning. I went outside into the pouring rain and walked to the drainage ditch behind the house. It was flooded like a river and I saw my wife floating face down in the dark water, her blonde hair streaming in the current. I straddled the ditch, reached down, and lifted her up. She was limp and heavy and I almost slipped into the surging water trying to lift her out. I carried her body through the pouring rain back to the house. My mother was working in the kitchen. She didn't look up, but she told me I better go and see my daughter. I started walking to the baby's room, down a corridor of rooms, each room separated by an arched doorway. I could see her bassinet in the last room, illuminated from above by a beam of light. In the next to last room my father was sitting in a chair. He said, "You'd better not go in there - the dogs attacked your little girl." I rushed in anyway, pulled back the cover and saw my child lying there dead, half her face torn away. Screaming in grief, I rushed from the room. My father blocked the way. "Where are you going?" he said. "I'm getting my gun - I'm going to kill the dogs." "Don't do that," he said, "it won't bring your little girl back." I threw my father out of the way and ran screaming to get my gun.     At that point, Tex awakened from the dream, still shaking with emotion - his wife asleep in bed beside him. That was fifteen years ago. He never forgot that dream. Moved to tears by his story, I said, "The dogs were your anger. It must have been what destroyed your marriage." "No," he said, "it wasn't anger - it was my wildness that destroyed the marriage."   Next: Using your dreams to find your True Self previous - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 home - teachings - history - archives - FAQs