Lesson 4 - Separating the wheat from the chaff. The first challenge in working with our dreams is remembering them in detail, the second challenge is arriving at an understanding of their meaning. Many people get bogged down trying to understand the meaning of every detail. Freud kept a dream diary and then destroyed it, complaining, "The stuff simply enveloped me as the sand does the sphinx." Jung recorded his waking and dreaming fantasies, tried to decipher what they were all about, became overwhelmed by their complexity, and later wrote that they almost "strangled me like jungle creepers." When we look at our dreams it's important to keep our eye on the sphinx, not on the sand; on the person in the jungle, not on the creepers.     Being attentive to the details when remembering a dream is very essential. It raises our level of dreaming awareness and makes our experience of dreaming more vivid. When we make dream clarity important, we dream with greater clarity. Later, when we try to interpret the dream, the details of the dream help us to remember the feelings we had during the dream. Re-experiencing the feelings of the dream is our key to understanding what the dream was about. But trying to interpret the meaning of every detail is an exercise in futility. By simply thinking about what is happening in our waking life and studying the feelings experienced in our dream we can usually figure out what the dream was about and deduce the message of the dream.     Recently my son dreamed that he was skating on a frozen lake with friends. It was a beautiful day and he was having a wonderful time. He skated out to where the ice was thin, and then to where it was even thinner. Suddenly the ice broke beneath him and he plunged into the freezing cold water. He struggled toward the surface, hoping that someone would come to his rescue. Then he woke up, very upset. What's important about this dream is not what friends he was with, or where the lake was, or what kind of skates he was wearing. For him, this was a dream about having a good time, not working, not making enough money to support himself, and suddenly being in terrible trouble and needing help. Knowing what was going on in his life made it easy to interpret the dream. Someone else could be blissfully "skating on thin ice" in their career, in a relationship, in regards to their physical or mental health. Dreams always occur in the context of what we are living through.     Keying in to what is important about the dream, rather than obsessing on the details is like separating the wheat from the chaff. If a dream is terribly mixed up and confusing, the dream is about being mixed up and confused. We'll only get more mixed up and confused trying to identify the meaning of each and every bewildering image and event. It's much more useful to look at the recent events in our waking life that created the feelings reflected in the dream. This is how we see past the machinations of our rationalizing intellect, our vanity, and our denial to see what we are really feeling and figure out what we need to do differently so that we can feel better.     Occasionally things that are especially odd or out of place occur in dreams that otherwise resemble our ordinary waking reality. I think that these are often clues to inform us that we are dreaming. They offer us an opportunity to transform an ordinary dream into a lucid dream, to detach ourselves from the emotional milieu of the dream and experience our spiritual freedom. Usually our dreaming mind glosses over the anomaly and when we look back at the dream we're intrigued by the puzzle piece that doesn't fit the puzzle. It may or may not be significant, but it shouldn't distract our attention from the larger picture. The primary value of any dream is what we can comprehend about it, not that which is beyond our comprehension.   Next: The importance of recurring dreams. previous - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - next home - teachings - history - archives - FAQs