Moss’s Active Dreaming is an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and shamanic methods of journeying and healing. A central premise of Moss’s approach is that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind. He introduced his method to an international audience as an invited presenter at the conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden in 1994.

Over the past fifteen years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught in-depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania, Romania, and Austria and leads a three-year training course for teachers of Active Dreaming. He leads popular online dreamwork courses at www.spirituality-health.com, writes the “Dream Life” column for Spirituality magazine, and hosts the Way of the Dreamer radio show at www.healthylife.net.

He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast, and including The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, Michael Krasny’s Forum on KQED San Francisco, The Faith Middleton Show on Connecticut Public Radio, and CBC’s Tapestry program. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman’s Drum and Beliefnet.com.

His books have been published in more than twenty foreign languages. His website is www.mossdreams.com and his lively blog is at www.mossdreams.blogspot.com.

Below, we can get into Robert’s mind and learn  more about dreams and his newest book, The Secret History of Dreaming.

You are a former history professor and you say that to research and write this book you had to become a “dream archeologist”. What is “dream archeology” and what skills and resources are required to practice it?

While “archeology” is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning is more profound: it is the study of the arche, the first and essential things. The practice of “dream archeology” requires mastery of a panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else. It requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context – physical, social and cultural. And it demands the ability to enter a different time or culture, through the exercise of active imagination, and experience it from the inside as it may have been. These are the skills we need to excavate the inner dimension of the human adventure.

What is the most important thing you can tell us about your new book, The Secret History of Dreaming?

The Secret History of Dreaming restores a missing dimension to our understanding of what drives the human adventure: the vital role of dreams and imagination in science and literature, war and religion, medicine and the survival of our kind. History without the inner side is as shallow as history without economics, and as boring as history without sex.
This is not another book about dreams. It is a history of dreaming, a term I use in an expansive sense to encompass not only night dreams but also waking visions, the interplay of mind and matter that is sometimes called synchronicity, and experiences in a creative “solution state”.

Explain your statement that a dream led directly to one of the biggest oil discoveries in world history.

In 1937, Colonel Harold Dickson, the former British Political Agent in Kuwait, dreamed that a sandstorm opened a crater under a strange tree in the desert, and revealed a mummy that came to life as a beautiful woman who gave him an ancient coin. His wife recorded the dream for him in the middle of the night, and then he consulted a Bedouin woman dream interpreter who gave him the location of the tree in his dream – in the Burqan hills – and told him he would find great treasure there. He was able to persuaded the Kuwait Oil Company (which had been drilling dry holes up to this point) and they struck it rich at the exact place he had dreamed. This was the origin of Kuwait’s oil wealth and a major source for the Allies in World War II.

Tell us about the dreams of the Founding Fathers

John Adams and Dr Benjamin Rush – who made a close study of precognitive dreams – were in the habit of exchanging dreams in their extensive correspondence. In 1809, Rush wrote to Adams about a dream in which the doctor’s son read him a page from the future history of the United States. The dream letter described “the renewal of friendship” between Adams and Thomas

Jefferson, who had been estranged for many years because of their political disagreements. It
stated that the later correspondence of the two former presidents would inspire many. And it recorded that Adams and Jefferson “sunk into the grave nearly at the same time.” Nearly seventeen years later, long after their reconciliation, the two former presidents died on the same day – July 4, 1826. The predictions on the page of Dr Rush’s dream history were exactly fulfilled.

Explain how Harriet Tubman’s dreams and visions helped her to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in American history – the runaway slave from Maryland’s Eastern Shore who went back to the South, braving great dangers, to free her fellow-slaves and became the most successful “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Yet the secret of Harriet Tubman’s achievement has rarely been told. She was a dreamer and a seer. In her dreams and visions, she could fly like a bird. Her gift may have been associated with a near-death experience in her childhood, when an angry overseer threw a two-pound lead weight that laid open her skull. We learn from her how great gifts can spring from our wounds. Harriet herself said she inherited special gifts – including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future – from her father, who “could always predict the future” In The Secret History of Dreaming, I examine the evidence that her ancestors were Ashanti, and that she may have inherited something of the Ashanti experience of dream tracking. I also look at the influence of the first, fiercely brave and inspiring, itinerant black women preachers, whose example may have helped Harriet develop the power to transfer her vision. She could sing courage into people’s hearts.

Tell us how Freud, tragically, may have missed an early dream diagnosis of the mouth cancer that killed him many years later.

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams he gives a lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses her condition with several doctors. The tragic irony is that in all his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that could have saved his life. I report on the exhaustive work of a cancer surgeon who compared Freud’s medical records with his dream report and concluded that the contained an amazingly exact preview of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years later.

You write: “Because young Sam Clemens could not find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North America and instead became Mark Twain.” Tell us that story!

While he was working as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa, young Sam Clemens read a book that described “a vegetable product with miraculous powers” that was growing in Brazil. Sam was “fired with a longing” to go up the Amazon, secure a supply of this miracle plant – and make a fortune. He sailed to New Orleans on a riverboat whose pilot was the celebrated Horace Bixby.
When he got to New Orleans, Sam found that no ship in port was sailing for Brazil and no one could tell him how to get there. So he changed his plans, sought out Bixby, and persuaded him to take him on as an apprentice pilot. Working on the Mississippi river, he got many of the ideas for the books that made him famous under a pen-name borrowed from the boatmen’s cry “Mark Twain”, meaning two fathoms, safe water.
The miracle plant Sam had set out to find was coca. Had he succeeded in his original plan, Keokuk, Iowa would have become the cocaine capital of America. Because Sam Clemens couldn’t find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North American history and instead became Mark Twain.

Tell us about the mystery of the Chinese Woman in Wolfgang Pauli’s dreams that Jung could not figure out.

The quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli frequently dreamed of an alluring “Chinese woman” who moved like a snake dancer. Though he found her sexy, she sometimes appeared in situations that filled him with dread, as if his world was being shaken. He was also distressed by a dream in which the Chinese woman had a baby the world would not acknowledge. Paul discussed these dreams with Jung, and Jung talked of archetypes and the anima. Then Pauli’s “Chinese woman” stepped out of his dream life and into the world at the center of the so-called “Chinese revolution” in physics. A woman physicist, Dr Wu, conducted the critical experiments that overthrew one of the scientific paradigms (the parity principle) that Pauli had fiercely upheld, shaking his intellectual universe. Yet when a Nobel prize was awarded for this breakthrough in 1957, only the two theoretical physicists – both men – were recognized; the Chinese woman’s baby went unacknowledged by the world.
I explore this episode in my investigation of the rich 25-year correspondence between Jung and Pauli. They were giants in their respective fields – depth psychology and physics – who goaded each other, in a 25-year intellectual friendship, to step beyond the boundaries of their disciplines and seek to develop a working model of a universe in which mind and matter are constantly interweaving. But they were capable of missing dream clues!

Tell us about the woman you call “the beautiful dream spy of Madrid.”

Ah, the lovely Lucrecia de León! When she was a guest of the Spanish Inquisition, one of the investigators told her, “You are so beautiful a dead man would rise up and make you pregnant.” Since women are absent from so much of the history written by men, it is remarkable that – thanks in part to the Spanish Inquisition – the record of no fewer than 415 dreams of a young woman of Madrid have survived from the time of the Spanish Armada. They were transcribed between 1587 and 1590, by clerics who listened to her accounts of her night adventures while an armed courier waited in the street ready to gallop to the holy city of Toledo to carry the latest dream installment to the head of the powerful Mendoza clan, second only to the Habsburgs in Spain. The reason Lucrecia’s dreams were so prized was that she had a gift for seeing the future and discovering what was going on behind closed doors, in the royal palace or the house of Sir Francis Drake in England. Her dreams were exploited as sources of military intelligence and as political propaganda, in a time when dream visions were still greatly respected. Some of them were painted; others were performed as theatre for high society in the town house of a dowager duchess who may also have been an English agent. Lucrecia’s story is a fascinating chapter in the history of women as well as the history of dreaming.

You are the creator of an original approach to dreamwork and healing that you call Active Dreaming. What is Active Dreaming? Will you give us examples of original techniques you have developed, and tell us how they differ from other approaches to dream interpretation or analysis?

Active Dreaming is founded on the understanding that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind.

One of the most important original techniques I have introduced is the Lightning Dreamwork Game, a fast and fun way to share inner experiences, get helpful feedback and guidance for action that you can practice with just about anyone, almost anywhere, It’s a great inner workout, and when you play it with friends or family or workmates, you’ll find you are deepening and energizing your relationships. By simply playing the game, you’ll find you can recognize and work with diagnostic and precognitive elements in dreams, and harvest personal imagery for healing and creative projects.
I teach many techniques for conscious dream travel. This goes far beyond what “lucid dreaming” is commonly thought to be. We learn to start out lucid and stay lucid. Using shamanic techniques for shifting consciousness, we embark on intentional journeys – often with partners or a whole group – on agreed itineraries, which might take us on a mission to scout out the possible future, or explore an alternate reality or a location in the imaginal realm, or through the doorway of a previous dream or vision. We learn to travel back inside dreams to dialogue with dream characters, resolve nightmare terrors, bring through healing and guidance, and scout out the possible future.
I love leading games of coincidence and imagination, and am constantly dreaming up new ones. Active dreamers find that the world around us will speak to us in the manner of dreams if we will only pay attention. I teach people how to navigate by synchronicity, how to harvest personal imagery for healing, and how to grow a vision so deep and strong that it wants to take root in the world.

About the Author
Robert Moss was born in Australia, and his fascination with the dreamworld began in his childhood, when he had three near-death experiences and first learned the ways of a traditional dreaming people through his friendship with Aborigines. A former professor of ancient history, he is also a novelist, journalist, and independent scholar. Visit him online at www.mossdreams.com.

I’ll write my review of this outstanding book later this week – it is definitely one you’ll want to read.

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First of all, what do we mean by inadequacy dreams?  An inadequacy dream would be one in which you dream that you are either:

• too fat
• too thin
• too old
• too young
• too unattractive
• too sick
• too forgetful
• not smart enough
• not tall enough
• too tall
• overqualified
• under qualified
  
• and on and on and on!

Basically, any dream in which you disappoint yourself, scare yourself, or fail to meet your expectations is an inadequacy dream.

Here’s a recent inadequacy dream submitted for analysis: Dreaming About Forgetting

I am a 52 year old mother of 2 boys (one’s 12 and the other is 21).  I had a dream a week ago that has stayed with me and is just very upsetting.  I dreamed that I was holding a baby girl and that she was my baby.  She was crying and had a fever.  So I took her to what appeared to be a doctor’s office.  The nurse working at the window asked me my name and I told her.  She asked what was wrong with my baby and I told her that she had a fever, didn’t seem to feel well and was crying a lot.  Then the nurse asked me my baby’s name and I couldn’t remember it.

I felt SO frustrated and scared in the dream (and when I woke up and ever since).  I was trying so hard to remember the name and kept thinking, “How can you forget the name of your own baby?”

Most of the time dreams don’t stay with me.  I usually remember them for a day or two but this one won’t leave my mind.  I keep feeling how frustrated and scared I was.

Now I’m scared that this means I’m losing my memory or that I might have problems with Alzheimers or something.  I’m just really in a bad place right now because of this dream.  Please help me sort this out so I can get rid of this feeling.  Thank you.

P.S.  Oh, by the way, this is strange – but somehow I know that the baby’s name was Victoria. It came to me just as I was waking up from the dream.

First of all, relax and throw out any left over fears and anxieties!   Very often dreaming about forgetting things is simply a sign that we need to slow down and start paying more attention to things.   It’s possible that you recently forgot something or almost forgot something and the frustration of that incident carried over into your dream.

Forgetting things is a very common thing – it happens to people of all ages, young and old.  It isn’t a sign of losing your memory or even of getting old – most of the time it’s simply a sign that you’re too busy or that you aren’t paying as much attention to details as possible.  Sometimes, in our work and at home, we get kind of lazy and don’t pay as much attention to details.  This leads to forgotten cellphones, keys, and sunglasses!

Most people just laugh at the situation – but a certain age group (between about 35 and 55) almost panics.  We tend to think, “Dear, God, please don’t let me be losing my mind!!!“  We don’t just hit the panic button, we jump on it.

Yet, if we pause and take a deep breath, we’ll remember that forgetting things happen at all ages.  After all, what about the time we forgot our school lunch, the time we forgot the dates for the history exam (!!!), the time we forgot to take the right notebook to class – etc, etc, etc.  If we would be reasonable, we’d realize that forgetting things isn’t anything new!

I do a lot of research and reading for another one of my websites, Out of Bounds.  It’s all about mental fitness, sharpening your mind, improving your memory, and just staying sharp.  I always recommend challenging the mind to keep it on it’s proverbial toes. Doing a lot of the recommended tips given on Out of Bounds will help you to not only stay sharp – it’ll give you confidence.

Right now, I’d say that a recent event (something small – like forgetting your keys…) has sort of smacked your confidence around – hence the dream.  Unfortunately, the dream only compounded the problem!

Rest assured that I’m certain the frustrating feelings will subside right away.

Other Inadequacy Dreams

If you’ve had inadequacy dreams,  realize that they stem from a particular insecurity.  If you dream that you are overweight, for example, you either…

1. Have been feeling like you need to lose weight.
2. Have a deep-seeded fear of becoming overweight.

Another interpretation for this type of dream – if you’re certain that you have no insecurities whatsoever – is that you “emotionally feel” whatever inadequacy is portrayed in the dream.  For example, if you dream you are incredibly ugly – yet don’t feel at all unattractive, you could have recently acted “ugly” and have guilt over your actions.

If you dream that you are overweight – yet you know you are a perfect size – you may feel like you’re “carrying too much weight” at the office, at school, or at home.

Finally, don’t ever let a mere dream shake your confidence or your swagger.  Dream Prophesy is all about USING your dreams as self help and self improvment vessels.  It’s the whole reason I put the website up in the first place!  We can take our dreams and use them as springboards to improving our lives.  If you dream of a particular inadequacy – put a little extra effort into chasing away the insecurities and watch your confidence soar!

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The majority of dream interpretation requests I get have to do with 1 of the following types of dreams:

• Dreams of dying
• Dreams of a lost loved one
• Snake dreams
• Dreams of falling
• Dreams of being lost
• Dreams of losing things

I thought we’d take a good look at one of these dreams today:  Dreams of losing things.  Many people want to know what it means to dream about losing things – some wonder if it’s a sign that they’ll be losing something (or someone) in their life.  First of all let me say a resounding NO, these dreams do not tell the future or imply that you’ll lose anything or anyone in your waking life.

Dreams deal with what’s going on in our lives – or with what has gone on in our lives.  Dreams are where we sort it all out.

When we dream of losing things, its almost always because we are (in our waking life) overwhelmed and are currently being pulled in too many different directions or are trying to do too many things.  These dreams often have to do with us, personally, more than things we lose.  They’re just symbols for the bigger picture.

It’s our brain’s way of telling us:  Too many pots on the stove!  Something’s going to happen if you don’t get it together. Dreaming of losing things often means we are “out of touch” or “out of control” in some area of our life.

Many times, life gets so hectic and twisted that we lose touch with who we actually are.  We try to be so many things to so many people that we sort of lose who we truly are.  We forget the things that truly matter (or at least should matter) in life.  At the risk of wading into the deep end of the pool, dreaming of losing things often reflects that we’ve “lost a part of ourselves.”

If you dream that you have lost something, examine your heart and life the very next day, while the dream is still fresh in your mind.  Have you lost touch with yourself lately?  Are you too busy?  Are parts of your life sort of spinning out of control?

As I point out in the article, Dream Prophesy: When Dreams Come True, dreams simply tell us that The stage is set for something to happen.  Whether it does or not is almost entirely up to us.

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A recent dream request:
I keep having dreams in where death itself is after me everywhere i turn its there. & this really scares me. can you please help me figure out what these dreams mean?

Dreams about death are always troubling – very much so! It’s important to remember, however, that these dreams aren’t actually about death as much as they’re about change or transition. Death in dreams is also often a dream symbol for loss.

Often, people will dream about death during the following changes in their lives:

• change of schools (from grade school to middle school, from middle school to high school, from high school to college – or a change of schools as a result of moving)
• change of job
• a move
• divorce
• parents divorce
• a friend moving away
• change of teachers
• change of boss and/or co-workers
• loss of a pet
• loss of a friendship
• starting a new relationship
• ending an old relationship

As you can see, any sort of change sort  of brings about a “loss” of sorts – a new job also means the loss of an old one.  A new relationship often means the “loss” of an old one, etc.  Death dreams generally just represent this change.

We often will dream about lost loved ones during times of change or transition as well.  Basically, anything that symbolizes change to us will symbolize change to us in our dreams.

Please don’t ever be afraid of death dreams – they aren’t negative dreams.  In fact, ancient dream guides often stated that to dream of death was a great sign that something wonderful was about to happen to you!  These dreamologists believed that to dream of death meant that the dreamer was moving on to a new, exciting experience in their lives.

Nothing scary about that!

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Our dreams can have a great impact on our lives and offer us wonderful insights into our minds. All we have to do is analyze them and find out exactly what it is they’re trying to tell us. Dreams can hold valuable secrets to our lives and the dream symbols can help sort through many problems and dilemmas in a way no self help book in the world could hope to.

I hope you’ll bookmark Dream Prophesy.com and subscribe to our e-mail alerts and/or rss feed so you can learn how you can interpret your own dreams and learn how they can help you get more from life.

Below are a few guidelines for interpreting and analyzing your dreams:

• Make the meanings of the dream symbols in your dream line up with your real life.  If you are terrified of snakes, a snake dream will have a different meaning for you than it would someone who keeps snakes as pets and loves them the way the rest of us love our cats and dogs.
• Submit your dream to Dream Prophesy.com for your own personalized dream interpretation and dream analysis. Our contact form is on the site.  Unless you mark your dream as private, we do share the dream with our readers.  This way, many people are helped by your dream interpretation.
• Write down your dreams, as soon as you wake up. It doesn’t matter if it’s a regular dream or a nightmare.  Even the most, seemingly, insignificant dream can hold a wealth of information and insight.   Don’t worry about trying to analyze it at that exact moment – simply write down what you remember.
• Even more importantly, write down how you feel when you first wake up.  The emotions you have at that moment are the emotions you were experiencing in the dream and are absolutely vital to the dream interpretation.
• Make sure you write down all of the symbols in your dream.  These are things such as knives, brooms, cats, birds, snakes, planes, and even people you recall.  Basically, anything or anyone you remember is a dream symbol.

At the end of a week, go back and examine your dream journal.  If you see a series of troubling and upsetting dreams, you can rest assured that your mind is troubled about something.   Your mind is begging for you to find a solution to the drama and the trauma so that it can find peace again.

If your dreams seem to be a series of fear and panic, you are experiencing a great deal of worry and concern in your life.  There is at least one thing you are afraid of happening (or not happening).  When the worry is resolved, your dream self will be less anxious!

Again, please use Dream Prophesy.com as a guide and resource as you begin to study and make sense of your dreams.  If you have a particular dream or dream symbol that you want interpreted, use our search box to find articles and posts related to this subject.  If you still have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me or use the contact form.

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A few days ago, one of my daughters and I were talking about we’ll often solve a problem or get a great idea while we’re lying in bed – either close to sleep or having just woke up. I’ll often get a great idea for a post or the ingredients for a killer recipe when I’m either close to sleep or just coming out of its blissful state!

Researchers actually back up our experiences

Experts say that we have the ability to solve problems in our sleep because most memory consolidation occurs while your brain is in a resting state. Studies have even shown that students who review schoolwork right before bedtime have a much better chance of remembering the information for the next day’s test or assignment.

If you are preparing for a test or a presentation at work, and you want the information to be stored as long-term memory, your best bet is to study the material right before bedtime.

By the same token, if you have a certain dilemma in your life and you’re searching for a solution, give it a great deal of thought as you fall asleep. Your chances for waking up next to the solution are outstanding!

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A Troubling Dream From a Reader:

I sit up out of the bed with a strange feeling. I look at the clock and its 3:10 still early in the morning. My throat is dry so i get some ice like i always do and try to turn on the kitchen light, but it doesn’t turn on. My mind makes me turn to the door as i feel something there. I see a shadow with a short height as i peer at the dark blue curtains. I walked over to the curtains and opened them up to see my son of 6 years standing outside with a blank expression on his face. I opened the door in a rush and asked him why he was outside at 3 in the morning. He didn’t answer me. When I went to reach for him something gave me a small cut on my hand. I thought nothing of it as I brought him inside. I took off his brown coat and something swiped across my hand again. when I looked at his hand he held up a gold screw about the size of my pinky and I could see the extra sharp point on it. I watched him take his hand across his chest and felt the point swipe across me again. I jumped up out of my bed to notice everything was like my dream. My house was dark, it was 3:10, the only difference was that my light turned on in the kitchen, and my son was peacefully sleeping on the couch. My body was cold and tingling and on my hand were 3 small cuts. They weren’t random as they are above each other…my hand was really scratched..maybe you could help me and tell me what this means or what’s happening to me. I remember dreams often some more than others and I have some dreams repeatedly altho this is the first time I ever had this….thank you.

It’s really a wonder that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. While we’re asleep, sometimes we’ll scratch ourselves, get our limbs twisted around, or just find ourselves in some sort of uncomfortable position – then, our mind will work this into our dream. Some people dream that their finger is bitten by an animal only to wake up with their finger in their own mouth!

More likely than not, you somehow managed to scratch yourself while sleeping (it’d be much easier to explain if you had a pet!) – then your mind sort of inserted the experience into your dream.

Many times when we dream of a loved one in this sort of dream, it’s an indication that we were thinking about them right before we drifted off to sleep. I guess that’s why parents so frequently dream of their children.  The dream also seems to indicate that you’ve been somewhat worried about “getting through” to someone recently.  This person could or could not be your son.

It appears that you know what is best for someone else but are having a little trouble helping them to see.  It could be something like trying to convince a friend that she’s wrong about a certain guy or it could be a case of trying to get your son to pick up his toys – it honestly could be just about anything.  However, the intensity of the dream suggests that it’s something you feel very strongly about and that has been worrying you more than you really realize.

As for the clock reading the same time, that can be chalked up to crazy luck.  The fact that you were cold and tingly can be attributed to the fact that you are a mother who was dreaming about her young child.  Lots of emotions are involved there, and your body registered each one.  Also, the fact that this dream seems very much like a lucid dream would explain its extreme effects on you.

Thanks for sharing your dream and I hope your scratches heal soon.

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A lot of people have the mistaken idea that dreaming of death foretells of a loved one dying.

First of all, dreams are a many things, but psychic they are not.  Our dreams reflect what is going on inside our minds and hearts.   They deal with (and sort out) things that we are currently experiencing or things that we have currently experienced.

Now having said that, we can take the information and symbolism found in our dreams to help us in the future.  So, in that regard, they can provide warnings and admonitions.  However, please don’t ever think they foretell bad omens or that dreaming of darkness is a prediction for upcoming  darkness.

If you have had a dream which involved death, rest assured that you are far from alone.  We’ve all had death dreams and, while troubling, we all know that they slink out of our lives just as fast as they slunk in.

Death dreams generally mean that you are anxious or worried.  You may not fully realize how much anxiety you’re actually feeling.  Many times, troubling dreams like this wave a flag for the individual and cause them to realize just how much stress they’ve been under.  The dreamer can then realize that they need to pull back a little bit – enjoy life more rather than just anxiously trying to get from point A to point B!

Almost all dreams of dying can be traced back to an overworked, overly anxious individual very much in need of some time off!

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If you’re serious about dream prophesy, dream analysis, dream interpretation, and really getting to the heart of what your dreams mean, you’ll need your dream recall to be on the absolute TOP of its game!

• How well do you remember your dreams?
• Do you remember your emotions and feelings during your dreams?
• Do you recognize most of the people in your dreams?
• In the morning, can you recall at least one of your dreams?
• Do you recall the various “symbols” in your dreams?

If you feel that your dream recall needs a little work, I have the perfect solution:  A Dream Journal.  While you don’t absolutely have to run out and buy a new notebook or journal to serve as your Dream Journal – it would be a cool idea.  You could use any notebook you have around the house, of course, but the more “special” you make the entire experience, the better.

Even if you simply go to one of those amazing stores where everything is $1 and buy a notebook in your favorite color – you’re making  a point of taking the entire enterprise seriously, and that’s what’s important.  My first Dream Journal was actually a wire notebook with colorful Lisa Frank dolphins on the front.  Seemed appropriate enough!

Here’s another idea that adds to the adventure.  Find a pocket folder (for mere pennies) to keep with your dream journal.  I’ll tell you what it’s for in just a minute!

Get Started With Your Dream Journal

Once you have your dream journal, go ahead and enter a recent dream.  Include the people who were in the dream, what you were doing in the dream (what you hoped to accomplish or were trying to avoid), the symbols (knives, snakes, balloons, candles, fire, clouds – anything that stands out) in the dream, and most importantly – HOW YOU FELT DURING THE DREAM.  Also, list any and all colors that you remember. List only the top 3 colors you remember – 4 at the most.  Oddly enough, this is very important!

A typical journal entry might look something like this:

I was driving  an old beaten up red pick up truck.  My beloved basset hound, Honey, was in the passenger’s seat.  We were in a huge hurry to get somewhere and Honey could talk.  In fact, she talked practially the whole time.  Her collar, instead of being her normal hot pink one was white.  I couldn’t make sense of that in my dream – though her talking didn’t shock me.  I was confused as to why the collar changed colors.

We were in a huge hurry and I was driving really fast.  We were on dirt roads and passed by a lot of farm houses and brown horses.  At some point, my cat Lanie joined us and could also talk.  He wasn’t in a hurry and wanted us to slow down and get something to eat.  Then I woke up. Hungry.

Main Colors:  Red, white, brown

Emotions:  Rushed, confused, anxious, hungry!

The above dream is actually one of the first ones I ever recorded in a dream journal.  This is actually the VERY dream that began my study of and fascination with dreams.  When I was thinking about this dream the next day at school (instead of listening to my Algebra teacher!), I realized that, underneath it all, I was feeling many of the same feelings in my real life as I did in my dream.  By the time the class was over, a lifelong fascination with dreams and heartfelt belief in the importance of their interpretations had taken hold.

Be sure that you enter your “feelings” as accurately as possible.  Here are a few suggestions:  joyful, sad, anxious, worried, depressed, helpless, surprised, ashamed, agitated, frustrated, curious, confused, powerful, unloved, ignored, furious, hopeful, optimistic, sexy, ugly, brave, etc.  Even if the emotions seem to have NOTHING to do with one another, write them down.

Remember the Folder?!

This exercise adds even more fun to your dream recall and analysis.  Cut out or draw/color pictures that symbolize your dream.  If you have room in your dream journal to tape (or draw) them onto the pages, do so.  If not, clip the images together with a paper clip, then add a little piece of paper with the date of the dream.

Having visuals of the colors and symbols can really help put you in touch with your inner feelings and emotions.

I have many more articles and exercises planned to add to the site that deal with Dream Journals and Dream Recall – with plenty more about images and, even, collages.  So, please grab an rss feed and/or sign up for e-mail updates, so you’ll know what’s been added as soon as it’s here for you.  I just wish I could open up my notebooks (and brain!) and pour everything out at once.  Kind of impossible, though, so I’ll just take it steady.

I’m actually working on a downloadable Dream Journal template for the site, color charts, and a visual guide to dream symbols.   So much to do!

Have a glorious weekend – if you need me, I’ll be right here, typing, thinking, and tweaking away with coffee and chocolate fueling me along.

A Few of the Best Dream Journals We’ve Found:
Adventures in Wonderland Dream Journal
Dream Time Journal

The Dreams II Fabric Poster at the top of the post can be bought at
AllPosters.com!

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