Overall we have a poor appreciation of dreams and how they can help us understand our psychology and grow as people. So this is the first post I hope to address this issue.

The main takeaway today is that dreams are not random. They’re not a result of random neural firings. They don’t happen to you. They’re created by you and are a reflection of your hidden, subconscious, unexpressed desires and emotions and personality traits.

Of course, most of the time we’re not consciously creating our dreams, but when you pay more attention, and learn to start lucid dreaming, you’ll realize just why and how you are the creator of them.

Let me address one thing first.

This might sound harsh, but there’s no other way to say it. Essentially, we poorly understand our dreams because we are unconscious.

I don’t mean unconscious in terms of sleep. I mean unconscious as in we are unaware of our own psychology. We are unalert of what’s going on in our own psychology. We’re sleepwalking through life, so we sleepwalk through our dreams, dreaming all kinds of things without being aware of how our dreams come about.

So let me set out a basic philosophy that will guide the rest of the articles:

• Dreams ARE NOT random or meaningless. Quite the opposite. Every dream has a reason behind it and is built around a certain psychological theme or message.
  
• You are not the victim of your dreams. You create them. I mean literally moment by moment, everything that happens in your dreams, you are creating them. I don’t mean this in some woo-woo, quasi-spiritual way. The only way that dreams happen is because you create them.
  
• You can be asleep in your dreams. Not asleep as in sleeping, but asleep as in unconscious. It’s similar to when we daydream during the day: we’re awake, but we’re not aware of the senses because you’re lost in thought. A similar thing happens in dreams. When you’re unaware in dreams, you react to the dream as though it were real, and you’re unaware of the fact you created it all.
  
• Dreams are like a 3D allegory, or a play that we construct through our mind.
  
• Through our dreams we express our deepest yearnings, our unacknowledged emotions, our hidden personalities. We live out the more fundamental, primal aspects of our character. These are experienced through the plot, characters, and the character we play in it.
  
• It’s possible to lucid dream, and become aware of everything I’m talking about right now, because you train yourself to create whatever you want, and you realize this is what has been happening the entire time.

Just contemplate that.

If you dream about having sex, you’re creating that. If you dream about being a child, you’re creating that. If you dream about being chased by a giant, fearsome, bloodthirsty animal, you’re creating that. 

These dreams are not happening to you: you’re creating them. And in every single one of these dreams there is a message, a psychological message waiting to be discovered.

Dream Decoding

To understand your dreams, you need to become a master decoder.

I will give you specific pointers and tips, but in the end it becomes an intuitive thing. So my pointers won’t be perfect, but they’ll get you started and will help you reach the point of intuiting or understanding without needing to dissect.

• All dreams are manifestations of hidden desires of all kinds
• The characters in your dreams are chosen by you
• If you yourself express this desire in the dream, it’s not so repressed; if others express it, it’s fairly repressed in you

Let me use the example of being chased by a lion. Being chased is a common dream, so let’s explore it. It’s actually more complicated than the example of you chasing someone and attacking them, which is also a common dream.

First of all, remember this dream is an expression of your unconscious desires. The lion chasing you has anger and aggression, and we know that it’s simply a reflection of your repressed desires. So this means that you have anger and aggression that is repressed, underground, hidden in daily life.

In fact, let me say that all the energy that is in the lion, is actually your own energy, it’s just been pushed out of your conscious awareness. It’s like you’ve made a pile and carpeted over it. It’s still there, but it’s semi-hidden, hence why it appears to be outside you in the dream.

In the dream, the other character is you, and you’re running away from the lion, meaning you have a fear of confronting anger and aggression. The two work in tandem.

So once you recognize this, you can start working on reintegrating your anger and aggression. Rest assured, the lion is like a condensed, intense form of the projected anger you experience in your day. It’s yours, but it seems to be outside of you. That’s how the shadow, or repression, works.

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dream is when you’re dreaming AND YOU’RE AWARE OF IT. Usually we dream with zero awareness of that fact. But it’s possible, and not even too difficult, to learn how to lucid dream. To be dreaming and be able to say “wow, I’m dreaming, I know this is all a dream.”

Now that’s a long conversation. But just know that I’ll teach you some techniques for lucid dreaming, and that through lucid dreaming you will discover what I’m saying now.

You might wonder why lucid dreaming is so powerful:

• The rules are totally different. You can create things in lucid dreams. You can fly. You can meet people you haven’t seen for years. You can visit places. You do all this simply by imagining. Then it comes to you.
  
• Now that’s fun and exciting, but there’s a deeper point to it. You realize that this is what you’ve always been doing in your dreams, that your dreams are all a result of your desires, often ones that are repressed and that you can’t or won’t express in your ordinary life.

Alright, we’ll pick this up and go deeper in the next article.