Dreams

Many people try to learn from their dreams. Some neuroscientists question whether dreams have any particular meaning, regarding them instead as inconsequential events triggered by neural activity. But others, including Freud and Jung (chapters 2 and 3 of the Cloninger personality text), describe dreams as symbolic representations of unconscious forces in the psyche, and recommend trying to understand their hidden meaning as a way of improving personality functioning.

If you want to remember more of your dreams, try these tips:

• Keep and pencil and paper next to your bed, and write down your dreams immediately when you wake up. (Or you could use a tape recorder.)
• Recall the dream in the present tense. This increases your recall of details.
• Don't censor your dreams. Details that seem embarrassing or distasteful are common, especially when people first start taking dreams seriously.
• Try changing the time you wake up (setting your alarm clock a bit earlier or later). We dream during periods of REM sleep, which occur about every hour and a half throughout the night, and if you wake up from REM sleep, you're much more likely to remember your dream.

Besides keeping track of your dreams, also keep a record of what you've been thinking about or experiencing. Dreams are often reactions to those waking life experiences.

Dream interpretation involves learning to understand the symbols of a dream. Many times, these symbols have a common meaning for many people (although there is no guarantee that this will always be the case). There are many dream books available, of varying quality. One of my favorites is Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols, which describes the cultural and literary meanings of symbols, as well as their dream significance.

Water is commonly interpreted as a symbol of the unconscious. Like the unconscious, it takes many forms. Sometimes a flood threatens, just as the unconscious can sometimes overtake our everyday lives. Water also flows in rivers, in one direction, like the flow of time during our lives. Whether we enjoy it or feel threatened by it may be reflected in dream imagery. You might enjoy looking at photographs of water and try to interpret what each image might convey, if it appeared in a dream. For some great photos of water (and other things), see the panoramic photos by Jim Flosdorf on his web pages at http://www.jfpan.com

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