of anxiety dreams proves their importance. "Our dreams are bringing to us something very necessary from our psyche, something that is really out of balance," Webb says. "The psyche is trying to tell us where our thinking might not be healthy or trying to balance emotions."
and other large life changes can all produce new dreams, which reflect the particular struggle or excitement you're facing. The more attention you pay to your dreams, the more likely you are to see new patterns crop up for particular emotions you feel in your waking life. Some dreams will have more intense feelings than others and are possibly more meaningful and useful, Just says. Dreams that are so vivid they seem real are probably the most important. What's often most vivid isn't the experience in the dream or images but rather the feeling, Just says in her book. She calls these dreams associated with more major life events signal dreams because they trigger dream patterns. Dreams during this time of change are specific to you because they're based on what you personally associate as comforting and fearful. If your family's summer trips to the lake are some of your happiest childhood memories, it's likely these will pop up when your life is hectic to remind you of how to feel at ease and peaceful. These signal dreams can also be cautionary, cueing us to past mistakes so we don't repeat them.
A signal dream began for one of Delaney's clients when she started dating someone new. She recently had ended a long relationship with a man who criticized her appearance. Her new boyfriend
seemed nothing like her ex, but one night during dinner he criticized her hair. At the time, the woman didn't consciously register he criticism — she liked the
new guy — but later her dreaming mind did. She dreamt about her old boyfriend criticizing her, a dream that ultimately helped her treat her new relationship more cautiously. "Dreams provide us with honesty, gentle honesty, but they're honest," Delaney says. Dreams are free of our waking illusions and can allow us to see our feelings with a less-guarded perspective.
Signal dreams can also clue us to baggage we're carrying. If you're feeling guilty about a fight with a parent or cheating on a partner, it's likely it will be expressed in your dreams. Ever showed up naked to somewhere in a dream? This could be a sign of shame. Such strong emotions as shame and guilt are usually hard to shake, but being exposed, literally, in your dreams can be a sign you need to deal with it in order to move on. Just says in her book.
Keeping a dream journal will help you solve problems by helping you to notice dream patterns. By recording the details of your dreams, you actively pay attention to them and gather the details in one place so you can more easily find consistencies and themes.
We can greater understand what our dreams are telling us by using dream recall techniques, Webb says. Experts agree that the most important part of remembering your dreams is wanting to. Valuing what our dreams are saying is the first step to interpreting them, and understanding them is a step toward resolving our daily problems.
—Jacqueline Lenart, Jayplay writer, can be reached at jlenart@kansan.com.
thursday, december 4, 2003
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