When you sleep your brain and mind process your waking life experiences of the last 24- 48 hours. One function is to store some of your experiences into memory. To do this, your brain compares your recent experience with all your past similar experiences which is why you often see things from your past in your dreams. Every night, as you dream, your hard drive is updated: some memories and beliefs are strengthened, some are replaced and some remain in conflict. The purpose of all of this is to aid your survival and to help you to cope with future new experiences.
You experience all this processing as dreams. You witness HOW YOUR MIND WORKS. You witness the building and demolition of YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM based on your experiences.
The question is this: if your brain and mind are performing these necessary good works in the name of your survival, health and wisdom, what is the point of analysing your dreams? Unfortunately your dreaming brain often makes its survival decisions based on some of your oldest beliefs or past traumatic experiences rather than on today's situation. As a result you are often wired for survival according to what kept you safe as a child or through fear of an unlikely repeat of the trauma: often hardly relevant to your life today.
When you understand your dreams you understand yourself and when you understand yourself you understand your world. You can then look at your world and decide what needs to be changed within your belief system (since your experience of the world is a reflection of your beliefs about it).
My approach to working with dreams is to follow dream analysis with exercises I call Dream Alchemy Practices. You experience your dreams as symbols, puns, feelings, allegories and other right-brain perceptions. This is the language through which you view your otherwise unconscious belief systems. Dream Alchemy Practices enable you to engage with your unconscious mind using the same language and, in this way, to change old, inappropriate beliefs into new, supportive ones.
When you sleep your brain and mind process your waking life experiences of the last 24- 48 hours. One function is to store some of your experiences into memory. To do this, your brain compares your recent experience with all your past similar experiences. Sometimes your recent experience agrees with a past experience and your brain logs a confirmation, a strengthening of your beliefs about this issue. Sometimes your recent experience is so different from your past experiences that decisions need to be made: the recent experience may be discarded (we tend to hold on to our oldest beliefs), or the older experiences may be discarded in favour of the new truth that you have perceived. Alternatively the old and the new may co-exist in conflict for a while, or they may interact creatively, producing a new insight born during sleep.
You experience all of this processing as dreams. Imagine this processing and filing as being like updating a computer hard drive, or sorting out an old-fashioned office filing system. You witness files from your past being opened and flicked through while your brain and mind are comparing notes, looking for older memories, beliefs, buried feelings, word associations, emotional associations, dates, anything and everything. You see bits of the last 24 – 48 hours (someone you met, a project that is on your mind, a character from a TV show) mixed up with bits from your past and all sorts of bizarre odds and ends that you don’t instantly understand (associations you have consciously forgotten which your unconscious mind has retained). This is why so many dreams have references to the past as well as the present.
You brain and mind are not totally focussed on the past and memories though. The point of all this processing is to help you to survive and thrive, to build your own belief system to negotiate your way through life and remain safe. The processing is about finding ways to deal with challenges and changes in your life, solving problems, coming up with creative solutions, learning from your experiences and projecting ahead to work out ways of approaching the future.
When you dream you are witness to all this processing, comparing, sorting, discarding and creating. You are witness to HOW YOUR MIND WORKS. You witness the building and demolition of YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM. The problem for many people is that the heavy focus on training the mechanist left-brain (much of our schooling) makes it difficult to engage the more visionary holistic right-brain approach needed to make sense of our dream experiences. With training it becomes easier to look for associations, word plays, the feelings behind personal symbols and all the other keys that reveal the Big Picture beliefs painted by our dreams.
The question is this: if your brain and mind are performing these necessary good works in the name of your survival, health and wisdom, what is the point of analysing your dreams? Should you just let it all happen and wake up each morning content in the knowledge that your hard drive is sorted, your brain is clean and tidy and you know how to avoid being eaten by a tiger?
What? And miss a brilliant opportunity to CHANGE THE WAY YOUR MIND WORKS?
Why do we all have differing views of the world, different belief systems? Many of our fundamental beliefs are established early in life or as a result of later traumatic experiences. Our minds usually favour the old beliefs. We built those old beliefs to keep us safe, beliefs such as “Do what Daddy says,” (so you’ll be fed) or “Don’t get your hopes up,” (so you won’t feel disappointment) or “Agree with your friends,” (so they’ll include you) and so on. As adults many of these beliefs are not good for us, but our unconscious mind tends to hang on to them in a false bid for safety. Unfortunately we are driven by our unconscious beliefs, including those that were established to keep us safe from the extremely unlikely repeat of past trauma. Knowledge of these unconscious beliefs puts you in a powerful position because they CAN be changed.
When you understand your dreams you understand yourself and when you understand yourself you understand your world. You can then look at your world and decide what needs to be changed. For example, if your dreams indicate that you have an unconscious belief that it’s safest to agree with your friends because they’ll make you feel included, you’ll understand why you feel so anxious about putting yourself in any position where you are required to be different, to risk what your unconscious mind perceives as the dangers of being excluded. As an adult you may have been working to make a difference to the world and wondering why your efforts have been misfiring. In this example, your dream explains why. You are then in the powerful position of being able to choose to change that unconscious belief and replace it with a more helpful one – one more appropriate to your goals as an adult and to your conscious wisdom. How is this done?
My approach to working with dreams is to follow dream analysis with exercises I call Dream Alchemy Practices. These exercises cover a wide spectrum including visualisation, affirmations (but very far from conventional affirmations), dialogues, writing, artwork, body work and more. What all these exercises have in common is working with personal dream symbols. This is why:
You experience your dreams as symbols, puns, feelings, allegories and other right-brain perceived modes. This is the language through which you view your otherwise unconscious belief systems. Dream Alchemy Practices enable you to engage with your unconscious mind using the same language and, in this way, to change old, inappropriate beliefs into new, supportive ones.
My approach to analysing dreams and to working with them to effect personal change has been evolving since 1991. Originally based on wide reading, I moved on to research dreams with the help of several hundred people via surveys and dream experiments and then progressed to work individually with hundreds of clients over the years, always learning, testing, learning and refining. I have constantly worked with my own dreams and pioneered much of the Dream Alchemy Practice work on myself before moving it into the public arena (and private clients) in 2001.
My scientific mind is, no doubt, evident in my approach to dreams, but I cannot finish describing the contents of my rather large nutshell without reference to telepathy, precognition, mystery and spirituality.
In common with many other people, I notice that many of my dreams overlap with those of my partner. It is normal for us to compare notes and find we have shared similar dream experiences, often quite specifically (for example, same dialogue) during the same sleeping period. The dreaming mind incorporates material beyond the senses science generally acknowledges.
The same applies to precognitive dreaming (dreaming accurately of the future). I, along with many people, regularly experience precognitive dreams. This is a very frightening concept for many people and one I prefer not to highlight simply because, until people understand dream analysis, too many fear their dreams are literal. For example, it is extremely common for parents to dream of one of their children dying, usually by drowning. This dream is symbolic. People rarely mention it because they are frightened that mentioning it will make it happen. My estimate is that as many as 1 in 3 parents have had this dream. I look at ALL dreams from a symbolic point of view as this is most meaningful in the quest for self-understanding. However, I researched precognitive dreaming for three years, including subjecting myself to some extremely challenging experiments, and then wrote a book about it. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME was published by Random House in 1998. You can now read it online (or download it to read later) by clicking the bookcover at the bottom of this page.
I am often asked for my views on spirituality and God. These subjects are also included in most of my books. The nutshell? For me, personally, life is a spiritual quest, an ongoing path of self-knowledge, a living with awareness and meaning. For me the guiding light is the ultimate truth and wisdom we all seek as we negotiate the personal illusions we call reality. Dreams help me to see those illusions and, in so doing, guide me closer to the truth.
And that's it, in a nutshell. Now, to get a real taste of dreamwork in action, I've added some links to examples and resources on this site.
Jane Teresa Anderson
1. THIS WEEK'S DREAM
Every week I interpret a different dream and add a suggested Dream Alchemy Practice. Bookmark the page and visit it weekly.
2. 101 DREAMS INTERPRETED
Use the index to 101 dreams interpreted by Jane Teresa to look up dreams according to their themes. Dream alchemy practices included.
3. DREAM INDEX
Use the index to look up a dream symbol. This leads to a number of dreams once discussed in our old forums. Those marked with a BLUE ASTERISK * are ones I have interpreted and suggested Dream Alchemy Practices for.
4. DREAM ALCHEMY
This book, published in 2003, is available from all good bookshops. It focuses on recurring dream themes and Dream Alchemy Practices. You can read extracts to discover more.
5. DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICES
Read more about how how to use your dream symbols to create lasting change in your life.
6. ONLINE BOOKS
Three of these books were originally published in paperback form while the fourth was written for this website. You can read all of these in full online or print them out to read later.
7. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Included at the above link, this is the book about precognition that I referred to in my Nutshell. Read online or print to read later.
8. DREAM SIGHT NEWSLETTERS
My monthly articles provide another window into my dream interpretation world. Highly informative. You can subscribe (free) and read back issues online.
9. AFFIRMATIONS
Read more about how affirmations using dream symbols work as one form of Dream Alchemy Practice.
