What Your Dreams Are Telling You About Your Waking Life
What if I told you that the answers to your problems lie within your dreams?
Before we get to the deep stuff, let me clue you in on some things.
The average person will sleep for 230,000 hours throughout their life. That equates to roughly 26 years that you spend asleep. During this timeframe, the average person will spend 6 years dreaming. Six. Years. That’s longer than Britney and K-Fed’s marriage lasted (granted, most things are)!
Thankfully, you never feel yourself sleeping. Rather, on the nights where we don’t blink out of and back into consciousness, we are handed a private performance in our minds equipped with wild scenarios, people we deeply love or barely remember, intense moods, and unpredictable imagery that leave us with questions in the morning. How did flying feel so real? Who was that woman in the red gown steering the ship? Why was there a zombie outbreak on the beach while my boyfriend bottle-fed a raccoon to smooth jazz? Ah, the magic of dreams.
While most people dismiss their dreams as disjointed and strange combinations of people from high school, things they saw on TV recently, and random imagery, there are those who see dreams for what they truly are: an open door into the subconscious mind.
After centuries upon centuries of interpretation from the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, and many others, Sigmund Freud revolutionized the study of dreams in the 19th century and Carl Jung expounded upon and enhanced his work by opening doors to the collective unconscious use of symbols in dreams. Jung saw what was easily waved off in the modern world as sexy needs (oh Freud), indigestion (for real), and devil messages (get with it, Middle Ages) as opportunities to look within to learn more about your waking life. Your mind is still your mind at night, so why would it put on a senseless puppet show instead of sifting through and coping with information from your day that it didn’t have a chance to work through during consciousness?
From emotional compartmentalization to societal repression to general fear and anxiety and beyond, there is so much information that we generate each day simply from existing in our circumstances that doesn’t have a chance to be dealt with for one reason or another. Whether we are avoiding an argument or refusing to cry over something that has hurt us, those experiences get smothered and stuffed away for our subconscious mind to cope with. For some, this is an active choice, but for many this is how we have been conditioned to respond after years of external influence in one way or another. Suffice to say, we feel a lot of things we don’t talk about, and we leave our brains to clean up the mess while we sleep, not thinking anything of it. As mentioned above, some nights are a blip of blackness and then we are back to reality. Other nights, we dream, seeing the show our minds put on.
So, the question that brought you here: What are your dreams telling you about your waking life?
The answer: everything.
Your flying dream? It’s likely that you feel a newfound sense of freedom. That woman in red steering the ship? It may be indicative of a feminine force in your life who is pushing you to explore your emotions, making you feel out of control. That raccoon zombie beach fiesta? You fear deception and are looking to be nurtured during a time of extreme stress as you actively taking steps to find joy. Sounds like a stretch, right?
Jung and myself believe your mind has spent years and years ingesting images and associated understandings of those images that are generally accepted by society. Those subtle understandings are thrown together by your subconscious as you sleep to help you cope with emotions, experience scenarios that are too hard for you to deal with in your waking life, and hide in parts of your subconscious that have something to say, whether positive, neutral, or frightening.
Dream interpretation opens the door for you to step into your subconscious and better understand what brings you joy and pain, fear and anxiety, anger and love. Beyond that, it sets you on a path to important realizations that can be followed by actions to bring positive change in your waking life. For those who have experience interpreting childhood nightmares, it has even helped dreamers better understand and begin coping with past traumas by recognizing what their young minds were going through.
You have the opportunity to better know buried aspects of yourself through dream interpretation, as your subconscious does not hide and it does not filter. Although potentially confusing to your waking self, the unconscious mind shows you exactly what you need to see through imagery, moods, and scenarios that it best understands.
In paying attention to your dreams, you pay attention to your needs. Practice self-compassion and mental wellness by looking deeper into your mind to understand what you need in your waking life. You have six years of dreaming the answers to your problems at your fingertips, so make the most of it.
Go forth and dream. ❤
