- Your dreams can mean many things...

DREAM METAPHOR
So complex and multi-leveled, a dream can mean many things. All that we see and do every day, our thoughts and reactions, enter our dream world. Symbols from the archetypical collective unconscious get mixed in. We add a bit of "implicate order" knowledge—from the past, present, and future. Even the voices of angels and ascended beings, communicating from a higher dimension can permeate our dreams...
PROBLEM SOLVING IN YOUR SLEEP...
Dreams are very personal messages from your subconsious. Only YOU can really interpret what they mean, and use them to help solve problems in your daily life. Have you ever heard someone say "I'll sleep on it" - they need to make a decision? You can focus on a particular issue you need to resolve, thinking about it right before you go to sleep. Ask your subconscious, and the Universe, to give you an answer. Good luck with your dream quest!

UNDERSTANDING DREAMS...
How can we make sense of our dreams? Start by writing them down—keep a journal next to your bed and jot down notes the minute you wake up. You can even set your alarm clock to wake you up at night, and perhaps catch a dream vision you might not remember the next morning! Look for patterns, symbols and metaphors in your nocturnal visions. Dream dictionaries are good for common, universal archetypes...
A TIME FOR DREAMS...
Our time spent sleeping is also a time for dreams. Throughout the ages humans have tried to find meaning in these "visions." We'll probably never know what pre-historic humans thought about their nocturnal visions. Records kept by Earth's ancient cultures give us at least some insights into what they believed. In Mesopotamia dreams were used for "divination"—to predict future events. The Egyptians and Assyrians kept written "dream interpretation dictionaries," detailed in the definition of what each dream subject meant (though they chose to use an "opposite interpretation"—so dreaming of death might actually mean a long life ahead.) Influenced by the Mesopotamians, the Hebrew culture also felt that dreams delivered prophesy of events, but they saw dreams as a direct channel for God to communicate with the prophets. Over time there was a worry of "false dreams" leading to the famous warning "Beware of False Prophets"—this helped to turn the Church against the use of dreams for "divination"... Meanwhile the ancient Greek's theories on dreams were influenced by Eastern Shamanistic ideas of actually traveling outside the body during sleep and dreams. From these ideas came the Orphism movement, influencing Pythagoras and Plato (who felt dreams were a state somewhere between our spirit and "matter"...) We know that Socrates considered dreams as "inner guidance." Aristotle had some differing ideas about dreams (rather unpopular with his contemporaries.) He felt that dreams only came from our five physical senses, and were not connected to a higher source. He did think it was possible to have dream prophecies, but only by chance. Humans could use their own power of suggestion to influence their own lives (giving us the idea of the "self-fulfilling prophecy"...) The emergence of the Kabbalistic works during the middle ages gave information on dreams, and their use in "connecting" people to Heaven. From the Middle Ages forward, religious leaders and philosophers kept moving farther away from the spiritualistic aspect of dream interpretation. The wonder of mystics and miracles faded with the emergence of modern science. Dreams were sometimes reduced to nothing more than nocturnal physical reactions caused by the dinner people ate before going to bed at night!
MODERN PSYCHOLOGY RECONNECTS WITH SPIRITUALITY... Fortunately the 20th century's prominent psychologists brought renewed interest in dream interpretation. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) connected dreams to wish fulfillment, with plenty of sexual symbolism. He didn't associate dreams with our spiritual nature, but his student, Carl Jung, recognized the deeper connection. Jung really brought the dream back full circle to it's spiritual roots with his theories on the dream's power to connect us with the collective unconscious, for guidance and self-awareness. Jung also reconnected the ancients' theories to modern day dream interpretation through his work with archetypal symbolism. Themes common to all humans occur in dreams, almost "instinctive" in origin. Jung's concepts linked the physical world and the spiritual realm through dreams. Modern quantum physics actually describes a "realm" where dreams may dwell—known as the "implicate order." The Universal continuum that contains all time, but is also "timeless." Energy flows from this "implicate" order to the real world we live in, the "explicate" order, and back again. Can we catch a "dream wave" into the collective unconscious, the holographic sum of all knowledge?