Everyone dreams — even though each person’s experience is different — but not everyone can remember his or her dreams. After you wake up, as you make an effort to remember your dreams, you will begin to recognize various types of dreams and their meanings. Then, you will be able to work with the psychic information that you receive in your dream state.
Psychic Dreams
Dreams are a great medium for receiving psychic information. They come at a time when your conscious mind is at rest and open to the messages of your unconscious and your Universal Mind. Because your conscious mind is so active, many of you do not relax enough while you are awake to receive the information that is there for you. At night, you may have many dreams, but most of them go unnoticed. Even if you are aware of having dreamt when you wake up, you may quickly forget the contents of those dreams.
If you dream of something more than once, pay attention. Many psychic dreams are given to you for a specific reason. They may concern your health, safety, or even career choice.
Dream Recall
When you prepare for bed, make an entry into your dream journal — you can also use a tape recorder. Make sure the listing includes the time, what you last ate, and when and how you feel mentally, physically, and spiritually. If you have a request for your guides, angels, higher power, or just for the Universe, ask that an answer may come in your dreams.
Then, when you awake, make sure that you record your dreams as you remember them. Include as many details about your dream as you can remember — the type of dream, theme, people, places, time period, and whether you have had this or similar dreams before.
Just as with any other type of memory recall, you may remember more of a dream over time. There are many pieces of information that the conscious mind doesn’t notice, but they are taken in and stored in the unconscious mind. Your post-dream notes can help prime your unconscious memory pump. Once the memory is activated, it is possible to recall a lot more of the dream experience than was first noted.
I’m trying so hard to remember my dreams, but it seems that I’m not making a lot of progress. Should I keep trying?
When you first begin to work with your dreams, you may not feel as if you are making a lot of progress. The more patience you have, and the more willing you are to experiment with your dreams, the more your potential for growth will expand.
Dream Patterns
Even if you wake with no conscious memory of a dream, make a note in your journal about how you feel. Over a period of time, the data you collect will help you establish your sleep and dream patterns. Do your dreams occur regularly or sporadically? Do you remember dreams daily, weekly, monthly, or less often than that? Do you have specific dreams for specific moments in your life? Do you dream more when you eat certain foods before you go to bed?
The following sections will help you distinguish between various types of psychic dreams, including dreams that have to do with your past lives, dreams concerning the future, symbolic dreams, dreams of healing and creativity, and dreams that you share with others.
Looking Back to Previous Lives
One type of dream that often starts in childhood and may or may not continue into adulthood are dreams that deal with a past life. Children may not recognize that what they are dreaming is from a past life, but they may notice that in their dream, they and their family members appear in different roles.
A past-life dream is set during a different time period. The dream may be repetitious and have a theme that was imprinted in the soul of the past life. It’s not unusual for the past-life dream to be traumatic — many of these dreams are nightmares. For example, a past-life dream may be an event that led up to a death scene, with the dream ending before the actual event. Upon waking, the feeling of terror lingers.
Past-life dreams are often karmic in nature. In other words, your dream may relate to unfinished business from a previous lifetime. The dream may give you a clue as to how you can resolve the karma in your current lifetime. It is possible to use a past-life dream as the catalyst to go deeper into the past life through the technique of hypnosis.
Look for Clues
Here is how you can figure out whether a particular dream is giving you clues or revealing episodes concerning your past life. Often, these dreams have visual images that you recognize. Does the dream’s location seem familiar and yet as though it doesn’t belong to your lifetime?
Sometimes that distinction is easy to make, and sometimes it is not. A child may not recognize the difference of a few years, whereas an adult would. Also, if the turnaround time between incarnations is short, the child may blend his or her current life with the one that he or she experiences just previously.
If there are people in the dream, how are they dressed? Are they wearing modern clothes? Can you see yourself in the dream, or are you only experiencing it? If you cannot see yourself, hypnosis may help you get more information about who the characters in your dream may have been.
Is there anything else that may give you a clue about the possibility of a past-life dream? You may awake from a past-life dream with an emotion that connects to another lifetime. What other clues would you collect from a dream to imply that it may have been about your past lives?
Dreams of Flight
A subset of past-life dreams are flying dreams. Have you ever dreamed that you are able to soar in the sky, as free as a bird? Some people believe that dreams of flying date back to the earliest reincarnations of your soul because they go back to a time when you had no physical form. At that time you were able to travel using the pure energy of thought as your power. Dreams give your soul a chance to fly again without the constraints of your physical, human body.
Do you fly in any of your dreams? If so, where do you go? Do you travel to other worlds or to heavenly realms? Do you fly backward or forward in time? Where else do you fly? Do you fly alone or with others? Can you choose a destination before you go to sleep and fly there during a dream? Do you ever dream about falling or floating? Is there a pattern to these dreams?
Some people actually dream so deeply that when they leave their body, another entity comes in to occupy it. Before you go to sleep, remind yourself to stay grounded at all times.
Seeing into the Future
Do you have dreams about events that have not happened yet? Many of the great prophets throughout history have relied on their dreams to provide the insights that helped rulers make their decisions about the future. These predictions included floods, famines, and other weather changes. They also included predictions of wars and threats to the people, the land, and even to the rulers themselves.
When you are out of balance and your energy centers are open, you are susceptible to receiving psychic images from the Universe. These images include events that have not yet happened. When you go to sleep in a state of confusion and out of balance, your dreams become a conduit for images of the future. Unfortunately many of these types of dreams are not happy, but tragic.
Jenny, an early-childhood schoolteacher, had a very unsettling dream of a teenage boy being beaten and then a large building blowing up. The images were so strong that she could barely concentrate the next day in school. At home after work, she turned on the television, and there on the screen was the building she had seen in her dreams the night before. It was the Oklahoma City bombing.
Good and Bad
Is there a pattern to your prophetic dreams? Do you dream of winning numbers in the lottery before they are drawn? Do you dream about questions and answers on tests before you take them? Do you dream of meeting people and then actually meet them?
Do you dream of future events? If so, are these related to your life and the lives of others you know? Are your dreams about events that may take place on a worldwide scale? Do you dream of disasters before they happen, such as plane crashes, assassinations of famous people, or wars? How often do you have this type of dream?
Prophetic dreams may be messages from your guides, angels, or other forms of higher power. They are often given to you as a warning for the future. Listen to yourself after you have a prophetic dream. Your psychic intuition will indicate how you should respond.
How do you feel during and after you have a prophetic dream? Do you feel helpless, or are you compelled to take action as a result of your dream? Where do you think your prophetic dreams are coming from? Do you wish that you could block out this type of dream? What else do you experience when you have a dream about the future?
Lucid Dreams
It’s possible to change a dream’s outcome if you enter into a state known as lucid dreaming. You have a lucid dream when you move from dreaming into a waking state while the dream still continues. As you become fully conscious that you are experiencing the dream, you have the opportunity to control the dream events and change the dream’s outcome. Try entering your dream state again, and consciously change the outcome of the dream. If it is a bad dream, run your positive feelings of peace and love over the negative image and sleep in peace.
Your Dream’s Symbolic Meaning
Once in a while, you will experience a dream that feels like a riddle. It may involve snippets and pieces of events in your life, usually close in time to when the dream is experienced. These snippets may be from news accounts, or they may come from some memory in your unconscious mind. These pieces are woven into the dream theme but are out of character with the actual events.
Symbolic dreams may come in sequences or segments. They may be experienced over several different nights or weeks. The dreams can relate to you or to events that are taking place in the world. Dream themes can deal with events that have happened or with events that have yet to happen.
Symbolic dreams are easily dismissed as nonsense dreams. These are dreams that are often attributed to too much rich food or experiences you might have lived through earlier in the day. Even when a dream seems to make no sense, make a note of it in your dream journal, and you may find a pattern developing in your symbolic dreams.
