How did you feel in your dream?

One of the first questions I ask when a client finishes telling me a dream is, ‘How did you feel in the dream?’

People usually mention the big emotions they encounter in a dream: fear, anger, sadness, but otherwise focus on telling the dream story. If you keep a dream journal, and you haven’t studied dream interpretation methods with me, look back through several dreams to see how often you mentioned your feelings. You may have included them in the dramatic highlights – or lowlights – but did you cover them in the other stages of your dream report?

The emotions we feel during a dream are an important key to interpretation and healing, since much of our dreaming is concerned with processing our conscious and unconscious emotions. If you can get in touch with how you felt at various stages in a dream, you effectively get in touch with emotional issues that may need your waking life attention, and when you explore the rest of your dream you gather clues about why these issues are affecting you, and how to resolve them.

It’s not about how you feel looking back on your dream once you’re awake. It’s about how you felt while you were in the dream.

Let’s say you dreamed of murdering someone. It’s a common dream theme. Waking from your dream you might feel horrified, or nauseous, but if you run through your dream you may discover you felt vindicated at the time. Another person with a similar dream might have felt satisfied. Another might have felt complete. Others might have felt released, hopeful, or free. Then again, others might have felt guilt, remorse, or even horror while they were in the dream. These are only some of the emotions and feelings I have heard people report about a murder dream.

In overview, these dreams usually reflect things that are coming to an end in your life, the murdered person symbolising what is ending – or potentially ending – and how you felt about this in the dream reflecting either your conscious or unconscious feelings about this.

Things that end – or potentially end – might be an attitude or approach to life, a problem, a phase of life, a responsibility, a business, a way of being, an issue. The list is, ahem, endless. Life, lived well, is a series of endings and beginnings, cycles of symbolic death and birth, or death and rebirth.

Your murder dream may be processing readiness for a timely ending, such as putting an end to an attitude that has kept you stuck, or it may be reflecting a premature ending, perhaps leaving a study course due to self doubt rather than discovering the confidence and inner resources that would help you finish the course (as well as grow personally and spiritually). When you know how to explore and interpret the details of your dream, you are able to relate it to waking life, identify the issue, make healthy decisions, and resolve any conflicts. Where deep unconscious conditioning is found to be making things difficult for you, you can apply dream alchemy to reprogram those unconscious limiting beliefs, or integrate and heal emotional wounds that are holding you back.

Now add your feelings during the dream back into your interpretation:

If you felt vindicated after the dream murder, where in your life now are you feeling vindicated about putting an end to something, or to the possibility of putting an end to something? Or what do you imagine you would feel vindicated about ending even though you intend to keep the thing/issue/situation going? How does looking at the situation from the viewpoint of vindication change how you feel about it? What insight does it give you about yourself?

Take that last paragraph, and substitute the emotion you felt in your murder dream, and see where the questioning leads you.

Let’s leave the example of murder dreams for now.

These techniques work for all dreams. Go back through a dream and ask yourself, at each stage, ‘How did I feel in the dream?’ Look at your dream through the lens of emotion and feeling. If you do my How to interpret your dreams step-by-step course, you’ll learn a series of interlinked interpretation methods, one of which takes you through how to understand a dream by highlighting your feelings. Today’s blog is an introduction to the method.

In last month’s blog we looked at numinous dreams. These are dreams where you feel you have met the divine, or touched upon life’s deep mysteries, or been deeply inspired by a magnificent sense of awe. Numinous dreams can be very hard to describe because they touch emotions and feelings that are too deep to express in words. In the blog, I have given an example of a numinous dream that I once had. The first rendition is where I have tried to use words to express the feelings I had in the dream. The second rendition is the storyline alone, without effort at emotive description. The two renditions of the same dream illustrate the importance of reporting dream emotions the best you can, even if it takes time and effort. The results pay off brilliantly.

 

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