Naming your dreams

“I have what I call my Inadequacy Dreams,” a neighbour told me recently, “a whole bunch of dreams that seem to fit that title, where I feel inadequate to complete a task, or something is not enough.”

If you’ve studied with me, you’ll know that I encourage you to give a gut-feel title to every dream before you begin to interpret it. It doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing title. It doesn’t need to encapsulate the whole dream drama. A title works best if it’s the first thing that springs to your mind when you think about the dream. Why is this?

When you’re immersed in recalling a dream, or writing it down, the symbols and surrealism continue to engage your unconscious mind, as if you’re still, at some level, dreaming. The title that springs to your mind often comes from that deep well of dreaming, so it can contribute to your understanding of the dream when you sit back to interpret it.

As an example, the title ‘The Dog’s Breakfast’ might pop into your mind for a long, adventurous dream in which all sorts of things happened including noticing a dog eating breakfast. Later, when you come to interpret your dream, the notion of something in your life being a bit of a ‘dog’s breakfast’ (meaning messed up or badly done) might throw much of your dream drama into context.

Giving each of your dreams an individual title means you can build an index, perhaps in the back of your dream journal, or as a Word doc, so that you can quickly find a dream when you want to refer back. Even when you can’t remember what title you gave the dream that you’re searching for, it will jump out at you when you run your eye through your indexed list of titles.

As a creative writer, I can get carried away with ideas. I could propose a subtitle for every dream, and this would indeed contribute extra light:

‘The Dog’s Breakfast’
– If only she’d been more prepared

You could have fun with that, but the practical tip I’m bringing you today is to give theme subtitles to those dreams that seem to follow a similar theme. Like ‘Inadequacy Dream’, for a recurring dream theme where you feel inadequate to complete a task or something is not enough.

In this way, you can go back through your dreams to compare similar themes, look for progress or – in the other direction – decline. You can compare what was happening in your waking life in the 1-2 days before each repeat of your dream theme. You can look for clues in one version of your dream theme that throw light on another in the category.

You might be thinking of standard dream theme subtitles such as Anxiety Dream, or Losing Teeth Dream, or Being Chased Dream, but have fun and colour outside the boxes. Giving yourself creative freedom also engages your unconscious mind, and this helps you to shine a light on your blind spots when you’re exploring the meaning of your dream theme.

If you prefer more structure, you might want to be guided by an emotion you feel (Fear Dreams, Grief Dreams, Rejection Dreams), or by the situation (Lost Dreams, Stuck Dreams, End of My Tether Dreams, Walking by the Water Dreams, Sea Life Dreams).

So you might have:

‘The Dog’s Breakfast’
– Not Good Enough Dreams

I’m writing this in early December. You might be running on empty at this time of the year (there’s a dream theme subtitle, Running on Empty, that I could apply to many clients’ dreams I’ve seen) and feel that you have no time to write out your dreams. Maybe you could capture them with a quick title and subtitle: you might be surprised how much a couple of weeks of dream titles can reveal. Or you might be planning some time off time to yourself, in which case you might want to go back over a few weeks of dreams in your dream journal and retrospectively assign titles and theme subtitles.

Or you may wish to save these ideas for a fresh new start to the way you record your dreams in 2023.

Whichever way, I wish you a happy holiday season, sprinkled with enlightening dreams to ponder at leisure over many delicious breakfasts.

 

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