Dreams: A Gateway to Self-Exploration

We seem to have everything figured out around us, don’t we? We have answers to almost all the events that we may encounter, either on a daily basis or at some point in our life time. Substantial amount of research is being done to gain clarity on many other things that still continue to elude us or haven’t been satisfactorily explained.

Our dreams are such unexplainable events which we haven’t yet completely understood. Dreams are such a universal phenomenon, which unite one and all due to their intriguing and mystifying nature. Universal because every one of us dreams. Not remembering what we dream might be a common problem, but we all dream for sure. Some of them make sense, whereas some are just too confusing with an unconnected sequence of events.

One of the revolutionists, Sigmund Freud, tried to piece this puzzle together in order to get a better insight into people’s personalities and relate them to their pathology. He was one of the pioneers of a later to be christened group of individuals known as psychoanalysts. He had carried out in depth studies to explore the mysterious and intriguing world of dreams. Freud believed that our dreams are symbolic representations of our anxieties and hidden or suppressed feelings. Most of these feelings remain latent in the course of our struggle to fit into the social framework, which we very much want to be a part of. It is mainly due to the pioneering work done by Freud that these unexplainable events called dreams came to be established as a science.

A few years down the line, this area attracted the interest of many more scientists and researchers who wanted to provide a better understanding of these astral events. These extensive studies slowly started unraveling different facets of these events which occur in the REM (Rapid eyeball movement) phase of our four stage sleep cycle. Research showed that we often dream about things we tend to overlook or pay less heed to. Dreams may even be indications of change that is needed to be brought about in our lives or inner revelations about one’s self. Thus dreams are far from being insignificant, trivial events. They seem to withhold the answers of several questions about our lives that seem to be unanswered.

All we need to do is learn to tap this unusual body of knowledge, as the key to all our troubles and problems seems to lie within us itself.

A simple and effective way to begin would be to maintain a dream log. However to successfully track our dreams it’s important for us to make a note of them the first thing in the morning. For, our dreams are stored in our short term memory and soon seem to vanish from there. This kind of a log will help us analyze our dreams in a better way. With the help of useful literature in the form of dream dictionaries available online or by referring to different books by reputed publications, one can try and uncode their complex dreams.

Similarly, when being plagued by any problem which you don’t seem to find any solution to, you could turn to your dreams for some valuable insight. How can you do this? Well it’s simple again. All you have to do is set aside some time before you fall asleep to ponder on a specific issue that might be concerning you. Chances are that you might picture the solution to this problem in the form of symbols in your dreams. And by recording it in your dream log and subsequently analyzing it, you might just uncover the solution.

Thus dreams are a powerful medium and can reveal some very useful and potential insight on a person’s personality. And these hidden truths can help us either improve, by focusing on our strengths or by overcoming our weaknesses.