Your Life is a Dream

Symbolism is the key to unlocking your dreams.

A solid understanding of symbolism will not only help you understand your nightly dream messages, it will also help you gain a deeper perspective of yourself and your life's path.

Most of us already do view life symbolically, but the process is largely unconscious.

Why might a woman be upset that her lover gave her a food processor for an anniversay gift? On some level she may've hoped for a gift which symbolized his romantic feelings towards her. The more conscious we become of living symbolically, the more conscious we become of our own desires, goals, and feelings. If we allow our dream symbols to guide us, we can make our real life dreams come true.

We use three categories of symbols in our dreams -- cultural, universal, and personal. Cultural symbols are perhaps the easiest to understand. Most people know what their national flag symbolizes without needing it explained. Our pop icons and pop culture fall into this category. Kissing Mel Gibson in a dream says one thing to us, kissing Homer Simpson says another. Cultural symbols are often drawn from literature or the media, and can transcend national borders.

Universal Symbols are drawn from human experience, and are common to ALL human beings. Concepts such as food, motherhood, weather, predators, lovers, enemies, friendship, death. These concepts are to some extent influenced by our particular culture -- a coffin might symbolize a death for us, where in other cultures or times people might dream of funeral pyres, but we all recognize the concept of death. Cultures have different styles of housing, but houses in dreams are universal symbols of ourselves -- they reflect our personal space (i.e., our mind, our spirit,) and each room is a different aspect of us. A living room in your dream is your public persona, the bedroom represents intimacy or sexuality.

Body parts are highly universal symbols and often found in dreams. If your ear hurts in a dream, you've heard something painful in waking life. If you dream your neck hurts at work, maybe your coworker is a pain in the neck. Our hands are used to accomplish virtually everything, so to dream that your hands are tied or disabled in any way indicates you feel hampered in your real life effort to achieve something. Your teeth represent your sense of identity. Like snowflakes, no two sets of teeth are alike. That's why forensics labs identify crime victims by their dental records. Intuitively, we understand what teeth mean and our dreams reflect this. It's very common to dream of having bad teeth. Some teeth dreams could be telling you it's time to change your career, but usually we can fix our "teeth" by making small changes. Start by keeping some promise you've made to yourself, like taking up that musical instrument you always meant to, or honoring your resolution to stop repeating mean gossip. Be true to yourself and your teeth will be strong.

The final category is personal symbolism. These symbols depend entirely on our individual frame of reference. A candy bar in a nutritionist's dream, for example, would have a different meaning than a candy bar in a five year old child's dream. The child could be dreaming about the sweetness of life, where the nutritionist may be dreaming of a shallow love affair that's sweet, but which she knows is not really good for her in the long run.

We can become conscious of our personal symbolism by taking some time to work with our dreams. First write down the key nouns (symbols) from your dream. Next to each word, write down a brief explanation of what it means. This may sound pointless if the object is something ordinary like a telephone. Of course everyone knows what a telephone is, but pretend you have to explain it to someone who has never seen one. Your definition should be quite revealing. You may write something like, "It's a way to communicate over long distances. It was a dull beige and old-fashioned like the one in my aunt's kitchen." Hmm, is your dream phone a reflection of the emotional "distance" you feel from your aunt? Perhaps she seems "old-fashioned" and "dull" to you. Was the connection good in the dream, or did you feel frustrated in your effort to communicate.

How we feel about the symbols in our dreams is another clue to understanding them. I'll give you an example from my own life. My mother was always the responsible parent, my father was the fun one. As a child I was highly responsible, very driven, took little time for having fun. Yet as I grew older, I rediscovered my father's sense of fun in myself. About that time, I dreamt that a police officer came to my door to return a valuable ring which my father had given me, but which had been stolen. The ring held precious gems including my birthstone, and the joy I felt at having the stolen ring back mirrored my feelings of having recovered something precious given me by my father -- that sense of fun. A couple of years later, my father actually did give me a birthstone ring, and I wear it to this day as a reminder that life is meant to be enjoyed.

This brings us back to using dream symbols (like the ring) in our own lives. Look around your life and interpret it like a dream. If living rooms are symbolic of our public personas, what's in your living room? What items did you choose to display there? What do you want people to see? What's hidden in your closet or your basement? Are the colors in your bedroom warm or cold? Metaphysical teacher and author, Louise Hay, uses a similar approach with physical ailments. If your ears are a constant source of pain in real life, consider the symbolism and ask yourself who keeps saying things that cause you pain? Think about everything you do as if it were a dream. Did you buy a new lamp this week? You've brought more light into your life. Maybe your car overheated or a pot boiled over on the stove, what's got you boiling mad? Did you get new glasses? You've improved your view on life. Ever prop a shaky table up with a book? What's shaky in your life that you're trying to prop up? What kind of book did you use? The possibilities are endless.

By Ingrid Spielman