7 Keys of Dream Interpretation

Ever dream you are flying? I remember the soaring feeling in my dreams as a young child. The freedom…the release…the hope…the sense that I was made for more in this life….

Don’t think you dream at night?  Science has proven that we all dream. Early thought was that dreams occur in our rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but dream states can happen during various stages of sleep. We all dream about 4-5 times a night, but you probably just don’t remember them.

Science is still trying to figure this one out.  One theory is our short term memory isn’t functioning. Others suspect if you don’t have an association to recall the dream, it will remain hidden from your conscious mind.

You will spend approximately a third of your dreaming. By the time you are 70 years old, you have will have pend 6 years of your life in dreamland.  Tests on sleep deprivation prove that sleep and the accompaniment of dreams is a necessity we cannot live without.

Are Dreams Meaningful?

Personally, I believe we’ve lost the significance of dreams.  We don’t remember dreams because we don’t value them – and may not even understand them. The following people, however, have let their dreams have a direct impact on their lives.

• Einstein used concepts from his dream world to arrive at his theory of relativity.
• James Cameron, director of Titanic, used dreams of flying as the inspiration to create the movie Avatar.
• Another director, Chris Nolan, mined his own dreams to conceive Inception.
• Thomas Edison came up with the idea for the electric lamp in a dream.

God is probably speaking to all of us through our dreams much more than we can imagine. Many people pay absolutely no attention to their dreams and eventually get to the place where they think they don’t dream.

I remember dreaming about scores of music as a child.  I took piano lessons for a few years, but the music I was reading in my dreams was more than Chopin or Beethoven could have ever written. The music seems to come alive in my dreams, both shifting into the higher notes and the lower notes as the pages turned effortlessly.

One might look at this dream and think I was going to become a professional piano player.  Let me just say, you don’t want to be in ear shot of any piano music I try to play these days! But, with a little spiritual fine tuning, I have come to learn that God sees my life as a beautiful song. It may echo high notes, but it may also reach low points.  Nonetheless, whatever song is played from my life, it was mastered by a God who knows how to create a melody that sounds perfect in His ears!

Why You Should Listen To Your Dreams

God has chosen to communicate with us through dreams (with many examples in the Bible, like in Matthew 1 – Joseph was told in a dream to take Mary, though pregnant, as his wife). You can find counsel, stories, actions, ideas, warnings and so much more when you lay your head to the pillow each night!

Our bodies need rest at night, but our mind and spiritual bodies are still at work. God can communicate with you through dreams, while your intellect rests.  God by-passes your every day fight to get through the day, accomplish your to-do list, get dinner on the table and master your own fate.

To quote my favorite author, Madeleine L’Engle:

“In our dreams we are able to fly…a remembering of how we are meant to be.”

A dream that is not understood is simply a mere occurrence, but when understood a dream can become a life-changing experience.

7 Principles of Understanding Your Dreams

1. Record your dreams while they are fresh.  Keep a journal close by your bed and jot down the dream as soon as you wake up.

2.

Dreams are often filled with symbols and usually not to be taken literally.  Symbols may mean different things to different people and may change from dream to dream, but are used to bring clarity to a dream.  Here is a short list of common symbols and their meanings:

• House: represents the person, life or spiritual state
• Vehicles: represents the current path or direction of one’s life due to decisions made
• Water: fast or flowing: blessing or presence of God
• Colors are important. In general, green can represent conscience, yellow the mind, pink the emotions, blue is communion.

3. Reduce the dream to its simplest form. Who is the focus and sub-focus of the dream?

4. Look at the context of the dream, remembering there are 2 sides of every coin. Keep the main thing the main thing and don’t “read into anything” too soon.

5. Find the focus, theme or plot of the dream. Write down the facts, order, objects, people, associations and what you need to remember most from the dream.

6. Categorize the dream: warning, direction, correction, healing, chemical (from drugs), self-condition, fear, invention, knowledge or dark dream (among the most common).

7.  Trust God to help you find the true answer.  Pray for understanding. Dreams are pointing us to a direction that we have yet to experience.  The road to understanding is asking God to help us connect the meaning to action. The one who knows the exact interpretation of every single one of your dreams is God. Ask him! Believe me, he wants you to know and understand. Pray before you go to bed that God will speak to you in the nighttime and when you awake that you will understand how he did.

The most important rule in interpreting your own dream is answering this question: what did the dream mean to YOU? The dream came to you and God put within you the  ability to understand what the dream elements mean.

Dreaming is one of the more exotic ways to hear from God – and just how much He loves you. Dreams are more than “the pizza I ate last night.”

Dreaming and simply knowing a little bit about how and why we dream opens a new world to us, one of insight, revelation and a world where we are not restricted by our personal limitations.  Dreams are hints, landscapes and emotions in a dimension where God is communicating to us – nightly.

What’s the dream that you are trying to understand? How has a dream been life changing for you?