Dream Journal

I begin my dream analysis with creating a dream journal, and I recommend doing the same for anyone else that is truly interested in discovery more about their dreams and themselves. I started recording my dreams several years ago when I noticed them harboring a great deal of interest for me. Since then I find myself remembering more of my dreams and figuring out their hidden details that connect to my personal life. Once you record your dreams from the previous night you can begin dissecting the major and eventually even the minor pieces that represent a big part of your subconsciousness. Heres an excerpt from my dream journal :
"I find myself walking along a hidden path through the woods chasing after a type of feminine, shadowy figure as I reach the end of the path I see a shack town filled with mist. I'm still chasing this dark, female figure as I follow her into a large dark mansion. Just as I enter the large ball room that she is in I her banging at the door. I run to lock the door and hold it shut but my feet are dragging unable to run at full pace. I grasp the lock on the door and am in a struggle to lock it. The door shakes and I begin to tremble as it burstes open and a dark mist fills the room and I immediately awaken."
In this excerpt of my dream journal there is a specific emphasis upon darkness and being lost. As a side note I was a senior in highschool during this time and was going through the struggle of finding and choosing which college to go to. These can be connected through a shallow bond such as the forest being my confused lost time of not knowing which college to attend and the fear of being over taken by failure. According to one of my most beneficial dreams books Know Your Dreams, Know Your Self this ghost-like figure that I was following can be seen as a representation of my past. Therefore the hidden message I can learn from following it could be that I must look into my past experiences and even my own personality to decide which college would be right for me. In comparison to the dark, black mist that enters into the room, this can represent my unknown future that will without a doubt be forever connected to which college I attend. This particular dream and my interpretation of if definitely honed down my choices and guided me toward my final decision. Through keeping my dream journal, I was able to interpret this very dream and have it affect my life positively.

Dream Analysis

For me dream analysis has always been an area of curiousity and wonder. I would try to intepret my dreams to benefit my every day life and often I would spend a good portion of my day thinking of what my dream from the previous night could have meant. I have read countless books on dreams and found that these books along with almost an instinctual feeling of what your dream could have meant its easy to interpret them. Many times they are reflections of negative or unrestful aspects of your life. They could be linked to stress, anxiety, and even deeply seeded fears. More, recently I have been keeping a dream journal and I intend to share certain dreams and my interpreation of them. But for now I want to focus specifically on dream analysis. There are two layers of dream interpretation; there is the manifest content of a dream and the latent content of a dream. Manifest content is what we can recal upon awaking and latent content is the underlying meaning which many are in search for. Aside from getting into the deep personal meaning of dreams and the vague definitions for each symbol, vision, or action; there are many major signs that can reveal what your subconscious is attempting to tell you. A majority of these signs are stress or anxiety driven and can be related to past, present, or future experiences. Such signs can be one's teeth falling out, body/face disfigurement when looking into a mirror, the feeling of falling, being chased by a dark. Again most of these are anxiety driven. But there is another sector of dreams which are guided by self-conscious, often negative emtions such as shame, embarrassment, or doubt. Often there can be dreams of a sexual encounter and an elder figure interupting or watching causing embarrassment. The most important dreams that your unconscious screams to you are ones directed towards unsettling areas of one's life. Such as being deterred from a life goal, recent failure, or knowing that you should not be doing something. But dreams are not all negative that is where my next post will follow up which an experience coined as lucid dreaming. Dream analysis is linked to both negative and positive aspects because we are constructed by this wide spectrum of emotion.