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.