What If There Were No Doors To Separate Us?

5 Steps To Dream Analysis

I dream a dream – not because I choose to, but because I can, and it becomes my way of life. Like cats, I can live nine lives or more. 

~Maria Lehtman

Science has been studying the consciousness of human beings for ages without a concrete understanding of what most of our brain capacity is for.

At the same time, our brilliant minds have yet to realize that our dreaming capacity is limitless – our subconscious connectivity endless. There are no doors. Only pathways, firewalls, filters that protect us from absorbing too much of what we cannot physically cope with.

We are creating complex artificial intelligence and cognitive learning algorithms without even understanding the basic logic of our own humanity. Dreams are not merely archiving passing and fleeting moments of time from our day-to-day life.

One of the reasons I published my recent book about the Dreaming Doors is that I felt the need to let people see the journey of our subconscious mind. The one most people are too busy or too afraid to dive into.

If you are at home looking out the window, or on the porch, taking a morning walk – look around you. What do you see? Do you see a constant transformation?

Methodologies of dreaming allow us to manifest what our subconscious already knows or understands. Healing through dreams is a magnificent tool as it knows no boundaries. If you are at home looking out the window, or on the porch, taking a morning walk – look around you. What do you see? Do you see a constant transformation? The same tree reconstructing leaves that look similar, and are completely unique from the ones before. Do you see harmony? Do you witness a repeating pattern that is never still? This is us. These are our thought patterns. If we allow that extra capacity of our subconsciousness to work for us, it will use it to an unlimited extent – unless you set boundaries to it – conscious borders.

The Journey of Six Handshakes

The journey we take in our life reaches much further than what we can fathom. Do you remember the hypothesis about every person being only e.g. six handshakes away from each other? When we dream, we can bypass the handshakes and access information straight from the source.

The constant information flow we are exposed to does not disappear. We store trivial and non-trivial data constantly, even when we do not realize that we do it. It is not only words we capture in the digital data stream and live interactions. We store everything we can absorb through our senses and most of all, emotions. When your conscious and physical capabilities are reachings its limit your mind can override that the capacity requirements. How do I know that? Because I have been dreaming all my life and learned to control dreams to an extent – when they are meant to be controlled.

I can slow down or stop time completely in my dream. If I fall and call out “Stop!” – I remain hanging motionless half a meter above the ground and slow my descent. I can invite people to approach me or tame a wild animal with my willpower. I remember going through the same dream path over and over again, even if it is the first time I record that dream in waking life.

Illness of someone close to us, or in us, manifest in dream metaphors before it happens. Great challenges in life alert me months or sometimes years before they happen. When I bridge the symbolism in my dreams to my waking life I can access what normally would be hidden from people.

Managing Basic Dream Analysis

How do you rehearse the skill of dream analytics? And why should you bother? Nightmares are not always what they seem. They can represent fears, trauma, and be painful to repeat in your mind over and over again. If you learn to listen to them, understand what their meaning is – most dreams are actually harmless, the issues in them already resolved, or about to be resolved.

Here are a few very basic tools how to learn from your dreams:

1. Write up short sentences about the dreams you see repeatedly or replay them in your mind when you wake up. Your mind will eventually start to recall the dreams for longer and longer periods of time.
2. Follow up on the symbols in your dreams, what does e.g. water, snow, mountain, vehicle, motion, architecture etc. represent to you? Online dream dictionaries can help you, but your symbols are unique to you and unique to a specific circumstance and the dream context. As an example: water can represent emotions, subconsciousness, fears, opportunities depending what the water is like (shallow, muddy, clear, deep, empty, full of life, flowing rapidly, still etc.)
3. Take note of what emotions the characters in your dream raise in you? Do you recognize the same emotions or characteristics in you? If so, why?
4. Change your negatives thoughts into gratefulness, e.g., by naming the “counterparts” in your dream, e.g., people and animals representing negative emotions – and turn them into a positive ‘thank you’-phrase. As an example: If you have a presentation coming up and previous ones have stressed you out, thank for your mind taking away the fear of performing. Repeat the ‘thank you-sentence’ in your mind three times before falling asleep, or write it down in your notebook before you go to sleep and read it.
5. Name your “villains” and “friendlies”. Learn to recognize who in your dream is your dream guide(s). In my dreams, I see myself as the main dream guide although I have different appearances. My subconscious leads me through the process and engages with other ‘teachers’ who open up paths I need to walk in the dream or in my waking life.

Dreaming gives you access to vital information

Never ignore a dream. Whenever I see snow or ice in my dream, it means a potential illness. It is a sign that tells me that I need to slow down and take care of myself. It makes a difference if I walk in my dream with my shoes on or off. Walking barefoot on the ice means that I need to take immediate measures, such as, start drinking ginger/lemon tee, go to sleep earlier, not expose myself to cold or people with a cold. If I ignore the symbolism, I typically get sick. If I see hurricanes and avalanches, I am up for a real emotional test that changes my life often for months and cannot be undone.

Curiosity killed the cat. How about your dream cat? Life and death have completely contrary meanings to our normal life. Curious Alice can find her way back from Wonderland in ways that in waking life would not open up to us. Death in a dream is typically a passage to another phase. A sign of letting go, a memory, even a rebirth. Plummeting to a tunnel is definitely a passage in time – forward or backward, depending on the tunnel.

The dream monsters are like often the Wizard of Oz. Taunting at first, but when you learn a trick or two – dreaming can change your life for good.

I warmly recommend trying to learn dream management. At least, it is much more enjoyable than letting nightmares dictate your state of mind. In a dream, you can be anyone you like!

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I am not myself, you see.”  

~Alice in Wonderland