Our dreams are very personal. It could be argued they are the most personal thing about us because they come from our subconscious mind. We have no control of our dreams, they just happen. We can pretend to be someone we are not. We can act out a fantasy lifestyle but our dreams are the true person inside and there is nothing we can do to change them.

We can try to understand our dreams. We can try to figure out what they represent and try to understand why we are having these dreams and what these innermost thoughts
might mean for us and how our lives are going.
It is said that we all dream though many people can never recall even having them, let alone what they might have involved or what they meant. We dream but it is as though it is in a different world, the world of sleep. Dreams are the most etheral part of our lives and they are intriguing but they are so often just out of reach for many of us.

Every night we have a variety of dreams and even if you do remember parts of a dream that is just one dream among many. The dream we remember will be the last one we were having before we awoke so it may not tell the whole story about what we are dreaming or what our subconscious thoughts might be. But, it is all we have got to go on so we must try to make the most of it.

Invariably, the moment we wake up the dream fades from our minds. Sometimes as we are waking we think that the dream we were just having was interesting and we want to remember it but so often it is gone the moment we wake up. Sometimes we do remember parts of it and the best thing you can do is to write down everything about it that you can remember. Keep a notepad by your bed and get started straight away the moment you wake up. Note down the major features first so you don’t lose the thoughts trying to write too much detail about one aspect.

Try to get down the place, what time of day, who was involved and the general theme of what was going on in your dream.
The philosopher and psychologist, Sigmund Freud, was fascinated by dreams and he carried out a great deal of research on dreams and how they related to our spiritual health and our mental well being. He described dreams as a state of mind where our dreams provide us with an opportunity to completely detach ourselves from all the daily chores external stimuli and even the physical realities of the world we live in.

Freud was particularly interested in our internal emotions and how they were represented in dreams. He considered that interpreting our dreams could give us a greater understanding of our inner self and how we viewed life and the world around us.

In our dreams we can experience emotions, places and situations, which are simply not possible in the real world. We can behave in a way that would be totally unacceptable in society and we can move in ways that would be totally impossible in the physical world.

He explained the recurrence of some very upsetting and unsettling dreams, which may involve evil behaviour and be of an extremely haunting nature. Freud reasoned that the frequent occurrence of these dreams which are represent feelings and thoughts that are always present in our subconscious mind, are suppressed by each of us so that they do not appear in our conscious mind in our day to day life.

However, when we awake rather suddenly after experiencing these emotions in our dreams, we feel compelled to reconsider and assess our innermost thoughts and emotions. This may help us to deal with those worries, concerns or fears and helps us to release ourselves from those uncomfortable feelings.

We all want to have certainty in our lives but life is not certain. We consequently have doubts and fears. We worry that life will not develop in the way we hope and these dreams we have can express those fears and perhaps help us to overcome some of those concerns and enable us to lead a better and more contented life.

Many people find that recognizing these significant dreams can help to guide them through difficult stages in their lives and these dreams we have in our subconscious sleep state can point us to a new direction which may help relieve the worries we have which are troubling us in our normally conscious state.

Freud believed that each dream implies a couple of different meanings. First there is the manifested and then there is the deeper meaning, the latent explanation. The manifested meaning is normally a fairly superficial one. It is strange and very vague and may make little sense. Many people are quick to accept a simple explanation of a dream based on the superficial meaning and they dismiss it as being a frivolous one. What they are missing is the latent or hidden meaning, which may be far more significant and may be able to help them solve their problems.

How we go about discovering this hidden meaning of the dream is by understanding some of the common issues expressed in these dreams and working out how they might relate to our lives and the things happening and expected, or feared, to happen in the future.

We sleep for approximately, one third of our life. We dream frequently throughout that period. Logic tells us that there must be some purpose in all this ‘wasted’ time and it is widely thought that dreams are a way to organize our thoughts and to clear our minds of some of the less important information we absorb every day. If we can learn how to understand  and interpret our dreams we may be able to manage our lives in our waking hours to achieve our dreams and enjoy a better and more rewarding life.