to Dream - Why Dream?

Why dream?

Most people rarely know that they're dreaming or just forget all their dreams the moment they wake up. Sleep is considered to be nothing more than just a part of the day being unconscious. If you recognise yourself in this, you're missing out on a lot. Read why.

Benefits of dreaming

There are several key benefits of working with dreams: creative problem solving, health improvements and increased peace of mind. All benefits have in common that dreams have access to personal information usually not available to the conscious mind. To give a few examples: dreams may show that you're concerned about certain work related challenges even before you start feeling the stress yourself. Dreams can quite literally warn you that you're close to catching a flu because your immune system is running low. With a little luck a dream will even show how to avoid the problem.

If you watch your dreams you will notice that you sometimes rehearse situations in your dreams. Such a situation could be an important speech, a new sport, a piano recital, etc. The beauty of it is that when you get more accustomed with your dreamlife, you will also be able to take better advantage of the creative potential of dreams by trying to have dreams that help solve your problems. Weird as this may sound, there are dozens of famous examples of scientific breakthroughts based on dreams. Also much music, poetry and other art originated in dreams.

Your dreams can also function as a reliable mirror for yourself, showing your strong and your weak points. By listening to your dreams you will raise your self-knowlegde and in time this will lead to simply being more at ease with yourself.

Obstacles

The obvious question: if dreams are really so great, why did we never hear of it before? Fear, ignorance and superstition are probably part of the answer, with fear being the biggest part.

It is one thing to occasionally remember a dream fragment, it is something entirely different to give serious attention to it. Dreams have their own reality and anyone who would mix up the dreamworld with the physical world risks getting locked up in an institution. At least, that is what people fear. The truth is that unless you have a serious mental illness, you won't be able to confuse dreams with your normal life.

A second fear is that dreams may delve up all kinds of stuff you'd rather not like to know. Dreams won't usually do that to you. Dreams self-censure precisely to protect you from material that would upset you too much.

How to start

Just give it a try. Have a look a the Alchera Dream Journaling software, which you can download for evaluation. It will help you to work with your dreams and will automatically store them in a database so you can look up older dreams for recurring themes and issues.