Listening to Your Dreams

Dr. Danner paused, completely unruffled, waiting for me to finish. Then she tried once more. "Listen, Andie. I don't know what’s bothering you, although in time I hope you’ll let me help you figure that out. But I do know this—dreams are messages, something akin to encrypted letters from the unconscious. Often these messages are difficult to understand, like riddles… or puzzles with many of the pieces missing and no picture to go by. And the type of dreams you’re having – recurring dreams—carry particular significance; they’re a sign your unconscious mind is trying extremely hard to tell you something important. The fact that these dreams are essentially the same dream, coming to you over and over again, is a sign that you’re not paying attention.”

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In this excerpt from my novel, Night Mirrors, my protagonist, Andie, is suffering from terrifying nightmares she attributes to a secret she’s keeping. But are her nightmares also about something else, some sleeping dragon awoken by another woman’s tragic secret? This exchange between Andie and a therapist she engages, not for help, but to distract her suspicious husband from the secret, underscores what I’ve previously blogged about dreams—that they can be letters from ourselves to ourselves, those letters written in a language that is ancient and timeless, the language of symbols. Such dreams can help us work through everything from problematic emotional relationship issues to explosive trauma resurfacing from earlier in our lives.

But not all dreams contain complex, life-altering lessons. A large percentage of our dreams are simply day remnants, also known in psychology as day residue. Day remnants are fragments of our waking lives rising up in our dreams for multiple purposes. Stretching all the way back to Freud, psychiatry and psychology tell us that our brains uses these types of dreams as raw material, or perhaps building blocks, as it sorts and processes memories, knowledge, and emotions.

Here is one example: As a theater major in college, I was employed in the costume shop as a student worker. One semester the department put on Arthur Kopit’s famous play, Indians, a brutal social commentary using Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show as the framework for the truth about cultural genocide and land theft. I was tasked with sewing sequined designs of squash blossoms onto heavy, fringed leather jackets for the four Buffalo Bill characters in a dream sequence. Night after night, one by one, I hand-placed and stitched thousands of green sequins to form the stems and leaves of each blossom before starting on the flowers. One night, after a week of this, I dreamed I was in the university cafeteria. I held out a plate and asked the server for some green peas. Instead, I watched in horror as she dished up a plate overflowing with green sequins. There’s no doubt, at least to me, the dreamer, that this was a day remnant about a repetitive task that was starting to take its toll.

Some day remnants are simple memory processing for future use, sometimes in ways that seem a bit eerie. For a long time, I was a systems analyst and software developer while one of my sisters was a bookkeeper. More than once I would spend hours scouring pages of code, looking for that one line that was causing bugs in my programming; then later that night, the exact page and line of code that held the mistake would show up in my dreams. My sister reports something similar—searching for the single entry among a weeks’ worth of entries that was upending her reports. A day or even days later, she would dream the exact page and entry that needed to be corrected. As eerie as this might seem, it’s actually common. Our brains sort out information for further use while our waking minds are too distracted to recall that specific information, especially when it’s needed. Our desire to locate critical information paired with how our dreaming minds store that information help easily work out what at first glance is a difficult problem.

Some parts of dreams that seem to be day remnants—such as an argument you had earlier with a loved one, or a disruption at work, or even an illness in the family—may be exactly that. Just the brain processing lingering emotional or social issues. But pay attention to these, please, because these supposed remnants might actually be the beginning of a series of letters from your unconscious to your waking mind, telling you there are things to be worked out and that what’s happening in your waking life is more serious than you are willing to acknowledge.

So how do we tell the difference between day remnants and important messages dressed in symbolic language?

By keeping a dream journal. Fancy journals aren’t needed, so a simple spiralbound notebook will do. Keep your notebook and a pen on a bedside table; if a dream wakes you up at night, quickly scribble down what you remember of the dream. Or, when you first wake up each morning, lie still for a while and search you minds for any dreams, then immediately write down everything you recall. When you begin, you might only capture a single image or a few words, but the point is, record every scrap of the dream you remember. If you think you’ll be able to do this after breakfast and three loads of laundry or after a long commute into work, you might soon be disappointed.

Your entries might be simple at first—a calico cat, or a room full of cats; a black horse standing backstage in a theater; a car filled with relatives trying to wrestle the steering wheel away from you. A long dead dog coming for a visit. Don’t try to make sense of things or analyze your dreams until a month or so after you start dream journaling. You’ll be looking for patterns. Patterns in our dreams can help us heal if we are open to healing.

I will close for now, and next month we will talk about dream journaling, dream patterns, sorting through what might not be dream remnants, and more. We’ll also cover dream dictionaries or any other books claiming to have the low-down on any and all dream symbols. There is no handy-dandy book to help you understand your dreams. However, you are very close to the one person who can help you the most, and that person is yourself.

Until next time, thank you for your interest in my writings. Happy writing to all you writers, happy reading to all you readers, and deep dreaming to every single one of you.

~ Penelope

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