Learning Dreams - Problem Solving
As we go through life, we are always learning new things. New facts and figures. New ways of dealing with ourselves, and with new situations in our life. In the process, we are constantly changing our perceptions and the way we interact with those situations and events. And, more importantly, we change the way we interact with the other people involved in, and associated with those events.
Whenever we learn something new, or are confronted by something new we need to learn, we search our memories for similar situations and events that we can draw upon to assist in managing, or coping with our current challenge. These longer term memories have been filtered, processed somehow from previous day-to-day experiences, then stored chemically for us to recall at a later stage.
Memory encoding occurs in two stages. It occurs first in our short term memory. Then, magically, the information is somehow filtered, sorted and compared. If a new event provides new information that is worth keeping, it is linked with similar memories, encoded and cross linked chemically within our long term memory. Much of this process occurs during sleep.
For this reason, when you first go to sleep at night, with the events of the day still fresh within your mind, the first one or two cycles of your sleep may be primarily involved with reorganising your memories of daily events. Sorting them for longer term memory encoding. Often, people remember these mental processes from their initial sleep cycles as dreams. This is why so many of our dreams seem to be associated with processing day-to-day stuff.
However, the soul part of us, our consciousness, is eternal and everlasting. It doesn't just have access to the temporal memory patterns of one individual life. Your life, or mine has a rich tapestry of collective memories it can draw upon when evaluating and assimilating new experiences.
As we drift into deeper levels of sleep, all of these deeper 'soul' memories can be made available to us to help us process our day-to-day stuff. And most of us access this information unconsciously without ever having to think about it.
Occasionally, information from our deep inner being bleeds through to our conscious memory as vivid dreams which we remember when we wake. If they are really important to us, the dream will sometimes be so vivid that it actually wakes us from our sleep, usually with quite a start. The meaning of the symbols may not however be immediately obvious. We have all had such dreams.
In learning to understand these dreams, we need to do a little work on ourselves. We need to know what the dream is related to, both in the short term and the long term. There may be longer term patterns that we are not even aware of. The events of our lives don't just happen to us. We are willing participants, for our own purposes, even if we don't consciously remember what that purpose is.
The first step in this process is taking the time to write down, and begin the process of consciously analysing our dreams so that we can begin to fit the jigsaw of our lives together. We do this by working first with the dreams we remember. As we get better at this, we can give ourselves permission to remember and explore more and more of these adventures in a totally new way. Once you begin this process consciously, your understanding of yourself and your life, and how you fit in co-operatively with others around you, will change.
Note: These notes are incomplete. Further notes (dream classrooms) to be added on this topic.
Read about Healing Dreams