What does my dream mean?

Dreams have many levels of meaning that relate to your health, emotions, relationships, spiritual beliefs, and personal growth. However, these meanings can be difficult to interpret. One reason for this difficulty is that dreams rarely come to tell you what is. More often, such dreams come to tell you what might be. Dreaming has a tendency to look ahead to imagine your future possibilities, both the dangers that might slow you down and the opportunities that might enhance your health and development.

As a result, your dreaming self is always pushing ahead of your waking self, looking beyond where you are right now. Naturally, this makes it difficult for your waking self to understand your dreams, precisely because your dreams can see more than you are currently capable of seeing. The joy of interpreting dreams comes from expanding your conscious perspective so you can truly understand and integrate the dreaming self’s point of view.

This basic difficulty of dream interpretation can be overcome by the simple practice of projective dream-sharing. This practice involves sharing your dream with someone else and inviting them to respond as if they had experienced this dream for themselves. Using the phrase, “If it were my dream,” they are invited to project their feelings and reactions into your dream, and to imagine what the dream would mean if it were theirs. Sometimes their projections will help you get around the limits of your personal perspective to notice important new meanings in your dream. Sometimes, however, their projections are totally wrong! Ultimately, you are always the final authority on what your dreams mean. You should always trust your own feelings and intuitions when you interpret your dreams, even as you stay open to the new discoveries that can come from practices like projective dream-sharing.