THE 14 MOST OFTEN ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT DREAMS
(The answers follow the list of questions)
- Does everyone dream? Do I dream?
- Why don't I remember my dreams?
- How can I remember my dreams?
- What if you can't remember dreams? Are you losing out?
- Can I have interactive communication with my dream state?
- Do all dreams have meaning?
- What advantage is there to knowing what my dreams really mean?
- Why do I tend to remember only bad dreams or nightmares?
- Why do dreams seem so strange and seemingly make no sense?
- Is a dream dictionary useful to understand dream symbols?
- What is a symbol?
- What is a metaphor?
- Why aren’t dreams literal and tell me what I need to know straight out? Why do dreams have to be symbolic?
- Is there a reliable, quick, easy to use dream interpretation method? One I can use myself? A method that will provide the actual or true meaning of my dreams?
ANSWERS
To the 14 Most Often Asked Dream Questions
1) Q. Does everyone dream? Do I Dream?
A. Yes. Everyone dreams - every single night.
Sleep / dream studies done in university labs have proven that adults have a dream about every ninety minutes throughout their sleep cycle. For every eight hours of sleep, you have an average of 4 to 6 dreams. But, certain pharmaceutical drugs, such as barbiturates, can prevent dreaming. Everyone must dream. Lab subjects who were allowed to sleep, but not allowed to dream, began to hallucinate within a week.
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2) Q. Why don't I remember my dreams?
A. Most individuals do not realize how important dreams really are.
The ego or conscious mind logically, but mistakenly believes that there are no practical uses for dreams so why remember them? This is a major reason that dreams are usually not remembered.
People in today’s world are busy. There is too much to do in so little time. People think they don’t have the time to bother with figuring out dreams. For this reason, dream recall is not encouraged.
Alarm clocks are also a culprit. They jar the conscious mind awake too suddenly, instantly fragmenting dream images.
Dream recall may be blocked on purpose as a protective ploy. Sometimes a child can be so frightened by nightmares that a protective part or the ego decides that dreams are harmful things. This belief can carry forward into adulthood. The ego or conscious mind may refuse to allow the memory of any dreams, whether they are good or bad
In truth, dreams are necessary for health and well being; and are useful for the guidance they provide. There are numerous and important reasons for remembering dreams, and interpreting their meaning.
3) Q. How can I remember my dreams?
A. Here are some simple steps to remembering dreams:
You must have a strong desire to start recalling dreams.
Make a pact with the conscious mind. Tell your ego that you are serious about wanting to remember a dream.
Before you fall asleep, set an intention. The beginner can simply make a request to remember “a good dream.”
Be determined. Make a nightly commitment to remember a dream. If no dreams are remembered in the morning, be patient and ask again the following night.
Recall can begin to happen when the conscious mind fully understands that dreams are an important tool for growth, guidance and healing. These teachings can be found throughout Tianna’s book. In truth, dreams are necessary for health and well being, and are useful for the practical assistance they provide. There are many good reasons for remembering dreams and figuring out what they mean. Simply by reading of their importance, the ego can take an interest in wanting to remember dreams.
After you discover what is possible in dreamtime, you may become interested in programming them for help. You can interact with the dreamstate by making specifically focused dream requests. The beginner can ask to obtain guidance, or release stress. Ask Spirit for this to happen in a dream, then add this statement, "...and I will remember my dream."
Show intent that you want to remember dreams:
- Decide on the information you want to get from a dream.
- Keep a notebook and pen by the bed.
- Write down your dream request at the top of an empty page.
- Make the same request before sleep, every night. Do this until a dream is remembered.
- Record a recalled dream as soon as possible. Even if you only remember a fragment or a brief scene, write down all the details. As shown in this book, the tiniest piece of a dream can be rich in meaning.
- Do a Decipher on a recalled dream. This method helps you to discover the message hidden within dream symbolism. Interpreting dreams proves to the conscious mind that they are well worth remembering.
4) Q. What if you can't remember dreams? Are you losing out?
A. Absolutely not! Dreams happen for a reason.
Dreams work on your behalf. They constantly provide what you most need, whether you remember them or not. A chapter in Tianna’s book shows you how to program your dreams; i.e. to ask for something such as information, guidance, healing, suggestions for accomplishing something, etc. One does not have to remember a programmed dream for results to happen!
Dreams and the meaning they have for you, are stored in your subconscious. This stored information can come back up into your conscious mind during your waking day. Dream input can come in the form of a waking-day intuition, an insight, an idea, an inspiration, a revelation, a feeling to take a certain action, and so on. When you are seeking guidance, you might be led to a certain book or person that provides what you need. You might not realize that all this comes from (unrecalled) dream input. An important message throughout this entire book is the reminder to program dreams. Ask nightly for what you want. Ask and you shall receive even if you don’t remember a single dream.
5) Q. Can I interact with my dream state?
A. Definitely yes!
One way to interact is to do a dream program every night.
So much can be accomplished while you are dreaming. Dreams can be programmed to give you what you need. A great way to interact with dreams is to make a request before falling asleep. Burning questions can be answered. Stress can be released. So much is possible, however, you must remember to ask for these things.
For beginners, it is recommended that you ask for only one thing per night and ask for the same thing three nights in a row. This allows Spirit to give focused attention to your request. When you get that particular request answered, move on to something else. Ask before you go to sleep for the answers to your questions. Ask for help. Ask for guidance. Ask for healing. And by asking, you will be greatly rewarded. Spirit will interact with you in the dream state and provide what you seek. This works even if you don’t recall a single dream. The most important thing to remember is to program dreams nightly.
A remembered dream, then interpreting it provides more ways to interact. To interpret a dream, one connects with Spirit. The Dream Decipher method works by asking your Voice of Intuition for the meaning of each of the dream’s metaphors. No guesswork is involved. This method is so simple to do, and Tianna’s book shows you how.
6) Q. Do all dreams have meaning?
A. All dreams have meaning and all contain useful messages.
However in most dreams, the true communication is hidden within mysterious symbols and metaphors. Dreams have insightful meaning for you. They are typically about you, your waking life, or loved ones. Most, if not all dreams need to be interpreted to discover their hidden significance. Using Tianna’s method is a quick, sure-fire way to know what your dreams mean.
7) Q. What advantage is there to knowing what my dreams actually mean?
A. There are numerous advantages in learning to interpret your dreams for their true meaning. Dreams give information that can aid you in many ways, such as:
- Dream warnings. These alert you to change a bad situation, or guide you to avoid possible danger.
- Buried emotions. Sometimes we do not recognize that our emotional and physical stress has been internalized. Dreams can release stress and can help bring you to resolution about the problem that caused it.
- Obstacles to your success. Dreams can make you aware of the beliefs and behaviors that block success. You can transform these in your dreams.
Dreams often pre-view a possible future. Conscious knowledge of “what may happen” can help you make the right decision(s) about how to proceed in any given situation.
Bad attitudes, negative emotions, misperceptions, illness, can be healed in dreams. Knowledge and personal resources to use for changing attitudes, emotions, and perceptions are given in dreams.
There are profound benefits to understanding the hidden meanings in your dreams. Tianna’s book provides you with a key that will help you unlock the healing magic of your own hidden dreamstate resources. That key is using your intuition to interpret dreams. How to do this is taught in Tianna’s book.
8) Q. Why do I tend to remember only bad dreams, or nightmares?
A. Nightmares are true gifts.
If you tend not to remember dreams, a nightmare will certainly get your attention. Although this kind of dream may seem bad, its intention is positive. The nightmare forces itself into your waking state to say, "Notice me! I have very important information for you."
Perhaps you have a powerful negative emotion such as fear or anger buried within your body. Emotions can be held in bones, muscles or a vital organ. Storing fear, anger or resentment is dangerous. These emotions accumulated in the body can undermine your health.
In a dream, an inner fear can take on a solid-looking and seemingly real form. One’s internalized fear is seen by the dreaming mind as a frightening dream monster. This is called a thought-form - i.e.: an image that is formed from your own thoughts or feelings.
A dream monster is a gift. It is showing you in graphic detail how bad or fearful you feel deep within yourself. This symbolic monster is trying to show you the impact your fear feelings are having on your body. How much you are scared in the dream is showing you how much fear you have stored in your body. Your inner fear is making the cells of your body “run scared” within you. Deepak Chopra calls this phenomenon “jittery cells.” Cells that are upset are out of balance not working the way they should. This situation compromises the immune system and invites illness.
Run from the dream monster and it chases after you, demanding attention. It does this because it has an important message to give.
Protective parts can bury an emotion so thoroughly that a nightmare is sometimes the only way that buried emotions can come up from the subconscious. A bad dream may be shouting at you to do something about a fear that you may not realize is there, down deep inside.
The above, and other reasons for nightmares, bad dreams, and frightening recurring dreams are addressed in depth in Tianna’s book:
DECIPHER Your Dreams, DECIPHER Your Life.
9) Q. Why do many dreams seem so strange, and seemingly make no sense?
A. Dreams are most often described as being “strange, weird, or frightening.”
Dreams seem to make no sense because they are in the coded secret language of symbols and metaphors. Your dream images are like hieroglyphics, petroglyphs, or pictographs - encoded symbols. They do tell a story, but you have to know the code to understand the story.
The ancient hieroglyphics of Egypt could not be understood until the discovery of the Rosetta stone. This slab of basalt found near the Nile in 1799 had a decree carved on it in three different languages. Two sections of the stone were written in two unknown, ancient Egyptian languages. Before l799, these languages made no sense. Luckily, a third section of the stone was written in Greek. This known language provided the key to deciphering the meaning of Egyptian, hieroglyphic picture writing.
One needs a decoding key to unlock the secrets of one’s personal dream symbols. There is a part of you that understands symbolism. That “part” is your intuition. Chapter One of Tianna’s book shows you how to tap into your intuition to understand dreams.
10) Q. Can I use a dream dictionary on my dream symbols?
A. It is NOT recommended.
Dream dictionaries give universal interpretations. At times, the meaning of one or two symbols in such books may ring true. Even so, it is unlikely that you will discover the actual meaning of your dream by using dictionary-type dream interpretation books.
Dream symbols are as unique as your fingerprints. Life’s experiences and the things you notice in your world are filed in your subconscious mind. These symbolic images are stored in your memory banks. The meanings of your symbols are personal to you. While some are literal, most dreams are entirely symbolic. Dreams are created out of your subconscious mind, from your own storehouse of personal symbols.
A dictionary interpretation may even throw you completely off track. One interpreted symbol alone does not necessarily give you what you need, as the description of one word in a paragraph does not give the meaning of the paragraph. You would be better off trying to do trial and error guessing through your conscious mind than using a dream dictionary.
A. A symbol stands for an idea, quality, condition or other abstraction. Examples that might be found in a dream dictionary:
- A baby might mean a new idea.
- A car could be a symbol for movement.
- A butterfly may mean transformation.
However, each of these symbols has numerous other meanings. You must consider what meanings a symbol has for you personally.
For example, one client’s interpretation of a baby in her dream was “something I never want to have to take care of.” Her dream baby turned out to be about her boyfriend, who was too needy.
What needs to be understood when interpreting a dream is that the combined metaphors within a dream can either somewhat, or drastically alter the meaning of an isolated symbol. For example: One client’s dream of a red car – a ‘Charger” parked in front of her house meant: “Warning, my ex-husband is spying on me.” It turned out that he was stalking her, and she had to get a restraining order. NOTE: He did not own a red Charger. This was simply her subconscious mind’s way of getting her attention.
One dreamer’s interpretation of a butterfly was: “Something that dies too soon.” Her dream was really about her mother who had died young. The rest of the dream addressed her unresolved grief.
Notice how each symbol (italicized above) meant something different than the “standard’ dictionary interpretation for these three dreamers?
The above examples clearly show why one should not separate a dream into individual symbols, or worse, try to use a dictionary-type of dream book to interpret a dream’s overall meaning. Using Dream Decipher on your dreams would tell you for sure what your symbols and your dreams actually mean.
NOTE: Don’t expect that when you discover the meaning of one of your symbols through the Dream Decipher method, that it will have the same meaning in your next dream. It may or may not. In my dream groups we often find that a symbol in one dream means something different in a subsequent dream. And sometimes we find that the same symbol, showing up twice in the same dream, can have two different meanings.
The point is, what does a dream symbol mean to you? And what particular meaning does it have within a specific dream? Only by using Tianna’s intuitive Dream Decipher method, can you know for sure.
A. A metaphor is a story that appears to mean one thing on the surface, yet also has a deeper, hidden/veiled meaning that speaks to our subconscious mind.
Jesus spoke in parables. Parable is another term for metaphor.
Fairytales and fables are metaphors. Hidden within its story, a fairytale has a moral or message in disguise that speaks to the subconscious mind of the child who hears it.
An example is “The Ugly Duckling," the well-known tale about a baby swan who mistakenly is raised with a family of ducks. The baby swan looks ugly to the baby ducks and they tease it. The young swan feels different, out of place, and sad. But in the end, when it grows to maturity, it finds its real place in the world in the company of other swans. The maturing swan eventually realizes its own true beauty.
Below the surface of the story, the metaphor gives many positive messages to the child, such as: It's okay to be different. Others may tease you and call you ugly, but this is because they do not understand that you are a unique and special person. You may feel different and out of place right now, but you can grow up to be proud of who you are. Eventually you will find others of like mind.
Dreams can be literal, but most dreams in our culture come in the form of metaphors. All metaphorical dreams have a veiled meaning. Your subconscious mind does understand the meaning. However, upon awakening from the dream, the conscious mind is usually left totally ‘in the dark’ so to speak. It is the reason dreams seem so weird, and hard to understand.
13) Q. Why aren’t dreams literal and tell me what I need to know straight out? Why do they have to be symbolic?
A. A literal dream is one that would come to you in the same imagery as real life does; i.e. you see what you get -- you get what you see.
While some do dream in literal terms most people do not. Why?The answers are many.
We live in a symbolic universe. The subconscious mind speaks in the language of symbolism and metaphor. Everything one notices in life could be a metaphor - a mirror - that has useful information imbedded within its symbolism.
The subconscious mind stores memory in the form of symbolic images, pictures, and personal movies of experience. In most dreams, these stored visual images are brought in as useful metaphors for current situations in one’s waking life. Thus, dreaming about being back in high school and having to take a test that you didn’t study for, is an “as-if” metaphor. It could be telling you that you are feeling as unprepared about something right now in your life, just as if you were back in high school and feeling unprepared for that test.
Did you ever have a friend try to tell you something for your own good? Something you weren't ready or willing to hear? If the Higher Spirit is giving guidance that the conscious mind may not want to listen to, or not be able to tune in to hear, a dream sent in the form of symbolism and metaphors will bypass the screening-out filters of the conscious mind. A symbolic way of giving information provides what is needed - without the conscious mind, or ego, blocking it out. This is yet another reason that one does not dream in literal terms.
If you dreamt about your stressful day at work as simply a replay of the day, you would wake up and think: “Oh, I just re-lived my day. That was a stupid dream.” But if you dreamt instead about being chased by a monster, and that dream interpreted to tell you that your stress levels at work were getting so bad that you could get sick—then you would pay more attention to the dream’s message. Stress related nightmares usually have positive suggestions veiled within their symbolism for how to change things for the better. Those dream suggestions could be to change your reaction, your attitude, or even to look for a new job.
Yet, as stated above, not all dreams are symbolic. Some are literal. These are called "true dreams." These type of dreams give information in real life terms or imagery. Lucid dreams usually fall in this category. A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer realizes that he/she is dreaming. There are examples of both literal and lucid dreams in Tianna's book.
NOTE: One needs to be aware that a dream can seem literal yet still have symbolism and metaphor intertwined within it. Because our universe is symbolic, even a dream that seems entirely literal can still be Deciphered to gain further insights.
14) Q. Is there a reliable, quick, easy-to-use dream interpretation method? One I can use myself? A method that will provide the actual meaning of my dreams?
A. Yes. There is an excellent method in Chapter Two of Tianna’s book:
DECIPHER Your Dreams, DECIPHER Your Life.
Included in Tianna’s book are simple instructions for how to use the Dream Decipher© method, Tianna’s own innovative invention. It is an effective, easy to use and reliable interpretation process, one that eliminates all conscious mind guessing games. A Decipher interpretation is accurate because it allows you to intuitively delve into your subconscious for the personal meaning of your dream symbolism and metaphors. With Decipher, you can work through a dream quickly and get a completed interpretation in from five to twenty minutes - depending on the dreams length.
Thousands of people have learned to interpret their dreams by using the Dream Decipher method. All dreamers who used this process on their dream were easily able to find its hidden meaning.
Your dreams can be decoded by using Decipher as a decoding tool. Decipher allows you to tap into your unconscious mind and interpret dreams through your intuition. This method provides the true or actual meaning of your symbols.
This has been an overview
of the most often asked questions about dreams.
All the above questions, and many more, are answered in-depth
within the chapters of Tianna’s book:
DECIPHER Your Dreams, DECIPHER Your Life