Would You Like to Have Your Dream Interpreted?

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

          I sometimes have dabbled in some dream interpretation on this blog, but as I have indicated in previous posts I think this is a very subjective realm that can be difficult for an outside observer to do effectively.  Recently I ran across a dream interpretation blog that seems to do a pretty credible job of this.  I've invited Amaranthe from Sculpted Dreams to share a bit about what she has to offer at her site.  Be sure to visit her blog and send her a dream if you'd like to get her take on it.

     I’ve been having strange and vivid dreams for as long as I can remember, which is to say since I was five or six years old. One of my earliest dreams involved Captain Kirk lying dead on a black slab with lasers set up around his body to keep anyone from bothering it. (I really liked Wrath of Khan as a kid.) Another that I had when I was ten or eleven was about a dog-eating sunflower. Sounds funny now, sure, but at the time it was terrifying—I had a dog, after all, and awoke concerned for its welfare.

     I got in the habit of writing down these dreams in a diary someone had given me, at first only in passing with one or two lines, but eventually I began logging the dreams in careful detail. Some were easy to shrug off as a kind of “data dump” in which my mind was simply discarding old information or making bizarre connections between otherwise unrelated things. But some dreams felt weighty and somehow important. These I would puzzle over, trying to understand them. I would read this and that dream dictionary and attempt to cobble together the meaning behind these nightly teleplays.

     After a while, I got pretty good at it. Taking what I’d learned, I began to apply a certain amount of intuition to interpreting dreams, until eventually it became second nature. And before long others began to ask me what their dreams meant, too. My cousins, my friends. Until one day a friend suggested I do it more widely. So I recently started a website titled Sculpted Dreams (http://sculpted-dreams.blogspot.com) where I do dream interpretation for free. Because I enjoy it, and why not?

     As I’ve noted, I’ve only just started the site, but I’ll talk about some of the most common dream questions I receive from friends and neighbors. Places, for one. Usually some kind of distorted location along the lines of: “It was like the house I lived in as a kid, except . . .” Houses often (but not always; there is no “always” in dreams) represent the dreamer, and the rooms represent various aspects of that person. A childhood home, then, may be a way of showing an “old” or “outdated” or even “immature” aspect. The fact that it is distorted makes sense—the dream house has been manipulated to reflect the dreamer, not the actual location.

     Airplanes are another big one, or really any form of travel. This generally symbolizes the dreamer’s life journey. How difficult or easy the travel may be indicative of how difficult or easy the person is finding life to be. If in a dream you find yourself stuck at the airport, you may be feeling stuck in a kind of limbo in your waking life as well, as if you’re not getting anywhere. Travel can also represent transitions in life, moving from one stage to another. After all, when you travel you leave something (and sometimes someone) behind.

     So what good does knowing a dream’s meaning do you? It can be therapeutic to some degree, allowing you to understand yourself, be in touch with your own inner workings. It’s self-therapy. Dreams, when not a simple data dump, are your subconscious trying to get your attention. When you open those lines of communication, you begin to feel more balanced. The flow of information from subconscious to conscious and back gets easier, and the more you do that, the more you’ll dream because it becomes an ongoing conversation with yourself.

     Still, sometimes you need someone to translate the strange language of dreamspeak. Or maybe you just want a second opinion. If so, send me your dreams, and I’ll post them (anonymously) along with my take on them on my site. Be aware that I do edit for grammar and punctuation. (I’m a writer in my day job, so I can’t let these things go by untouched.) The e-mail link is on the site, or you can reach me at methos [at] gmail (dot) com.

      Thanks, Lee, for having me. And happy dreaming!

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