Dreams are free, harmless and entertaining. They can be educational, emotional, or just plain fun. They open doors that go past the entertainment/fantasy section of your consciousness and embark on great spiritual journeys in your own psyche. And the only thing that holds you back is yourself. Since dreaming occurs whether you want it to or not, may as well take control of them and have some fun. You should never be frightened of dream content. No matter how sick, scary, twisted or demented a dream may appear, good lucid dream control techniques can instantly change unwanted dreams into something which gives you a good story to talk about in the morning.

Directed Dreaming - Can you possibly be in the right place at the right time - all the time? Discover exactly how to control your dreams, and your destiny use conscious dreaming, subconscious dreaming; and find out the truth about Lucid dreaming.

Meaning of Dreams - What Dreams Are:

A series of thoughts, images or emotions occurring during sleep. Dreaming is a universal and powerful experience — all humans sleep, and all humans dream. Dreams can be fleeting fragments of images or entire complicated narratives unreeling like movies before the mind's eye. The visions can appear benign or soothing, or they can inspire heart-pounding terror. They can be peopled with friends and loved ones or commanded by horrifying monsters. Dreams can mimic reality or create a totally surreal environment. They can be clear and detailed or jumbled and confused. They may impart wisdom or knowledge, or they may leave the dreamer completely baffled by their content.

What are dreams? Where do they come from? And what significance, if any, do they hold for the dreamer's life? The variety of answers set forth to these questions over time reflects the values and the social and psychological structures of various cultures. Ancient peoples, among them the Egyptians and the Greeks, believed dreams were messages sent by the gods to sleeping minds. The father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, thought that dreams, created by the human brain, could serve as windows into the psyche, revealing a cache of wishes unfulfilled, and many of his followers today consider such visions to be a major tool in psychoanalysis.

On the other hand, some scientists have theorized that dreams are unnecessary bits of information being expunged nightly from a person's memory, just as a computer's files are cleaned of unwanted data. The ancients regarded sleep as a second life, a life in which the soul freed from the body was supposedly much more active than during the waking state. And researchers into the paranormal, in some ways echoing the ancients, believe dreams may have a psychic element, revealing the forces of destiny, the reality that is about to happen. www.occultopedia.com

Meaning of Dreams - Dreams and Consciousness

It is important to understand the nature of reality, and how dreams and consciousness relate to every experience you will ever have. Its not that hard to realize that thought and reality are related, that our thoughts for the longest time have driven our lives from mechanically hammering out technology, buildings, or from a more liquid stream of dreaming. Where did all that technology come from? Why do we struggle in darkness when we are full of light? My life isn't just about triangles and dreams, we have fallen so deep into spiritual darkness that the damage caused to us is evident throughout our Earth, our minds and our dreams.

Since I can remember, I have always known certain basics about life. Something more inward and built into what I am as a sentient being. There is a past stream of memories I have, a powerful all present now that I occupy, and a gray future that I wake up to in my dreams. I have seen it all, the birth and death of entire universes. The unfolding drama of life and death, the spiritual backdrop hidden from most, lost to forgetfulness of physical incarnation. I exist in a universe that is, not in a universe that is not. There is more to life then just a body that dies with time. I am just reclaiming what is rightfully mine, my spiritual heritage.

There is one truth, and only one truth. That truth is, we exist. Always have, and always will, in one form or another. All parts of one whole, one truth, one absolute, one universe, one God. Everything else is just an extension of us. How many times must you live and die before you wake up to realize that something is wrong? That you have been lied to your whole life, that science doesn't have all the answers. That there is more to life then what you physically see. Do you love and embrace war? Do you like killing parts of yourself? Every action has a consequence, every life a purpose. Who you kill and torture "here", will be you "there" from that there is no escape. We are all one. So learn to love, live in truth and embrace life, don't destroy it.

Meaning of Dreams - Dreams are Soul Talk  ...

The images and events that occur in our dreams are expressions of those feelings. "I'm in a speedboat. Someone else is driving. They are being reckless and I'm afraid. I tell them to slow down and be more careful." This is a dream about not being in control. Perhaps someone else is calling the shots in our life. Perhaps it is an aspect of our own personality - our anger or our bravado - that is making the critical choices that affect our safety and happiness. Not only does this dream afford us a clear vision that someone else (or something else) is controlling our current situation; we also catch a glimpse of our True Self - intelligent, aware, and sensibly concerned for our own well-being.

What Dreams Mean: We are all  the artists of our dreams meanings.  

Dreams are not some black and white two-dimensional setting that we act chaotic
and silly in. Mind you, we all have dreams where the content is best left in the shadows of our forgetful memory. It's probably because the artist didn't bother to inspire the content. You weren't interested in picking up the brush and painting the colors, sounds, and textures needed to make the dream aesthetically pleasing.

Dreaming is a great medium to express artistically, in a multi-dimensional form. Treat your dreams like a movie where you are the director, the special effects crew, the actor, and the camera all happening instantly and simultaneously with little or no effort at all. You don't have to be an artist to be a good dreamer. This is a talent we all naturally have. It's a function of our very existence.

Although entertaining at times, dreams also carry a much deeper meaning. Spirit guides will often use the dream state to speak with us. It is at this time that we are most susceptible to the normally unacceptable. If a spirit were to appear during waking hours, most people would be in a state of shock and disbelief, whereas in the dream state anything goes. This is because dreams do not threaten our ridged sense of reality, as we are more able to grasp spiritual concepts, our dreams become less parable like, and more spiritually enlightening.

Dreams can unlock the gate to communicating with those who have passed on.
Dream Meaning can also help us in communicating with those around us. As an interpreter of dreams I have been asked, "What if you used to dream vividly, in detail, and now you no longer recall even dreaming?" This could be for a number of reasons. You may be under a great deal of stress and/or have other issues in your life that need your immediate attention. Because of this you may have subconsciously decided to let the dream world be put on hold, for a while. If the area of the brain that recovers dreams is not used, it can become rusty. It could also be that your spirit guides are imparting wisdom to you subconsciously that you would reject or be unreceptive to on a conscious level.

A while ago I was given a lucid dream. (A state of knowing your dreaming while still in the dream.) In front of me stood a large, wood-clad restaurant. Large statues of Buddha's, colorful paintings of Chakra's and Jesus' lined the walls. I could sense an unseen presence beside me. On the front of the restaurant hung a sign that read: "Soup, Ring, Bean Restaurant." I loved it! But still couldn't help but wonder why the odd name. The personage beside me telepathically told me to say the name out loud. I did. "Say it again faster." the personage said. "Soup-rin-been?", " Souprinbeing?", " Supreme Being!" I could hardly contain my laughter.

At first, other than being entertained by the dream I was at a loss as to the dream meaning. Then it hit me. The dream was trying to tell me that I needed to be edified more by spiritual food and less by clinical observation. Who says the cosmos don't have a sense of ha, ha! When attempting to recall your dreams it is important to think in terms of images and not spoken language. As the subconscious mind deals mostly with imagery and less with linguistics, the brain likes to output information the same way it comes in. Close your eyes and roll them up and toward the middle of your forehead. This is the area known as the third eye. The third eye is commonly known for being the center of psychic activity in the brain. This center can also aid in the recovery of dream memories. Begin to SEE the memory of the dream in your minds eye. Once your are able to see it, you are then ready to translate it onto paper. The amount of details you thought you could not recall, but begin to recall, through the process of writing will surprise you.

To help ensure that you will remember more of your dreams, suggest to yourself before falling asleep that upon awakening you will remember your dreams. Place a note pad and a pen on your night stand or within easy reach. When you wake up and recall partial or entire dreams, record it immediately no matter what time it is. If you think, "I'm too tired, I'll write it down in the morning." you won't, at least not in the detail that you would when it was still fresh in your mind. The next step is to analyze your dreams. Dream books, a dream dictionary, which can prove helpful, cannot encapsulate the dreamer's individual symbols all of the time.

Although some dream symbols are uniform throughout most dream books, such as the dream symbol of the snake meaning sex, many interpretations vary radically from one dream book to the next. Everyone attaches dream meanings to objects, people and events that are different for each individual. Lettuce, for example, reminds you of salad is a correct statement for most people. Yet, if you spent your summers as a teenager on a lettuce farm where you experienced your first kiss, then lettuce could mean something all together different to you. Dream books can give dream meaning; general dream meanings of salad or lettuce that would suffice for many but not for all. It all depends on the individuals personal associations that cannot be taken into account by a book. Dreams usually convey an overall impression or feeling. If a particular object recurred throughout the dream, think of what that object means to you. For example, if you had a dream of a cat chasing a dog through the meadow as people watched, you would rate each symbol in order of importance or degree of puzzlement to you.

If you found the meadow to have the most dream meaning, then your dream is trying to convey something to you about your environment. If the dog being chased by the cat is perplexing to you, then the dream is trying to tell you something about your relationships and in this case that a role reversal may be occurring. How you feel about that role reversal will be determined by how you felt when you first saw the cat chase the dog. The people watching are symbolic of how you feel others view that particular relationship from the outside. So as you can see, it is not only the symbols that are important to the interpretation but the meanings and feelings attached to those dream symbols that make the dream interpretation correct. By keeping a record of your dreams, these themes and dream meanings will become apparent over time.

Everyone has the ability to interpret their own dreams by analyzing them in this way. Dream meaning can be very important. You will know when the right dream interpretation is found, since you will almost feel a sense of remembrance, like, as they say, 'when something is right on the tip of your tongue.' The inability to recall the information just moments earlier, suddenly seems silly. That is the feeling of a good interpretation. What is not confronted and dealt with in the waking hours will seep into our dreams, and what seeps into our dreams will affect the quality of our waking hours. The good news is we are not powerless over this cycle.

The key to overcoming this illusion of powerlessness, associated with dreams, is to know that, YOU ARE NOT POWERLESS OVER YOUR DREAM STATE! Once this concept is internalized as a part of your belief system, you will begin to be able to alter small details of your dreams and eventually, with practice, larger details will be at your command. I don't know if I would have fully accepted this rule in the dream realm if I had not first been plagued by anxiety dreams. If you have ever suffered from them, you know how debilitating they can be. You CAN Program your own Dream Work!

Small children also suffer from anxiety dreams in the form of nightmares. When kids are taught that they have the power to change a monster of a dream into a little fuzzy bunny, for instance, it's funny how they react to this by looking at you like, now ya tell me! They don't even question it. They just do it, and do it well! In my opinion, children who learn to control their dreams feel an increased sense of self-esteem that comes from knowing that they have the power to interact, shape and mold their dream states.

One morning as I was about to awaken, I was thinking, why is it that I am reading all these enlightening materials and yet I feel I have made little progress? I still yell at the kids, fight with my husband and cringe when I see the neighbor who likes to talk about the price of toilet paper coming to my door. I thought to myself, "Shouldn't I be beyond all that by now?" The message I received was " don't rush the brush." Being a novice ( and not a good one) artist, I had heard that term before and immediately knew its meaning. It meant if you rush the brush, your painting will lose its focus and the result will be much less than satisfactory.

If we are determined to remember our dreams, they will once again begin to guide, warn, amaze and even amuse us, as well, we will begin to unlock fathomless doorways and pathways of outer and inner realms of learning.

Meaning of Dreams - Final note

Remember, dreams are slippery things. You are not in the land of one-to-one correspondences and literal interpretations. Symbols are open to interpretation and context is highly important. You are always the best authority on the meaning of your own dreams. But if you're having trouble understanding a dream  to talk it over with someone and do so within the first few days of the dream while it's fresh in your mind. Sometimes, the very act of talking the dream over will help you break through a block you've had in understanding it.

What Dreams Mean: - Dream Resources