#endr

First things first in the interpretation of your dream.  If you see something you don't understand, ask your mind to make it clearer.  Giving yourself permission not only to remember your dreams, but seeing them clearer is very important to this process of Directed Dreaming. As your awareness of the dream reality grows, you will find that you will no longer need to interpret your dreams, they will simply reflect life. With that said, let's move on to building a methodology that you can use to interpret your dreams.  

There are a lot of books out there on the subject of interpreting your dreams. But, I'm going to offer you another way to interpret your dreams.  Think about them as a mystery movie that concerns the problem you're trying to solve.

In my college film studies class, they demonstrated how scenes were constructed.  Take your favorite show. Watch the camera as it pans through a scene.  A Scene is considered a series of shots of a specific area in space.  So, if the camera is showing a crime scene from multiple angles, that is one scene.

Every scene is constructed with a background and parts that don't move.  For example, a house is a good place for a scene.  You might find yourself in a specific room of the house.  What is in the room?  Everything in the room has significance to you and you alone, even though there are many layers of the room.

So, let's back up a bit and help you remember bits and pieces of the dream to put together your movie.

Title your Movie.  "One fell over the cookoo's nest", or is it "The journey home"?  What mystery is your brain trying to resolve?

Since movies are based on books, and books have chapters, name the various segments of the movie, like chapters.  Maybe it was the journey home, playing with fido when you got out of the car, dreading going into the house, the expected conversation, and finally storm. Each scene is working on a specific aspect of the problem you're trying to solve, and demonstrates the 5 stages of loss:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

In order to know which stage we are in, we need to look at specific aspects of each dream segment to see how you feel and how things morph. As strange as it seems, I have not thought when in a dream.  This means that if I can't think, I can't judge something as good or bad.  

If I were to guess about why this is, I would say that the portion of my brain needed to think and judge is being used to generate this experience.  So, asking yourself what you thought may not be relevant here.  You might have thoughts about the scene now, after waking up, but probably not during the experience.

Starting with the emotional component of a scene, let's take the Journey Home. Assume that you're on a long road over looking crop fields, like in Ohio. What did you feel: relief, apprehension, other? 

Now, remember the details about your ride home.  What type of vehicle were you in?  Were you driving or were you a passenger?  Was there a vehicle at all?  Maybe you can fly.  Or you were talking.  Or maybe you were appearing and disappearing at various points along the road.  The motif for traveling is different in every dream and person.

As mentioned in previous articles, small things about the vehicle, landscape, and you are changing, based on a multitude of events happening both inside you and outside you.  These events are constantly triggering the dream to change interactively.  So, let's take a look at your 5 senses:  Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.  

Sight: What did you see?  What did one thing start as, and what did it morph into. Have you seen these two objects before?  Maybe they were juxtaposed in time as well as in space.  What significance do these objects have to you?

Sound: If there are other people in the vehicle, were you talking and what were you talking about?  How did you feel about the conversation?  Was the radio playing music?  Were you humming to the music, or enjoying the breeze if the windows were down.

Smell: What did you smell?  Was the car clean? Was the air fresh?  Were there farms near by?  Did you pass a garbage dump?  What other smells do you remember?

Touch: Did you touch anything in the car?  Maybe run your hand over the dash board?  Or over your clothing, or a back pack you might have been holding.

Taste:  were you eating anything in the dream?  What type of food were you eating?  How did it taste?  Was your mouth dry or salivating?  

All of these pieces play an important role in understanding your dream, since the dream is pulling remnants from your long term memory.  In addition, memories for different aspects of your body are stored in different areas of your body.  Only your conscious pulls all the various memories together and re-interprets them into a larger context.  The psychological therapy practice of ENDR relies on this to help patients re-constitute difficult memory fragments into a coherent memory in order to cognitively process it.

Once you have pulled everything together for every dream segment, you might begin to see a pattern after a while.  The dream could have been dealing with a difficult conversation you needed to have, and you were trying to ignore it in various ways or relax yourself during the drive home, playing with fido, and eventually entering the house, having the difficult conversation, and watching the weather outside change from a bright sunny day to a blustery overcast wind storm and eventually back to a bright and sunny day.