Dream Interpretation Resources?

Hey!

I was wondering if anyone can recommend good books on dream interpretation. How do you all interpret your dreams? Do you go mostly on book definitions, or intuitively?

Chris

i wouldn't give much for book interpretations.
dream symbols are highly personal and the best way to interpret a dream is to write it down, all the little things, like red shoes, 3am, stairs snaking upwards to a tiny butterfly shaped window... etc...
write at all down and then sit in calm and silence and figure it out. what does butterfly mean to you? red shoes, what if you wore red shoes to work - would anyone notice? how would you walk in them? would you skip and be filled of joy, or ashamed?

also you can do a deep daydream exercise and continue the dream while in a light meditation. interact with things and people from your dream, finish the actions you started, finish the dialogues and ask questions to the people you meet.
dream interpretations is hard work, fun but hard.
a book on symbols might help you out.
and here are a few sites:
dreams:
http://dreamemporium.com/
http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams/
http://www.dreams.ca/

symbols:
http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/index.html

I don't use dream dictionaries. As Jema already said, dream symbols are highly personal.

Here's a link:

http://class.universalclass.com/dreamology

Heres my advice STAY AWAY FROM DREAM BOOKS! Dreams are filled with symbology and it is highly personal. Its best to look at your dreams and see what they mean to you.

WhiteDrag0n said:

Heres my advice STAY AWAY FROM DREAM BOOKS! Dreams are filled with symbology and it is highly personal. Its best to look at your dreams and see what they mean to you.

Click to expand...

And I second that!

I have recently received Box of Dreams, a really cool book & deck set (yay Starfish!) that is a very handy thing to have around for starting to learn dream interpretation.

The cards are beautiful collage-style images on archetypal themes, with meanings drawn from many different sources & cultures printed on the backs.

There are also a few other dream interpretation decks out there, like Dreamcards.

These are much more fun than just books! If I am having a strange mood, I can look thru the cards & pull out the ones that I am drawn to at that moment. Then I read the interpretations on the back for clues as to what is going on in my subconscious.

Tarotphelia

i also believe that your own interpretation is the most important. as jema said, write them down. i keep a small pad and a light up pen (i highly recommend purchasing one), near my bed for this purpose.

i also believe in the collective unconscious, ancestral memory and possible past life memory. so many symbols are universal. i think it's great to read and learn as many of these as you can! then you increase your dream vocabulary. it's much like the tarot, learn, learn, learn, everything you can...but when it comes time to interpret; trust your intuition.

Jema, I really enjoyed reading through the dream emporium. Thanks for the links.
I agree that one should write out their own personal interpretations for dream symbols,
But if you haven't yet done that or are kind-of lazy about it, you can try one of these books. They are the dream books I use!
I've found many dream interpretation books just aren't very good, but there is usually something in one of these 3 that is at least semi-helpful:
Cloud Nine, by Sandra A Thomson
A Dictionary of Dream Symbols, by Eric A Ackroyd
Night Symbols-11,000 Dreams and Interpretations, by R.M. Soccolich
The last book has a huge section on interpreting the major arcana of tarot also! I thought it was quite good.

Have you ever dreamed of something that you are really curious about ? And then thinking the dream symbol must be fairly common, look it up in one of those dream interp. books, and not one of them has it?!
OR you have a dream, and then look up the symbol and the book has like one of two lines that don't much satisfy or help you?
I guess that's why "discovering" your own meanings would be more helpful. But where to start? Or what if you don't have a clue what it means? I guess then a dream interp. book would be a place to start, or gather ideas, or especially read what it may mean to the collective unconscious, or historically.

As I said in another post, my mom is the best at interpreting dreams, at least I think so. She uses alot of Jungian symbology.

The best bits of symbology advise I could give, Chris, are that dying in your dreams *does not mean you are going to die* and being terminally ill in your dreams is likely to indicate you are not nurturing yourself, not that you will come down with a terminal illness!

I mention these two things because soooooo many people think dreams are predictive. They rarely are - they are really more like you subconscious trying to get a message across to you in a format that your conscious can understand. Unless you are psychic. Then, a cigar might really be a cigar!

I guess if *you* think it means something, it probably does!