Decoding Your Dreams

The unconscious, conscious and dreams:

• The deep unconscious system of thinks inferentially. Part of a thing or a person is seeing the entire object or person. It is capable of working through an emotional issues slowly, weighing all the factors involved. The conscious system will not recognize the simultaneity of certain roles or relationships.
• The conscious system is designed to cope with issues that relate to basic survival and to mechanics of daily living. The deep unconscious system deals with emotionally charged issues.
• Emotional triggers are the instigators of dreams, that is, when your unconscious system registers a traumatic emotional situation and works it over, its efforts are often reflected in dreams.

Levels of a dream:

1. Surface meaning (manifest dream.)
2. Universal symbols.
3. Symbols-in-content.
4. Direct and raw perceptions. 
   

 Dream analysis:

• Brings a dimension to your inner mental world that widens its scope, creative potential, and range of self-awareness.
• Broadens a person's experience of the world.
• Provides access to an inner creativity that may otherwise go unnoticed and untapped. 
  

All major insights derived from a dream should be validated against one or more of the following criteria:

• A solid piece of inside usually involves an element of the unexpected, of surprises.
• The dream insight should be relatively straightforward, and should make sense.
• A dream-derived insight should be genuinely new.
• The new insight gained through dream analysis should fit with other known facts, impressions, and insights.
• Should unexpectedly explain and help solving puzzles in your personal and emotional life.
• A dream insight should itself elicit another as you continue to associate and analyze your dream.
• In time, dream insights should be translated into new ways of understanding yourself and others, and especially into new ways of coping.
• Finally, the validation of a dream insight should extend into the future.

Analyzing a dream:

• The cast of characters.
• The manifest theme.
• The setting.
• Examine how well and with what means the people in the dreams are coping.
• What is the overall picture of yourself that emerges in the dream?
• Scan a dream for your pictures of others. How you interacted with the other characters.
• What needs and desires are reflected in the dream?
• What appears to be your main conflicts and emotional problems?
• What does the dream tell you about your sense of self, your self-awareness, and your self-image?
• Mood of the dream.
• To what extent do the images of the dream touch on past events, including those from childhood?

Three types of messages in the middle layers:

1. Inferences
2. Symbols
3. Symbolic stories

Steps to dream analysis:

1. Examine the manifest contents.
2. Look for the implications of the dream images.
3. Decode all available symbols.
4. Attempt a broader reading of symbolized fantasies, wishes, and the like.

Source: Decoding Your Dreams. A Revolutionary Technique for Understanding Your Dreams (1988) by Robert Langs, M.D.