Have you ever wondered about the significance of a dream? 

Why do we dream? What does it mean that so many of us share common themes or symbols in our dreams, such as tornados, teeth falling out, or being naked in public? 

It’s fascinating that we can have a vivid emotional response in a dream, which triggers a physical reaction in our bodies. Our experiences in the dream world can cause an increased heart rate, tears, and arousal. 

It’s also interesting that we have a naturally occurring chemical in our brains that makes us forget our dreams upon waking. Are we designed this way to help us explore alternate states of consciousness in our dreams but easily re-adjust to the “waking” reality and its laws of time and space? 

Could you be in a dream right now?

We still don’t know many things about dreams, but I’ve experienced that the dream world is a powerful healing space. Through our dreams, we can learn more about ourselves, explore our subconscious minds, and expand our consciousness through the profound messages we can receive. 

Your dreams can prepare your subconscious for future experiences, guide you towards unresolved emotions trapped in your energy, and encourage you to focus on key themes in your waking life. 

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Healing Through Dreamwork

• Improve Dream Recall 
• Connections to Waking Life 
• Signs & Symbols 
• Lucid Dreaming 
• Intentional Healing in the Dream World

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Awakening to the Healing Power of Dreams

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Following my first conscious spiritual awakening in 2015, I became aware of the power of dreams. I regularly started having extremely vivid, emotionally charged dreams during this time. I didn’t know what to do with them or how to use them for healing, but I did know they were significant and wanted to remember them, so I started writing them down.

Without any action beyond writing the dreams down, I began to see more of the bigger picture beyond myself, which helped me to heal through a lens of greater understanding. In one particular dream, I saw through my dad’s eyes and could see his perspective of raising me and my siblings in a 100-year-old farmhouse in the country.

Much of what I remembered about my childhood experience was isolation, sadness and longing. I always felt anger and resentment towards my parents for moving us from the suburbs to the country, believing at the time that was why I was so sad and lonely.

Throughout the dream, when I saw myself as a child through my dad’s eyes, I was catching frogs, running in the fields, and playing in the creek. He saw me as a happy, carefree, wild child, and his heart was filled with love and appreciation watching his daughter play in the fields, covered in dirt. I could feel in my own heart the pure joy he experienced in those moments of being able to provide this life for his children. 

When I woke up, my pillow was wet as I had been crying in the dream, and the tears continued for a while after I woke up. I felt a massive emotional release and forgave myself for holding onto the anger for so long, unable to see the perspective beyond my pain. I then sent love, forgiveness and compassion towards my dad for being unable to see me in my times of loneliness and need for connection.

With a lighter energy, I could see how my unresolved childhood anger was blocking me from moving further into love, compassion and acceptance. Love was driving my parents’ decisions, and they were always doing their best, given where they were at the time. Holding onto anger and resentment was only hurting me. 

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Healing Through Dreamwork

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Improve Dream Recall

If you have difficulty remembering your dreams or believe you don’t dream, there are simple practices to improve your dream recall. 

Set the Intention

Set the intention, out loud, to remember your dreams when you wake up. The reason behind saying it aloud is that when you hear your voice, your subconscious mind absorbs it. Right before you close your eyes before bed, it’s as simple as saying, “I will remember the details of my dream when I wake up.”

If you don’t remember your dream the following day, try again the next night. Within a few nights of practicing saying the intention out loud, you will begin to remember your dreams. 

Record the Details

The most essential piece of improving dream recall is writing down your dreams. As you start writing, you will remember more details, and the more you get into the habit of writing down your dreams, the more vivid your dreams will become.

When you wake up, if the dream seems a bit fuzzy, try to remember one detail and move backwards from there. It’s similar to when you’ve forgotten a dream, and then something happens in your waking life that triggers you to remember a dream you had. Instead of waiting for that sign/trigger to come externally, we are doing this intentionally by focusing on even one detail that can bring you back to remembering. 

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Connections to Waking Life

Common Characters

Once you intentionally connect with the healing power of the dream world, you may notice common characters who pop up often or feel significant to you when they appear.

Take notice of these characters and create connections in your waking life.

• What do these characters represent to you? 
• Are they a loving guide, encouraging you to find your inner strength? 
• Do they come to trigger an unresolved wound that needs healing within your energy? 

Only you can find the answers and discern what each character means to you. In the dream world, our subconscious minds can absorb the messages we receive on a deeper level than our usual thinking mind. The information we receive from familiar characters guides us toward healing, so pay close attention. 

Synchronicities

We can easily recognize when our dreams are based on something that occurred within our reality, such as having a nightmare after watching a scary movie. It also works in reverse; once you start paying attention to your dreams, you’ll begin to see things happening in your life that you dreamed about first. Take notice of the synchronicities that unfold in your waking life; these guide you toward thoughts, actions, and events that are important in some way.

Emotions

Most dreams, even the ones that seem random, have an emotional undertone and theme. Identifying the intensity of the fear that manifests in nightmares is easy. It’s harder to understand the meaning behind the more subtle feelings of overwhelm, disorientation, desire, envy or disappointment without getting curious about what your dreams mean to you in your waking life. 

When writing down your dreams, you can also write down the feelings, themes or emotions. From here, you can connect the dots between your dreams and emotional states in your waking life.

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Signs & Symbols

Many dreams share signs and symbols – spiders, snakes, tornados, falling, giant waves, etc. We share common dream themes because we are all connected on a deeper subconscious level. There are many resources online where you can search dream meanings, and it is a great way to start learning more about yourself through your dreams. 

However, it’s important to note that we will never find the answers we seek in the external world. What we can do is use the world around us as a mirror. Using the external world in this conscious way holds great value as it helps point us toward where we can focus our attention inward. 

I’ll share an example of how I worked through a recent dream about a spider and how you can use the symbolism as a guidepost, but ultimately, your intuition holds the key to your healing. 

Dream Details:

I was on a camping trip, sitting on an old couch outside with my husband and best friend. A brown wolf spider bit my right thumb, which was hurting badly. I showed my hand to my husband, closed my eyes and asked him to help get it off me. He struggled to pull it off as the spider stuck its teeth deep into my skin. When he got it off, I kept looking at the holes in my thumb, watching it as it started to swell. 

Key themes/emotions:

In my waking life, if a spider came up and bit me, I would be terrified and disgusted, but in my dream, I wasn’t scared at all. While it hurt, I was calm and knew I had to do something. I closed my eyes, asked for what I needed, and trusted my husband would get it off. It was an energy of knowing I needed help because of the pain that I was in.

Reflections:

There are many common dream themes for the meaning of spiders; they can represent fear, the shadow self, feminine energy, creativity, and jealousy. 

When exploring the dream themes, I could see the connections to my waking life; I had been working through jealousy and feeling blocked in my creative feminine energy. If I stopped there, satisfied with the external information, I would miss the opportunity to use this as a unique message pointing me toward healing. 

Moving deeper into the dream’s meaning, the spider bit my right thumb. The right side of the body is masculine energy. I found it interesting that the feminine energy of the spider bit me on the masculine energy side of my body. For whatever reason, I remembered this specific detail, which means it had significance.

Through my intuition, I could see the metaphor the dream was conveying. It was a direct message and pathway to see how the wounded feminine energy perpetuates wounding to the masculine. The feminine energy (the spider) was demanding the attention of the masculine through an angry and aggressive delivery (biting). The angry and forceful delivery of this demand hurt the masculine. 

When I (the feminine) needed help because I was hurting, I calmly asked my husband (the masculine) for help, and he removed the spider. The underlying message here was that I received the help, attention and healing I needed when I spoke calmly, asked directly for what I needed, and trusted that it was coming.

In my healing practice, I can now work to bring my energy in balance by consciously releasing the blocks of resentment, resulting in a wounded disconnect and power struggle. 

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Lucid Dreaming

Even if you’ve never had a Lucid dream, Lucid dreaming is something you can begin to do with intention and develop skills to improve your chances of becoming awake in your dreams.

I’ve only had a few Lucid dreams I can recall. Still, I’ve noticed a key theme: I’d get so excited when I was Lucid that I’d become overwhelmed with possibilities and quickly forget that I was dreaming. With practice, we can develop skills to anchor into the dream world and continue to remain conscious throughout the dream. 

The most significant connection is that the experience of being “awake in the dream” is very similar to having a “spiritual awakening.” As quickly as you can fall back into the unconscious dream state after becoming Lucid, we can easily fall back into the dimensions and laws that govern this time and space.

As you practice becoming more aware of yourself in the dream world, this naturally expands into your waking life. The different stages of a spiritual awakening are like becoming more and more Lucid in our shared collective dream. We are waking up from the dream and no longer living unconsciously. 

We are consciously awake in the dream.

As my experiences with Lucid Dreaming are limited, I won’t suggest how to start Lucid Dreaming intentionally, but I highly recommend this book: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics. When reading the book, I had three Lucid Dreams, and was a straightforward and enjoyable read.

“Lucid Dream Tea,” also known as Sweet Gale or Myrica Gale can improve your ability to Lucid Dream. I like to drink this tea right before bed, and while I don’t know if it has improved my ability to Lucid dream, many others have said it helps. I have noticed, though, that when I drink it, I tend to have more vivid dreams.

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Intentional Healing in the Dream World

The final piece I’ll share about healing through the dream world is to be intentional in your healing practice. Commit to learning more about yourself and the world through your dreams. When you are going through hard times in your waking life, set the intention to receive guidance and healing through your dreams. Similar to the practice of recalling your dreams by speaking aloud, before you go to sleep, say, “I set the intention to receive healing and guidance through my dreams.” 

Open your mind, body, heart and soul to the tremendous healing power you hold within you and your ability to heal through the dream world.

Sweet dreams and happy healing, 

With lots of love, 
Megan xo 

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I only send occasional emails with new blog posts or other relevant healing information to support you.