Other People in Your Dreams

There are many ways to correctly interpret a dream and the more you work with yours, the more comfortable you will be at knowing which style to use for a particular dream. It's a lot like cooking. If you have beautiful, vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes you will want to do the least amount of preparation in order to fully enjoy their delicious flavor. Maybe just slice and top with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and a bit of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Yum! But if the tomatoes are a few days past prime, you might enjoy them more if you chop and cook them into a light sauce for pasta. And if you have tomatoes today...you need to throw them out due to the salmonella scare. Yikes! One method of dream interpretation is the Fritz Perls, gestalt method, wherein everyone and actually everything in your dream is a reflection of yourself. So I recently had a dream with my daughter in it. I could look at the dream to see if it is a message for me about her or about our relationship. I could ask myself what she represents to me in terms of adjectives: youth, great handle on life, sensitive, lovely...or I could look at her as an aspect of myself. That method fit my dream best, my daughter often represents the part of me that I gave birth to myself, the self-actualized part evolved from "doin' the work" as they say. Looking at myself objectively to claim the aspects I choose and discard or change the parts I don't. I call it Pecking Out. Based on the life of a bird, first born by its mother in the shell and then it does the work of pecking out of the shell to be a whole free creature. When we observe the shell around ourselves we might see things that were applied to us before the age of conscious memory: they could include your religion, political party affiliation, things adopted from your family...and even things like "she always was the quiet one." You get to observe and change your definition of self, weighed against what I call your gut meter. What is really true for you? So, my daughter often represents my soul or spirit or true self in my dreams. In this dream she signed me up to teach aerobics at a gym. I was in an unfamiliar town and an unfamiliar home. I said, "Well, I've never taught aerobics before and it's been a long time since I've taken an aerobics class. But I've got the right shoes and once the music starts I'm sure I can help everyone get a good workout." My interpretation: In my waking life I have taught many things, from Sunday School to Modeling, Past-Life Regression to Writing the Story of Your Life. So I see this dream as a message from my true self, I have the shoes or tools to lead a group in a healthy activity and the people will be satisfied. So go for it! Teach or lead a new thing, it will help people. I hope my blog encourages you to pay more attention to the wonderful guidance your dreams can be for you.