What is the Purpose of Dreaming and How Can I Use Dreams to Improve My Life?

As our body rests in deep sleep, our subconscious mind attempts to process the events of our lives. Scientists say this a critical phase for storing information into the long term memory centers of our brains.

I believe that as we struggle with the events in our lives, dreams offer us a glimpse into our higher awareness, processes that are active without us thinking about it.  You may even call this subconscious self-programming.  We relate events and situations within our lives to those we have experienced in the past, thus many elements of our existing current dreams have re-occurring events, objects and people that resurface from our past.

Once you have achieved an emotional balance in your life, putting away stress and worry, I believe these dream processes become balanced, perhaps to the point that dreams you may recall are no longer registering to you that you are in fact still having dreams when you sleep at night.  If this is true, then it is possible that by psychoanalyzing your own dreams, it could point to areas within your life that you can focus on to improve, thus creating a deeper sense of balance and self awareness.  In other words, getting to know yourself.

You can begin this process through a dream journal.  It is as simple as keeping a notepad and pen close to your bed.  As you awaken, jot down what dreams you remember.  Another step I would recommend is to find a website that will allow you to keep an online journal that allows the use of keywords such as Blogger. Set your privacy settings so that only you can see it or if you choose, share entries with others that you trust to help you review them.  

With the keyword feature on a digital dream journal, you can create a catalog of dream elements that resurface again and track them.  For example, if you have dreams regarding "John", you could simply set up a keyword for every journal post where "John" was an element of that dream.  As your dream journal grows, you can select the keyword "John" and see all relevant dream journal posts related to him.  This will also allow you to look at other keywords of those posts to see if other elements are present, such as "Running through Darkness".

With this type of cataloging, you can gain insight and understanding into how these elements are shaping your personality and discover new revelations for yourself.

Once you have worked through the steps of becoming aware of your state of being you can use dreaming as a way to bring balance into your life. I believe this allows us to open our perceptions with how we are connected with others through empathy.  When the storm within our own mind is calm, our visual awareness of others improves and we can clearly see new information about them that may have gotten lost in the haze surrounding us before.

Once we have mastered our understanding of the processes that occur in our dreams, we are better able to have a conscious relationship with those dream processes, also called Lucid Dreaming.  

Lucid dreaming is the condition of being aware of your state of dreaming while you are actively dreaming allowing you to change the landscape, theme, and elements of the dreaming state itself.  It allows you to control this nightly world that every one of us experiences.  In our dreams, we can become the heroes, soar through the skies and gain insight into the smiles of those we interact with in our waking hours.  You should create a keyword in your digital dream journal to track your lucid dreaming.  As you progress, you will see a pattern of the controlled process.

I am a big believer in this connectivity and relationship with those beyond ourselves.  I do believe that we have a spiritual empathy or insight that goes beyond the predefined five senses of our bodies.  For example, all of us are aware of the passage of time.  In addition, humans are the only species that are cognitively aware of their own mortality.

I believe that these connections can open our minds to premonitive dreaming, or clairvoyant insight.  From a scientific point of view, I would suggest that it may be possible for the mind in this dream sequence to be able to make connections and correlated analysis to construct a potential outcome scenario based on the relevance of what we subconsciously think about when planning our futures.

I also believe that we have a connection to everything and everyone, a higher consciousness that goes beyond ourselves.  Some may call that One Source energy or Universal Consciousness, perhaps even God.  No matter how you view the concept, it is definitively true that with a clear and balanced mindset, we can gain premonitions regarding upcoming events into our lives.  And I also believe that as those events unfold and we become validated in our understanding, this allows for us to have a subtle shift into conscious precognitive awareness, essentially meaning that everyone is "psychic" and has the potential to improve their own abilities.

Being psychic is different than mysticism.  Based on this explanation of how dreams can be used to influence and guide us, this awareness is a natural ability, not supernatural or extra sensory.  Although people have made astounding claims regarding getting information from the Unknown to exhibit showmanship, this does not discredit the natural ability that is innate to all of us.  Perhaps it is a gift.  It could be a curse.  In the end, it is how you program yourself and how you use it that makes the difference.