The other day a client came to me with anxiety over the dreams she had been having lately. They were unpleasant dreams about family members, both deceased and alive and left her scared to go to sleep each night. That got me to thinking more about dreams and what they are trying to tell us. I am not a dream analysis, but I will share what I believe and what I know from personal experience and from others experience.
Your Dreams are Trying to Tell You Something?
I truly believe that most of our dreams are not only trying to tell us something from our unconscious, but that they are actually trying to help us understand something. They are also often related to something that happened during the day. Perhaps an unpleasant interaction we had with someone and didn’t really give it much conscious thought, but our subconscious held on to it for whatever reason. As a matter of fact, unresolved issues, feelings and situations play a major part in our dreams. If you are angry with someone and haven’t dealt with it, that anger and those thoughts can find their way into your dreams and play themselves out.
Also certain things like smells or sounds can trigger things in our subconscious that play out during our dreams. Maybe you smelled a hint of a fragrance that reminded you of an old flame and you didn’t give it a second of conscious thought, but later that night you find yourself dreaming about him or her.
The bad part is that our dreams are often complicated, fuzzy or confusing which makes it hard to analyze some of them, but the feeling you have when you wake up from a dream is usually the key to understanding what the dream is trying to tell you and help you with. Did you wake up angry, sad, scared? That is usually the key to what the dream is trying to show and help you with.
Also, something I learned in a graduate school is that many dream analyst believe that EVERYTHING in the dream is YOU. They believe that if you dream about a dog getting hit by a car it was running away from, that it could mean you are afraid of something within yourself and are trying to run away from it. Interesting isn’t it?
Even bad and scary dreams are trying to help us understand or show us something. Lucky some dreams aren’t confusing and are quite easy to understand. Because dreams can be so fleeting and eluding, it is a good idea to keep a dream journal next to your bed so that you can capture those dreams while they are fresh and analyze them later.
Licensed Mental Health Counselor 
Interesting. Dreams definitely seem to be a portal into our subconscious minds. I’m not sure about the theory that everything we dream is “us,” though. If something we smell reminds us of somebody we used to know, I don’t think everything we dream about them correlates to how we feel about them. For example, we could be experiencing subconscious thoughts about unicorns, and as a result dream about said person riding a unicorn. I think that dreams are more often a mishmash of random thoughts than accurate expressions of our feelings.
Hi, thanks for reading, commenting and sharing your thoughts. The theory that everything in the dream is “us” is definitely something I’ve heard more than a few times and I try to use it when analyzing dreams and it doesn’t always pan out so I kind of agree with you. Sometimes our dreams are so random, and like you said, a mishmash of random thoughts that it’s hard to try to find accurate meanings and feelings in all dreams, but I think maybe reoccurring dreams are the ones that best lend themselves to deeper analyzes since obviously your subconscious is holding on to it for one reason or another. Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback and sharing your point of view.