These Dream Answers help to illuminate the most commonly asked questions about dreams and dreaming.

Your dreams may often appear to be completely nonsensical but they are answering questions for you that you are not even aware that you are asking. From questions like ‘How can I be more confident?’ to ‘How can I really express my needs?’, your dreams can provide the most honest and practical answers.

However, the answers that your dreams provide for you are not always immediately obvious. Rather than using conventional words and grammar, your dreams to speak to you in the language of imagery and metaphor. This is like a foreign language that you learned at school but have forgotten how to speak through lack of use. We all have a natural understanding of these images but often need to reacquaint ourselves with their meanings.

Your unconscious draws on a wide range of imagery when it creates your dreams. These images are not random but have accumulated meaning over thousands of years of human development. For example, when you dream of water, you are reflecting on your feelings and past experiences in waking life. We can hear these images in everyday phrases such as ‘floods of tears’, ‘feel it in my water’, ‘welling up’ and so on.

Even though your dreams can give you deep insights and widen your awareness, it can sometimes be difficult to remember them. You naturally tend to forget your dreams so that you can quickly adjust to your waking reality. However, there are a number of steps you can take to help you remember your dreams.

First, as you lay your head on the pillow, ready to fall asleep, say to yourself ‘Tonight, I will remember my dreams’. This will make you more likely to retain your dream imagery and experiences. Then when you do wake up, keep your eyes closed and try not to move your body for a minute or so.

This can be a challenge if you have to jump out of bed immediately or if you have children bouncing up and down on top of you! If you do have the luxury of lying still for a minute, then just allow any images and feelings from your dreams to drift into your waking consciousness. It may be difficult to see any images at first, so just concentrate on feelings. Are you feeling happy, anxious, exhilarated, frustrated?

As you become aware of your feelings, then imagery from your dreams should start to appear. These images may seem to be quite fleeting and vague to begin with but as you let them come into your awareness, you should be able to start to connect them together into a coherent dream recall. The more that you do this, then the more accustomed you will become to doing it and you will find that it becomes easier and easier to remember your dreams.

Although dreams can initially appear confusing and bewildering, the best person to interpret the dream is often yourself as you are closest to it. The first thing is that the dream isn’t happening to you; you are happening to the dream. Everything you experience in the dream is a reflection of some part of your own self.

For example, the characters in your dreams are aspects of your own character that you are projecting out into your own individual dreamscape. You represent these aspects by using real and imagined people from your waking life. If there is part of yourself that is constantly nagging you to do better then you will symbolise this by creating the character of someone who nags you in waking life. Perhaps your father influenced you with his calm and authoritative presence and so when you need to express some calm authority in waking life then your father will appear in your dreams.

As well as dream characters, you also create places, objects and events in your dreams. Your unconscious self takes on the role of film director and uses these as locations, props and plots to give a vivid voice to the messages that it is sending to you. The more you realise that you are in the person sitting in the director’s chair, the more sense your dreams will start to make.

The word dream has two apparently different meanings in our language. As well as being the unconscious stories that you create when you sleep, it also refers to your life’s hopes and aspirations. Although these seem to have no connection, your nightly adventures are constantly illuminating tangible ways of achieving your lifelong ambitions.

The easiest way to use your dreams is simply to start paying attention to them. They are overflowing with insights and answers that can help you in your everyday life. Even the scariest dream is only trying to help you resolve some frustration tension in your waking life so you can move on beyond it.

To help you get started on your dream adventures, here are the top ten dreams and brief explanations of their meanings.

1. Being chased
There is an issue in your waking life that you want to confront but are unsure how to do so. This issue is often a great opportunity for you to pursue a particular personal ambition. Although they may seem scary, your pursuers are actually bringing your attention to your unrealised talents in your own pursuit of fulfilment.

2. Teeth falling out
Your teeth symbolise how confident and powerful you feel, so some situation is causing your confidence to crumble in waking life. Rather than seeing this situation as something that will leave you powerless, just try calmly chewing over the facts and relish it as a challenge that you can really get your teeth into.

3. Unable to find a toilet
Toilets are what we use to cleanly respond to some of our most fundamental needs, so there is an issue in waking life where you are finding it a challenge to clearly express your own needs. This can often occur if you always spend your time looking after the needs of other people, rather than your own needs.

4. Naked in public
We choose our clothes to present a particular image to the people around us, so being naked in public suggests that there is a situation in waking life that is making you feel vulnerable and exposed. Although it might be potentially embarrassing, sometimes you just have to open up to others so they can see your real talents.

5. Unprepared for an exam
Exams are how we judge our ability to perform, so this indicates that you are critically examining your own performance in waking life. Rather than immersing yourself in endless self examination, the real test of your character is being able to accept your talents by celebrating your knowledge and achievements, instead of constantly judging them.

6. Flying
Being able to fly suggests that you have released yourself from circumstances that have been weighing you down in waking life. Although you may regard this feeling of liberation as just luck or coincidence, it is usually because you have managed to make a weighty decision or risen above the limitations of a heavy responsibility.

7. Falling
Feeling yourself falling in a dream indicates that you are hanging on too tightly to a particular situation in waking life, and need to relax and let go of it. Rather than being so concerned about losing control, sometimes you just have to trust in yourself and others by allowing everything to fall naturally into place.

8. Out of control vehicle
The vehicle represents your ability to make consistent progress towards a specific objective, so in waking life, you may feel that you don’t have enough control over your road to success. Instead of trying to over control the situation, relax your grip and allow your fundamental instincts and drives to steer the best path for you.

9. Finding an unused room
The rooms in a house represent different aspects of your character, so finding an unused room suggests that you’re discovering a talent that you were previously unaware of. The more time that you spend exploring your dormant talents, the more likely that you will find other doors opening for you in waking life.

10. Being late
Being late suggests you feel that you’re losing the opportunity to experience some sort of fulfilment in your waking life. This may be because you’ve been involving yourself in busy and sometimes meaningless activity, rather than committing to meaningful action. Until you commit to a decision, you will always find yourself hesitating and using your time ineffectively.

A dream is a story that you create to express your unconscious self. Although your unconscious is an area of your self that you are often unaware of, it drives most of your waking actions and needs. However as a rational human being, you tend to consciously filter out that wider awareness and usually only experience it when you dream.

Even though a dream just appears to be something that happens to you, it is an experience that you actually construct yourself by using your own creativity and ingenuity. From the sunlight glinting on a distant window to the bubbles rising in the champagne flute you are holding, you generate an entire world that vividly reflects who you are, where you want to go in life and how you can get there.

By becoming more aware of your dreams and how they express your unconscious awareness, you can bring them into the reality of your waking life and begin to live your dreams, rather than constantly searching for them. Dreaming is the most natural and powerful way for you to connect with your true purpose and potential.

We dream to remember who we really are and to understand who we can become. We dream to reconnect with all the talents and ideas that we possess but that we tend to neglect and ignore. We dream to play around with our potential futures and possibilities. Our dreams collect and connect all the remembered fragments of what we have experienced and what we hope to experience, and weave all those memories and hopes into a meaningful story.

Although our dreams are often dismissed as useless brain noise, they have been the inspiration for some of our most significant technological and cultural advances. The Theory of Relativity originated from a dream that Albert Einstein experienced where he dreamt that he was sledging down a snow covered hillside on a beam of starlight.

The melody to ‘Yesterday’, voted the most popular song ever, came to Paul McCartney as he listened to a classical string quartet playing in one of his dreams. As well as helping us to make artistic and scientific breakthroughs, we can use our dreams to discover our own gifts and express them in our own unique ways.