‘A professional dream psychologist for 30 years, Ian Wallace has made quite a reputation for himself as a regular and very popular radio and television guest, responding to listeners’ and viewers’ questions about their nocturnal imaginings and interpreting their dreams with an astonishing accuracy.

In this book he summarises the top hundred most common dreams and, by interpreting their meanings, shows how the reflect fundamental patterns of our waking life. If we know what they are trying to tell us, even the most unpleasant dream experiences, it seems, can offer a positive way of helping us work through problems and issues we face in our daily lives.

With general information before and after the dreams of themselves, this is a completely fascinating read’.

We dream for as long as we need to and if we are not getting enough good quality sleep or are taking sleep medication, then our dreaming activity will often be supressed. This results in a process known as REM rebound where we try to compensate for our lack of quality REM time by having even more dreams.

REM rebound is experienced by anyone who has been sleep deprived or has has been suffering from chronically poor sleep. Dreaming is a physiological necessity for us and in similar way to our response to dehydration or hunger, we will keep dreaming at a greater frquency than normal until balance is restored.

Dreaming ‘too much’ usually indicates that the dreamer is not getting enough relaxation in waking life and is probably having a lot of late nights and perhaps too many early starts. Their sleeping environment may be quite busy too, with laptops, phones and televisions intruding into their relaxation space. The quieter and more gadget free your bedroom is, the better the sleep you will have.

Here’s Rosie’s article from The Sunday Times.

When Steve Souza gets ready for bed at home in west London, he brushes his teeth, puts on his pyjamas and then places a wireless band around his head.

During the night, a small box attached to the front of the headband monitors minute electrical signals produced by his brain. It transmits the data in real time to a box resembling an alarm clock that sits on his bedside table.

In the morning Souza, 49, who runs a software company, wakes up and looks at the information on the screen beside him. It shows a breakdown of his night’s sleep: a graph detailing how much time he has spent awake, how much in deep sleep and, most important, how much time he has spent dreaming.

A year ago Souza read some research that identified a link between excessive time spent in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when we dream, and depression. “I was feeling anxious and stressed at work,” he says. “I read the research, and the descriptions matched what I was going through.”

Souza had bought the gadget, called the Zeo, to help his fiancée, who was a bad sleeper. He started using it himself and discovered that he dreamt for almost twice as long as the average person.

We usually spend about 20-25% of our total sleep in REM, or about an hour and a half. “I was consistently spending over 40% of the night in REM sleep,” he says. “Once I even reached 50%.”

Since then he has been using the technology to try to reduce the amount of time he spends dreaming. “It’s opened up great possibilities,” he says. “I have the ability to track my REM sleep. I’ve taken up meditation to try to lower my stress levels and reduce the amount of time I spend dreaming every night.”

Souza is one of a growing number of people making use of new scientific research that shines a light on what makes us dream, and why.

A Japanese study published by the American Psychological Association this month found that most people in their sixties dreamt in black and white, while the majority of university students dreamt in rich colour. Researchers surveyed more than 1,000 people, and only one in five of the over-60s recalled having dreams in colour. The researchers suggest this may be because they watched black-and-white television as children, whereas younger participants had grown up watching colour TV.

Ian Wallace, a psychologist and author of The Top 100 Dreams, is doubtful. “Although the dreams of older people tend to be less colourful, it’s not because they watched black-and-white TV,” he says. “A television represents a tiny part of the visual field and old viewers would have spent far less time watching television than we do today.”

There is a growing body of research providing us with solid evidence of what actually happens in the brain when we dream. Neuroimaging technologies show which parts are active during REM sleep. Two of the three main areas are the limbic system, controlling emotion, and the anterior cingulate cortex, with which we carry out decision-making and problem-solving when we are awake.

Robert Hoss, director of the DreamScience Foundation in Arizona, says this explains why we dream: “We use dreams to process unresolved emotional issues and solve problems.” Which could explain why Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the plot for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in his sleep and Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the tune of Yesterday running through his head.

The other part of the brain that remains active is the visual association cortex. Hoss says: “It isn’t the visual cortex, the part of the brain that actually allows you to see. Instead it allows us to make visual associations of what is going through our brains, so dreams are picture metaphors of what we feel.”

These metaphors reveal some surprising truths. Wallace, who has been analysing dreams for more than 30 years, says many of the notions about dreaming are wrong. One is that older people are more likely to dream about death. “Young people, when they become aware that they will one day die, start to weave death into their dreams,” he says. He believes that death in a dream is a metaphor for transformation: “People use it when they are leaving something behind and starting something new.” For this reason he has found that young people, in particular teenagers, are more prone to morbid dreams, while older people, who are more accustomed to death, dream about it less.

Another misconception is that we stop dreaming about sex as we get older. Wallace says sexual dreams aren’t about our relationship with others but indicate that we are learning something new about ourselves. “As people get older they indulge in sex less,” he says, “but when someone in the latter stages of their life gets really excited about something new, even though they think they’ve seen it all before, they start to have sexual dreams again.

“I have clients in their eighties and nineties who regale me with all sorts of sexual dreams that are actually quite scary. Because they’ve become aware of something new and it’s exciting them.”

In last year’s blockbuster film Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page were able to wander the streets in their own dream world, walking up walls and bending roads using strength of will. This was a very Hollywood expression of lucid dreaming, but it is one of the most exciting areas of dream research.

Brainwave measurements show that lucid dreaming is a stage between REM and being fully awake. In a normal dream the rational part of the brain is turned off. During a lucid dream it is active, so we are conscious and in effect “wake up”.

High brainwave frequencies, up to 40Hz, have been observed in certain parts of the brain during lucid dreams, which suggests a mental alertness not far from that when we are awake.

Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook University in San Francisco, is researching and developing ways that dreams, particularly lucid ones, can be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. Often those who have suffered shocking events relive them in nightmares. Krippner works with lucid dreaming to help them “change the ending” of such dreams and reduce the traumatic feelings.

Some dream research raises intriguing questions about consciousness. This month academics in Germany published a study showing that people born with disabilities dream as though in full health: paraplegics walk and run, and those born deaf or dumb can hear or talk in their sleep. The academics suggest that this supports the theory, first put forward by Carl Jung, that dreams tap into early patterns of our developing consciousness where these sensory and motor patterns exist, whether they become fully realised or not.

For Souza, the more people who monitor their sleep and dream patterns, the greater the chance of finding answers. In the meantime, he and his fiancée wake up every morning, turn off the alarm clock and look at the graph to see how long he has been dreaming. “My fiancée always checks to see if I’ve set a new record,” he says. “It can be fascinating, but above all it’s a lot of fun.”

Since starting work on this role, Dominic has been having recurring nightmares about Fred West. Dominic has shared his dream, recalling that ‘I have this recurring dream where I’m perched on a wall and Fred West is trying to grab me and pull me down.’

When we dream about a wall we are usually considering our personal boundaries in waking life. Being pulled down from a wall reflects Dominic’s concern that playing this role might cross some of his personal boundaries and make him feel depressed and down.

Actors and artists often dream of dead bodies and murders, even though they are not playing the role of a murderer or are working with morbid subjects.

Dreaming of murders or dead bodies usually suggests that an artist is trying to kill off some part of their own creativity, usually to please other people or to fit in to a group somehow. This act of trying to dispose of their unique talents can make them feel very guilty as if they had actually committed a murder in waking life.

The message from this dream is that rather than abandoning something that makes your life really worth living, you need to resurrect your neglected talent and bring it back to life. We may not all be great actors like Dominic but we all have unique talents that only we can bring fully to life.

After some reflection, I realised the best way to do this was to create a series of learning courses for people who are interested in working with the dreams of others and helping them actually put those dreams into action.

I also realised that, due to busy professional commitments, this was not something I could do on my own so I began to look for a potential colleague to help me put this particular dream of my own into action.

Of all the people who got in touch, either enquiring about courses or possible partnerships, one of them really stood out and that person is Clare Landon. Clare and I have been working together over the past few months, looking at ways to distil the experience of over 140,000 dream analyses into a powerful and engaging series of learning courses.

I am delighted to be working with Clare – it’s a really rewarding experience as she is a very fast learner and has a real talent for working with dreams! Here she is, introducing herself in her own words.

‘My interest in dreams has come from listening, sharing, following and connecting to my own dreams throughout my life, I have developed a passion for the insights, revelations and potential that can be achieved in our waking lives through gaining a deeper understanding of our dream messages.

Following my dreams has led me to study the American Indian Medicine Wheels, to practice as a homeopath and to become a singer, and now, I should have seen it coming, I have been led to work with dreams!

I am inspired by the way that Ian works and feel fortunate to be deepening my understanding with his guidance and experience and by connecting with you, the dreamer!’

Clare will be actively participating in working with your dreams and has already started to contribute by answering your dream queries in the ‘In Your Dreams‘ section. Welcome Clare!

Sonia has written a great piece here, and unusually for a modern journalist, she has shown a great deal of journalistic rigour in getting the facts right and also following up the interview with further questions for clarification and substantiation. Here is her article, in her own words.

We all dream
We have about five dream episodes per night. If you sleep for seven or eight hours you go through five sleep cycles, and in each of those sleep cycles you will dream for between 20 and 40 minutes. There are lots of theories about why we dream, but I believe that we do it as a method to understand all the information we unconsciously absorb during the day.

Remember, remember
The more we consciously remember our dreams, the easier it is to realise what they mean. When you turn the light off, say to yourself, ‘Tonight I will remember some of my dreams.’ When you wake up, as soon as you start to move you shift out of any dream state. Within five minutes 50 per cent of your recall will be gone, and within 10 minutes 100 per cent. Try and lie still for a minute. You will be amazed at all the imagery that starts coming back.

The top five
The most common dream is being chased, which means there is some issue you want to confront but lack the confidence to do so. The second, your teeth falling out, means you are experiencing self-doubt. The third is being unable to find a loo, which means you are always trying to look after the needs of others rather than yourself. Being naked in public means you are feeling vulnerable. And feeling unprepared for an exam is judging yourself too much.

And the rest
If you dream you are flying, you are freeing yourself from something holding you back. If you are falling, you need to relax and let go. Other common dreams are being behind the wheel of an out-of-control vehicle and being late (you feel you can’t fulfil an ambition and are missing opportunities); and finding an unused room in your house (an undiscovered talent)

Write down your thoughts
A dream log is a lovely thing to do and it doesn’t have to be massively detailed. All you have to do is jot down the main points of your dream. Even though each dream might seem very different, it will allow you to see patterns and give them context.

You are in control
Lucid dreaming is when you become conscious in your dream. As you are waking, tell yourself to stay in the dream for a while longer. Gradually you can begin to influence the dream. If you are being chased, you can change it so that you turn around and ask your pursuer what they want. This will help you realise what is troubling you in waking life.

Not all bad
A nightmare is a dream that has a higher emotional intensity and occurs when there are issues you are not dealing with. Your unconscious tries to get your attention by making your nightmare more vivid until you start attending to the issue. They are actually very healthy.

However, I was much less pleased to see that one of the ‘dream experts’ quoted in the article had supplied information from this website without my permission and without any attribution. The quote in the newspaper, published on June 21, 2011, reads…
‘The more you ignore those dreams, the more your unconscious turns up the volume – so a nightmare is that message on full volume,’‘ Ellis says. ‘Dreams are an incredibly valuable resource, which most of us simply ignore.’

A very popular page, Nightmares, on this website, published on December 9 2007, reads…
‘The more you try to ignore your nightmares, the more your unconscious turns up the volume, and so a nightmare is really just a normal dream on full volume. Your dreams are an incredibly valuable resource, which most of us simply ignore.‘

So The Independent, despite its title, doesn’t really seem to promote independent or particularly rigorous journalism. Perhaps it should change its name to The Dependent on Wikipedia and The First Page of Google.

As with most pieces on dreams, the journalist has been keen to add their own interpretations and facts such as ‘Over the age of ten we have four to six dreams per night. They can last from five minutes to half an hour’. This is not entirely true as childhood dreaming starts long before the age of ten and there is evidence that foetuses start dreaming during the third trimester of pregnancy.

However, with most popular journalism being drawn from Wikipedia or the first page of a Google search, it’s not surprising that rigorously researched facts are often overlooked in the journalistic process. Anyway, here is the unknown journo’s piece on The Top Ten Dreams.

Preparing to sit an exam we’re not prepared for, our teeth falling out, finding unused rooms in our houses – our dream world throws up bizarre and confusing images that make little sense. Yet, after analysing more than 100,000 dreams in my 30-year career as a dream psychologist, I’ve found there are ten dreams that recur the world over. They reflect fundamental life patterns and, by understanding them, you can see your life in a new light. Here’s a guide to the dreams we all have and what they mean…

YOU’RE BEING CHASED
DREAM: You find yourself being pursued by something or someone you feel is going to harm you. No matter how fast you run, or where you hide, you can’t escape them.

MEANING: Whatever is chasing you is an aspect of yourself, which is why you cannot escape it. It represents a part of you or a situation you are scared to confront.

ACTION: Identify what is causing tension in your waking life. It might seem easier to avoid it but, you need to be assertive and resolve it. Then, rather than being pursued, you become the one to chase your chosen opportunity.

YOUR TEETH FALL OUT
DREAM: You notice that some of your teeth are becoming loose and starting to fall out. Or your teeth crumble into powder. You might also be looking in the mirror and realise your teeth are decayed or that you have grown vampire fangs.

MEANING: You show your teeth when you smile and when you bite, so they reflect how self-assured and assertive you feel. Teeth falling out indicate that a situation is causing you to lose confidence. Crumbling teeth means your confidence is waning because you aren’t taking care of your self-esteem. Vampire teeth indicate you are relying on other people to provide your self-assurance.

ACTION: You should be more confident in whatever situation is challenging you. Rather than seeing the unknown as a threat, relish it as a challenge.

YOU CAN’T FIND A LOO
DREAM: You are desperate for the toilet. The only ones you can find are in strange places or in public view. You might find yourself in a queue and when you finally get there, the toilet is unusable.

MEANING: You have a need you are unable to express. Queuing means you are putting the needs of others before your own.

ACTION: You hope your needs will be met if you look after other people’s wants. But the best way to resolve this situation is to put yourself first. This may seem selfish, but it is much easier to look after other people’s needs when you attend your own.

YOU’RE NAKED IN PUBLIC
DREAM: You are surprised to find yourself naked in a public place and are making frantic attempts to shield your body. Everyone else is fully dressed but they don’t seem to notice your condition.

MEANING: You feel vulnerable and exposed, perhaps in a new job or relationship. No one sees your nakedness because you seem secure and confident to them.

ACTION: The dream usually indicates a positive and healthy progression in our lives, as we are being invited to step into unfamiliar territory and display our talents. If you are wary of opening up to people, you may appear cold. It might be nerve-racking, but express your true self without thinking about how people are judging you.

YOU’RE UNPREPARED FOR AN EXAM
DREAM: You are sitting an important exam but are shocked to realise you have done no studying. It’s too late to do anything and you are disappointed.

MEANING: Your lack of preparation shows you usually prepare meticulously for every task. You set yourself high standards and feel a constant anxiety that you will end up with a poor result. But it’s not others that are judging — it’s you.

ACTION: When you judge yourself too harshly, you will feel like a failure, no matter how successful you are. The best way to move on from this dream is to consider what makes you happiest and most fulfilled in life — this is often something joyous and spontaneous, which doesn’t require endless preparation. Now do it.

YOU’RE FLYING
DREAM: First you have the sensation of floating, then you soar into the sky and fly through the air. You have a tremendous feeling of exhilaration.

MEANING: You have been released from circumstances that were weighing you down. You are free of constraints, making you feel ‘as free as a bird’.

ACTION: Although you may regard this feeling of liberation as luck, you created the opportunity yourself. Consider other chances in your life where you could go off into the realms of new possibilities.

YOU’RE FALLING
DREAM: Everything seems normal, but then you suddenly feel your legs give way as you stumble and fall. Sometimes the fall is minor, other times you tumble downstairs or plummet off a cliff into a chasm.

MEANING: This signifies a fear of losing control. Falling suggests you need to let go of responsibilities that are dragging you down.

ACTION: This dream is often triggered by stress and so is encouraging you to take a more relaxed approach in certain areas of your life. Muscle tension can make you feel like you spend most of your day braced for impact. Try relaxing your muscles before going to bed.

YOU’RE IN AN OUT-OF-CONTROL VEHICLE
DREAM: You are in a vehicle that is spinning out of control. You desperately try to slow down because you are scared of crashing.

MEANING: You’re thinking about the path you are taking in life, usually in your career. While you may have a plan, circumstances are getting out of control. An imminent crash shows you are going to be in contact or conflict with something unavoidable.

ACTION: Rather than abandoning your present position, consider the areas where you do have control. Don’t be afraid to ask others for help; they can help you get back into the driver’s seat. Accept there are some situations over which you have no control.

YOU DISCOVER AN UNUSED ROOM
DREAM: You are walking through your house when you notice a door you haven’t seen before. You open it to find a room you had completely forgotten about.

MEANING: Homes in dreams symbolise ourselves and different rooms are aspects of our character. The unnoticed door indicates you have a chance to step into an exciting new possibility. The size of the room reflects the size of the chance.

ACTION: You might think you know your achievements and limitations, but you have talents you have yet to discover. Be open to even the most unexpected opportunities.

YOU’RE LATE
DREAM: You are on your way to an appointment and realise you are late. On the way you get caught up in obstacles and distractions. You keep looking at the clock and are alarmed at time passing. You feel as if you’ll never get where you need to be.

MEANING: You are worried you are missing an opportunity and that time is running out to carry out a plan, such as starting a family or achieving a career goal. The obstacles and distractions show you are procrastinating, that you have been filling your life with lots of other activities, but they are not getting you anywhere.

ACTION: Commit to meaningful action rather than involving yourself in meaningless action. Once a decision has been made, your direction will become clear and your time becomes your own, rather than being subject to the whims of what is happening around you.

As ever with these pieces, the comments are both fascinating and hilarious.

As I read through Soul & Spirit magazine I was intrigued to see ‘The Dream Interpreter’ page, written by Russell Grant. Although I have been working professionally with dreams for over 30 years and have analysed over 140,000 of my client’s dreams, I am always keen to check out different perspectives from other dream professionals.

However, the interpretations supplied by Russell (or more likely one of his minions or worker elves) are so old fashioned and inappropriate! One of the main reasons I wrote ‘The Top 100 Dreams’ was to help bring dream interpretation into the 21st century. Instead, it seems that Russell and his staff are drawing much of their information from the worst dream book ever written, Gustav Hindman Miller’s ’10,000 Dreams Interpreted‘.

Gustav started writing this book in the late 19th century and it was published in the very early 20th century, around about the same time as ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ by Sigmund Freud. The main reason that Miller’s ’10,000 Dreams Interpreted’ is still so popular is because it is out of copyright and so is very cheap to publish, rather than any of its content being of actual value to 21st century dreamers.

Rather than embracing more modern and valuable dream awareness, many people continue to churn out old fashioned analyses, not because they are useful and meaningful but simply because it is cheaper. As well as being used by ‘dream experts’ such as Russell Grant, Gustav’s book is also used as the basis for a wide number of woefully misinformed dream analysis websites such as Spirit Community and Dreams beds.

This willingness of publishers and ‘dream experts’ to stay in the past because it’s cheap, rather than embracing the future because it’s valuable, is one of the main reasons that most people are discouraged from exploring their dreams. This also often influences them to be less open-minded when exploring some of the other practices and perspectives described in Soul & Spirit magazine.

One unexpected bonus of doing this piece was the opportunity to read the comments left by readers. Most of the comments fell into three categories, which were:

1. A genuine interest in dreams and dreaming with shared experience and identified meaning. It was great to read these and help to expand a wider dreaming awareness.

2. A complete refutal of any of the meanings because they didn’t comply with specific religious beliefs or teachings. My approach to working with dreams is always entirely secular and although many great religious traditions have emerged from the dreams of their respective prophets, this can lead to confusion when applied out of context.

3. Unprovoked vitriol caused by the fact that most people are quite rightly fed up of ‘dream experts’ who have no academic training and often just make stuff up, claiming to be psychic or intuitive. Unfortunately, this results in genuine dream professionals being incorrectly branded as charlatans and general cynicsm about the power of working with dreams. The upside of this, though, is that these vitriolic comments are unintentionally hilarious and kept me laughing for days.

It was good to have this information published on Yahoo because Yahoo Answers is one of the poorest reference sources to go and ask about dreams. Everyone who replies seems to be an ‘expert’ but invariably provides some really bad information with little insight.

This super injunction prevents them from revealing the identity of another person, usually a celebrity or sports personality.

The meaning of these dreams is similar to the dreams reported about Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. Super injunction dreams symbolise carefully guarded secrets that may cause much discomfort if they are openly revealed.

For example, the dreamer may have a secret romantic crush on someone but they are embarrased about revealing their true feelings in case they are rejected. Instead of finding some way to get closer to their heart’s desire, the dreamer becomes increasingly defensive and guarded in waking life, often drawing more attention to themselves than if they had been honest and open in the first place.

When we dream, celebrities and sports personalities usually represent unrealised talents and powers that the dreamer has not fully realised in waking life. The super injunction dreams reflect how the dreamer’s concern about possible rejection may prevent them from ever realising their own hidden talents.

Like super injunctions, a fear of rejection can be a high price to pay  in order to try and keep our real talents a secret. Opening up to others and taking the chance to reveal our own talents and feelings, however, may prove a bit of revelation for others and open up lots of new opportunities for us in waking life.