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.

Although your dreams may seem like a stream of random imagery that makes absolutely no sense, you are just expressing yourself in a different and far more creative way. To understand why you are dreaming a particular dream, all you have to do is work with the imagery and emotion that you have experienced in the dream.

The images that you create in your dreams are your natural way of connecting what is happening in your inner world of imagination and ideas to your outer world of realities and facts. These connections from your inner world to your outer world are also known as symbols and identify where you can take meaningful action in waking life.

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.