Welcome to the Life You Lead While You Are Sleeping

Ever since the first man woke up yawning and stretching from his first sleep, dreams have intrigued mankind. Throughout history dreams have been considered everything from direct communication from the gods to important psychological insight. They can take the form of nightmares, beautiful love stories (which often include sexual fantasies) or distorted images that don’t seem at all connected. And sometimes they recur.

Though some insist they never dream, the truth is that everyone dreams every night. Five to seven times a night. Some of these nocturnal dramas last as long as an hour. And most of these fantastic, often delightful images are forgotten almost as soon as we wake up.

We get certain benefits from dreaming--stress relief, for instance--whether we remember them or not. But learning to remember them can help us to know ourselves better. Interpreting our dreams can give us the pulse of our inner health--mental, emotional and spiritual. Indeed, we know from sleep deprivation experiments that a nightly dose of dreaming is essential to our well being.

Dreams even have been known to offer advice regarding our physical well being. Several mind-body experts think our unconscious minds know the status of every cell in our bodies at any given moment. A dream about broccoli may be your mind’s way of suggesting that some vegetables be added to your diet when your body hasn’t been getting enough of them.

One woman dreamed she was eating honey all day, yet was very thin. In a second dream she saw a man starving to death. Soon after, the woman was found to have insulin-dependent diabetes, a disease involving the body’s inability to process sugar--which can result in severe weight loss.

Often, dreams take something that is going on in our lives and magnify it to be sure we recognize it. Sometimes through dreams we see creative solutions to our problems. “Why don’t you sleep on it?” isn’t just a bid for time. Taking a dilemma into a dream state can be like discussing it with a problem-solving think tank.

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Consider the story of Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine. He was struggling with a design question, how to attach a threaded needle. One night, he dreamed that he was captured by natives carrying spears. Each spear had a hole near the point, and the spears were raised up and down, threatening poor Howe as he stewed in the cannibals’ pot. He was in hot water, so to speak, troubled with his dilemma. But when he awoke, he remembered the image of the moving spears and applied their design to his problem: Putting the hole near the point of the needle would allow the other end to be attached to the sewing machine.

Howe is just one person who benefited from remembering and interpreting a dream. Most of us wake to an alarm clock and our feet hit the ground. We rush into thoughts of the day ahead, and, in the process, our dreams evaporate. But everyone can learn to remember his or her dreams.

Try waking to mellow music instead of an irritating buzz. Lie in bed for a few moments and ask yourself, “What was I dreaming about?” Jot down anything you remember. Make it easier by keeping pen and paper at your bedside.

If you wake during the night, go through the same procedure. Before getting out of bed to use the bathroom, get in the habit of asking yourself what you’d been dreaming about, and jot down what you remember.

Another tip: Before going to sleep, plant the suggestion in your mind that you will remember your dream when you wake up. Tell yourself, “Dreams are important to me and I will remember them.” Repeat this nightly and in a week or two you should begin to remember your dreams.

Even dream fragments can be of great assistance, so don’t get discouraged.

To interpret, ask yourself what each of the main symbols means to you. Your personal associations are key. I once had a dream in which someone in authority was calling me a radish! For me, it meant I was being called a loser, a less-than-nothing: I knew from working with weight-loss patients that radishes have minus 1 calorie.

If you’re stumped, just begin writing down words that you associate with the symbols in your dream. If you dream about grass, for instance, your list might include “green,” “spring,” “barefoot,” “itch,” “allergy” and so forth. Repeat this practice with every significant symbol in the dream and see where it leads you. It shouldn’t be long before you feel a sense of recognition.

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* Cynthia Richmond is a board certified behavioral therapist.