Ep. 3 - Dream Analysis For Self-Awareness

SHOW SUMMARY:

Dream analysis is a powerful tool for developing self-awareness, which helps us live more intentionally. In this episode, we’ll look at what dream analysis is and how to practice it by examining one of my dreams. We’ll also unpack the levels of consciousness in the human mind and introduce you to your inner egoic beast, which we all have. At the end, I'll share a simple way for you to experiment with analyzing your own dreams!

SHOW MAP:

• 1:40:  What is dream analysis? 
• 4:04: How T.H.E.  B.E.A.S.T.  inside all of us (ego) keeps us safe. Learn about it and why you don’t need to kill it to get rid of your limiting beliefs in order to be happy.
• 6:38: Learn the 5 levels of consciousness in the human mind before learning to analyze your dreams.
• 7:55: The subconscious mind is the part of our minds that makes decisions without our needing to actively think about them and often it does so without our awareness or involvement.
• 15:30: What does it mean to be awake, to live consciously and at a higher vibration?
• 17:00: Step 1 in the dream analysis process and a look at why brainwaves make it an important step
• 19:10: Step 2 in the dream analysis process
• 19:53: The dream! I’ll tell you about it so we can analyze it together.
• 24:42: Step 3 in the dream analysis process.
• 25:37: The context behind my dream, which helps us interpret it. Also “Your dreams are your subconscious mind’s way of processing things you are dealing with, recently or repeatedly.”
• 28:04: Why am I having this dream and how does grace factor into it?
• 31:18: Analyzing the dream and understanding the meaning of the symbols.
• 35:00: The big symbol in the dream and how it shows me that trying to figure things out isn’t the best way forward.
• 40:10: Step 4 in the dream analysis process.
• 43:27: The “in real life” 5x5x5 challenge to help you analyze your dreams.
  
  

WHAT TO DO NEXT:

• Take the 5x5x5 challenge and do your own dream analysis! Keep a bedside journal for 5 days. When you wake up each morning, spend 5 minutes capturing as many details as you can about the dream you remember.  Then spend 5 minutes picking out sections of the dream, finding the symbols, and guessing at what they might mean. If you have more time, break the entire dream into chunks and analyze each one. 

RESOURCES:

• Grab your free copy of the 4 Steps of Dream Analysis at https://flittersphere.mykajabi.com/lp-podcast-3-free-gift-jan-2022-1
• Join the conversation in the Flittersphere™ at https://www.facebook.com/groups/flourishinginmidlife

SPEAKERS:

Hostess SUZETTE CONWAY founded the Flittersphere™, a collection of courses, communities, and coaching programs, to support women 40 and older in creating a vibrant midlife! It’s a great time to shift things so you can release the burned out, angsty, restless feeling of living disconnected from what you are meant for and finally have the deeply satisfying life your spirit craves. Suzette started her company in 2017, bringing the wisdom of a 25-year career in corporate learning & development, a degree in communications, deep curiosity and a love of exploring the human experience, a nerdy obsession with positive psychology (the science of thriving!), a craving for Sparkable Moments™... and a determination to live vibrantly! This quickly turned into a mission of enabling better human experiences and helping women live more Sparkable Lives™!   From that, this podcast was born! Learn more and join the Flittersphere™ with the links below.

• Website: www.flittersphere.com/ 
• Ready for a coach? Book a consult
• Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/flourishinginmidlife
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/purplechickenlife
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flittersphere

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey there. Welcome to the Sparkable Moments podcast, where we have conversations to feed the soul! In this show, we explore the human experience using a mix of science, personal stories, random ponderings, and deep-end-of-the-pool discussions. I’m your hostess Suzette Conway. I’m a happiness coach and the creator of the Flittersphere, which is a community of women intent on crafting our most vibrant lives. This show is part of my mission to raise the world’s vibration and consciousness by creating better human experiences to change the world in beautiful and spectacular ways!  I’m so glad you’re joining me on the journey!  

Ok, be sure to stick around until the end of the episode today. We’re actually interpreting one of my personal dreams and I’m sharing the steps for how to do it so that you can apply it to your own life. And at the end of the show, I share a real-life experiment that you can try that only takes five minutes a day. You won’t want to miss it. It’s so much fun and so easy to do!

On today’s show, I’ll be talking about using dream analysis as a tool for developing your self-awareness, which is a foundational skill for intentionally creating your most vibrant life. 

Now, like the other Vibrant Living Tools™, I teach my clients, dream analysis is rooted in self-awareness because when you understand the workings of your inner mind and see the truth of yourself, you can use what you find to shift into higher states of being, where it’s easier to create the things you want in your life. 

So, what is dream analysis?  It is the process of examining and interpreting your dreams to gain clarity on things your unconscious and subconscious minds are processing, the things that may be hampering you in your conscious, daily activities. It helps you to see your underlying thoughts, and feelings, and assumptions, and beliefs, and so forth, so you can work with them and move past them as you address whatever issues need your attention in your day-to-day life. It’s a powerful tool for understanding the workings of your inner mind. Dream analysis is rooted in mainstream psychological techniques, and it was pioneered by psychologists like Carl Jung, who believed dreams were your mind’s attempt to communicate important things to you.   

But you don’t need to be a Jungian psychologist to interpret your own dreams. I learned it from my own therapist who was trained in Jungian methods. But it’s a skill you can learn, and I believe there is no way to get it wrong because the intent of it isn’t to get a perfectly correct answer to some deep-seated struggle. The intent is to practice self-awareness by asking the questions and being open to receiving insights that come from exploring your subconscious mind – all without making any of it mean anything about you. With dream analysis, self-awareness is both the skill you are practicing and the outcome you are creating. 

To understand this, it helps to have some knowledge of the levels of consciousness in the human mind, so let’s start with a primer on that! 

So, your conscious is your awareness that you exist and that things exist inside of you and outside of you.   

Your consciousness is knowing that you know you exist. It’s tied to how you understand and experience yourself and the world around you  It’s your inner life – it is your awareness of your thoughts, and feelings, and memories, and your awareness of your mental processes, like how you perceive stuff – which is taking in information, and identifying and ordering it, and assigning it meaning and value and that kind of stuff. Everyone perceives things and we all kind of have our own mechanisms for how we do that. So your consciousness is involved in how you perceive things. It’s also about being aware of how you learn, how you manage your attention. And critically, it’s the ability to be aware of that inner life – all of that stuff - and the ego that is part of it.

So, I call the ego THE BEAST. This is an acronym – T.H.E.  B.E.A.S.T.  – that represents your thoughts, your emotions, your beliefs, your experiences and expectations, your assumptions, your stories, and your strategies, the structures and habits that you use in life, and your triggers. And, yes, a beast can be a large scary monster, but it’s not trying to harm us. Its job is to protect us from dangers. That’s our ego’s job. Our mind sees danger as anything unpredictable or unknowable. Like wanting to start your own business or moving to a new country. In an effort to keep you safe from the dangerous unknowns of those experiences, the beast rises up and sends you thoughts like “I can’t do this.” “I’m not smart enough to figure it out.” “I don’t deserve it.” “See, I’m not allowed to have what I want - something always gets in the way.” These limiting beliefs are one tool of your ego’s efforts to keep you safe. Now your instinct may be to just kill the beast, to eliminate those kinds of beliefs and thoughts and stories, right, so it doesn’t get in your way of starting that business or moving to Paris. This is the goal of most self-help programs - to get rid of the limiting thoughts and feelings. But remember, the beast, your ego, serves an important function. And while it can be scary to look at, it doesn’t need to be killed. It needs to be befriended, it wants to be seen, and understood, and valued, and supported. So put another way, your limiting beliefs and habits, and feelings don’t need to be eliminated to ‘fix’ you. They are part of you and there is no need to deny or destroy any part of you. In fact, there is freedom and power in honoring all of ourselves, in seeing all the parts of us as valid and valuable, without judgment or labels, or fears. Befriending the beast is an essential tool in living a good life because your consciousness includes more than your awareness of your beast, it includes your awareness of how you and other people are influenced and impacted by the beast and how their influenced and impacted by your reactions to it. 

So, my personal coach has a saying that I just love. She says "Powerful people can look at the truth of themselves.”. And I’m gonna add to that. “Powerful people can look at the truth of themselves and use what they find to create vibrant lives.” Conscious living is a superpower.

Your ego isn’t the enemy. It’s a friend trying to help you, but you have to be willing to respect it and use it as a resource.  

Now that we know what consciousness is… let’s look at the various levels of consciousness in the human mind. We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up. It might help if you imagine an iceberg… we’re in the deep dark ocean and working our way up towards the bright, open sky.

At the bottom of the ocean is the unconscious mind is a collection, a repository of thoughts, urges, memories, and past events & experiences that we don’t remember. These things are outside our awareness but continue to exert an influence on our behaviors even though we’re unaware of them.  The unconscious can include repressed feelings and hidden memories, old habits, thoughts, desires, reactions… it’s a reservoir of things we find unacceptable or unpleasant or too painful, embarrassing, shameful, or otherwise distressing to consciously face.   

So, the unconscious mind is about information storage. The subconscious mind, the next level up, is about information processing. It records our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our experiences… it records our likes and our dislikes, our beliefs, and our values. And then, it determines our memories and it monitors the information all around us, deciding what to send to the conscious mind and what to store for later, and how deeply to store it. 

The subconscious mind is the part of our minds that makes decisions without our needing to actively think about them and often it does so without our awareness or involvement. This part of our mind is stuck in the past and usually unwilling to change. I love how it’s described in the book Awaken to Superconsciousness. Author Swami Kriyananda says the unconscious mind consists of “the unprocessed residue of thoughts, actions, and memories that are ever-present, but more or less unnoticed. They greatly influence the conscious mind, which doesn’t often realize how ungoverned by free will its decisions really are.” So, the subconscious has a huge influence on how we think and act when in the conscious state, it affects every aspect of our life, mostly without our knowledge. Something that’s key here is that those influences are from past actions and experiences and the structures & habits we have created from them. And what this means is that the ideas that come from the subconscious are old ideas. They are not new and creative. 

To me, the unconscious and subconscious sound a lot alike. I tend to think of it like parts of a computer that work together using the same raw materials. The unconscious mind is a database in which we store our thoughts and our feelings and memories and such. The subconscious mind is the processing chip and software that helps us use the information to help us function as we go about our daily life. Most of us are unaware that the chips and operating systems and databases are running in the background and impact everything we do in the computer. And if we are aware, we don’t likely understand all the technology and how it works. BUT.... we can learn to use the technology anyway, like our laptops or cars, even if we don’t fully understand the guts of it. We just need a willingness to learn and some enabling tools like a friendly user interface and a help system! Having the right tools and training makes all the difference!    

Ok, so that’s the unconscious and the subconscious. The next level is the preconscious mind. Freud says this part of the mind includes anything that could potentially be brought into conscious awareness. The preconscious mind acts like a security guard, controlling which information is allowed to enter into our conscious awareness for daily use. Preconscious memories are not the same as easily accessed memories, like knowing your way home. They are unrepressed memories that are no longer buried in our unconscious mind, that we can extract for a specific purpose at a specific time. It’s like if you have an experience of giving a presentation with spinach in your teeth. It was embarrassing and you don’t need that information to function each day, so you stored it away. And, then one day you pull it up into your conscious mind as a funny story you use to illustrate how telling someone the truth is better for them than ignoring the obvious for their own short-term comfort!  Or maybe it’s a memory of being rejected, which leaves you humiliated and feeling unlovable. You stuff that into your lower conscious mind but later you can pull it into the conscious mind when you are helping a friend through a similar situation. So, back to our computer analogy – a computer can store data in long-term storage like a hard drive where it maintains the data even if the computer is turned off… but it’s a little slower to retrieve the data. Or it can put it in short-term memory, where it holds onto its contents only when the computer is on and functioning, but in a way that it’s easier and faster to access, so it can but used when it’s needed, pretty quickly. It’s like the difference between saving a file to your hard drive or saving it into your clipboard so you can paste it into some other place. That’s your preconscious mind, it’s the clipboard.

 Your EGO, that inner beast we talked about, sits in these three levels of unconscious, subconscious, and preconscious. They are all beneath the water’s surface, beneath your conscious, aware mind.

A big part of living intentionally and fully is learning to surface things, to bring them up from the lower levels, into the conscious mind so you can be aware of them and actually use them for your own good.  

The conscious mind is what we operate with during our waking hours. It is our thinking, rational mind, it’s the part of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. Freud says it controls the thoughts, and the feelings, and the desires of which we are aware at any given moment. In our tech analogy, you can think of this as the files on your computer desktop! They are easy to see, and work with, and use for your daily needs. 

Above the conscious mind, at the tippy top of the iceberg, as we start to go into the clouds and the skies, this is your superconscious mind. It is heightened awareness that is above the ordinary range of attention. It is the source of our intuition; it is the wisdom we have before we engage reason and emotions. And it is the seat of our creativity. Tapping into it helps us discover unexpected solutions, create new things, and expand beyond what we think is possible. It is also known as the Higher Self. It can be accessed with tools like mantras or meditations that lift us into a peaceful and energetic state. English poet Alfred Tennyson wrote that the superconsciousness is a state where “individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being… a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind.” Oh, I just love that description. The superconscious mind is your future and holds all the information about your personal evolution. I like to think of it as the conduit between me and my divinity, or Me and God.  

Ok, so you have the unconscious and subconscious minds that focus on the past. The preconscious mind is the bridge from them to the conscious mind, which is in the present moment. And then the superconscious mind is future-focused, and it helps you evolve into your next best self, the next expression of your spirit. So, instead of lower consciousness stories and beliefs about what we can’t do, maybe what we are afraid of or ashamed of... the superconscious mind is full of possibility. Instead of memories of what was, it’s full of visions of what could be and instead of rational thinking, it holds the intuitive knowledge of how to create those possibilities. Instead of determining what we do it gives us room to decide for ourselves, to follow our spirit. Instead of monitoring information around us, it sends information to us for use in expressing our spirit in the world. Instead of influencing us, it reveals us. Instead of drawing on the past to create, we can use the superconscious mind to draw on the infinite future to create. And, instead of the unprocessed residue of our past, the superconscious mind holds the glittery light of hope and love. 

A primary part of the work I do in my own life and in helping my clients, is to make the unconscious and subconscious conscious… to surface them and be are aware of the things we suppress and why we suppress them, and how it impacts us… so we can understand, forgive, accept, let go…and heal. Then those things have less power and influence over us as we live our conscious daily life with a little more lightness. And then, from this place, we can tap into our superconscious, engage our intuition and spirit and create what we would love, with ease, and clarity, and joy. Doing this work helps us to have more choice and creative power in our lives. 

When I talk about being aware, awake, about living consciously… I am talking about being deeply connected to these aspects of yourself. It’s about seeing them clearly and without judgment so you can use them as tools to serve your highest good.  Living from a higher energy, a higher vibration, is living a conscious life in which you see the truth of yourself – the dark and the light –  the struggle and the power!  AND it’s about having the will and skill to shift from a lower functioning space like being triggered and reacting in a way that causes harm… into higher spaces where you can see you are triggered, you can explore it, and you choose how you respond based on the outcome you want for yourself and those around you. Living consciously helps you to act intentionally instead of reacting instinctively, which is a foundational skill for creating a happy, fulfilled, healthy life. 

So… that’s the overview of levels of consciousness. Now, let’s go back to today’s main topic of dream analysis, which is based on the belief that just like THE BEAST, dreams are messages from our subconscious, they are signals of things to pay attention to. Dream analysis is a tool to help us grow and evolve. 

So, recently I woke up from a dream that really stressed me out. It gave me a headache and left me exhausted like I’d used up all my energy doing whatever I was doing in the dream. I also woke up feeling like this soft sense of fogginess in my brain and I knew if I didn’t capture the dream immediately I would lose it - it would fade into the ether of my rational mind and the upcoming day.  So, I immediately went to my desk to write it down.

This is step 1 in the process. Write your dreams down as soon as you wake up. This isn’t about interpreting the dreams yet. It’s about capturing as much detail as possible. Most of us don’t remember all of our dreams and that’s ok. So, when you do remember them, make sure that you capture everything that you can recall. I don’t do this with every dream, but if it’s a long dream, a detailed dream, a really strong dream that leaves an impression on me and lingers in my awakened mind… I pay attention to it and I write it down. Doing it right away matters… before you engage with other thoughts and activities and people. This is because when we dream our brain is using theta brainwaves, which are dominant in deep meditation or in sleep. In theta, we dream with vivid imagery, and intuition, and information found beyond our normal conscious state of being awake. Theta brainwaves are our entryway into learning, memory, and intuition. In this twilight state, we are removed from the outside world, and we focus on signals that come from within. So upon waking up we quickly move from that theta state into alpha waves, which is the resting state for the brain. It’s the state that we experience when we have a sense of being present, in the here and now. It’s this calm alertness. And from alpha, we move to beta waves, which dominate our normal waking state when we’re alert and attentive, and engaged in problem-solving, and making, and focused mental activity.  If you don’t capture your dreams while you’re in the theta state, you quickly move into faster brain wave states and shift into thinking about things other than what was in that dream. And those things that were in your dream start to feel ethereal, like a fog, and they kind of slip between your finger and float away, so you have to capture them. 

So, I’m going to share the dream and how I broke down the symbols in it and connected it to what I was processing in my life recently. Whether you’ve ever analyzed your own dreams or not, I encourage you to listen to the whole episode so you can get some ideas for how to do this in your own life. There are sure to be some spectacular aha moments, Sparkable Moments™. There always are when we look for them!    

And that is step number 2 in the process - Be willing to look for symbols in your dreams and create meaning from them. This is a mindset moment. A choice. We make up everything in our heads all the time anyway. We decide what things mean and what it says about us and the world around us. So, we can use that skill intentionally to make up what the symbols mean for YOU. Just take it all in, find out what meaning you're giving something. If you think it doesn’t mean anything, give it meaning. Just make it up, right? Even if it doesn’t make sense to you, follow that flow of thoughts all the way through to the end and you’ll have it in your conscious mind for later if you need it, and if it doesn’t make sense, you can dismiss it. But this is the time for you to capture it.

So… let me tell you the dream and then I’m gonna break it down for you.   

So, I was driving back from my hometown, in this dream, and I was on a road that I had been on a thousand times. My sister and her daughter were in the car with me. Everything around us was familiar and comfortable and easy. Then we drove on a bridge to cross a river that I always cross as I return home. And suddenly, on the other side of the bridge, everything was unfamiliar territory. The scenery had changed, the road was a scary, steep, downward hill. I didn’t know where I was or how I got here but it wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was not my planned route home and I felt very out of control. I frantically pulled out the GPS trying to figure out where I was, but it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t find our current location or type in a destination. We were lost big time. It didn’t occur to me to stop and assess or even to turn around… I just kept driving forward, hoping to find my way. Finally, we came upon a town, and right off the main highway was its town center. It was bustling with people all around this really pretty courthouse. It was like there was a fair going on. Everyone was happy and running around and having fun, and moving from craft tables to food tables, and in and out of the buildings… like they didn’t have a care in the world. My sister and niece went to find us some food and drinks and I sat at a picnic table under the tree, next to the courthouse, facing the main highway. I took out the GPS again. The screens would automatically maximize and not let me minimize so that I could move the window around and manipulate what I was looking at. I would click in the text box and not be able to type anything – it would just come out as gibberish and no matter how hard I tried, nothing worked. I tried to pinch the screen so I could see the larger area on the map and reorient myself to where we were compared to where we wanted to be. And nothing worked.  

I was growing increasingly frustrated. I was swearing, and getting angry, and throwing the devices on the table… and my family came back with smiles on their faces, drinks in hand, and saying they were going to explore the area. They didn’t even notice that I was struggling. And when they finally did, they didn’t understand why, and clearly, they didn’t care.  I was left on my own, left to my own devices to figure this out. As I kept trying to make the GPS work, and I kept growing angrier and more scared and more desperate, the time was flying by. And I had assumed that other people would start to be worried if we didn’t arrive home as expected, so I was getting anxious. I decided to go find my sister and my niece, but I was also trying to keep up with all our things that we had taken out of our cars, like our sweaters, and devices, and purses, and whatnot. My family had just left them there with me to manage. I put them in a secure place and went off looking for my family and found them in a group of people. They were laughing and watching others do something that I couldn’t see. Everyone had formed a circle around whatever it was they were watching, and I came up from behind but was left on the outside. I tapped my sister on the shoulder, and I told her that we needed to go; we need to figure out how to get home. But she didn’t want to leave. They were having fun.  So, I went in the building and continued to try to get the GPS to work, but it wouldn’t. I was near tears, I was frustrated, I was scared. I knew I couldn’t get us back home and I thought that we would be stuck here forever in this strange town where we didn’t belong, in the wrong place, not the place we were meant to be going.  I tried to get our stuff and go back to the car but now I couldn’t find our things. And then, at that moment, a strange man came up and asked what the problem was, but he didn’t really seem interested. It was like he was humoring me because he knew the truth was that we would never get out of here and we were kind of stuck. I finally made it back to that picnic table and tried to breathe and collect myself. And when I looked up to the main highway, I saw a sign telling me what town we were in and the highway number. I instantly recognized it and got so excited, because I knew how to get home from here. I didn’t need the GPS. I knew my way. So, I ran to get my sister and my niece and said that we could go home. It was tough to get them to come with me, but I did. We piled all in the car and drove off toward home. It was all ok. I could breathe again. I exhaled and relaxed and enjoyed the drive, certain in the knowledge that I was on the way home, and on the right path. Then I woke up. 

This dream is full of stress and struggle… and it’s full of symbols for me to unpack and learn from. I’m going to move through the symbolism quickly and, I’m not going to cover absolutely every little thing, but I want to give you a sampling of how I made the symbols in this dream mean something, and then you can try to notice the themes and key concepts that pop out.

So, you’ll notice that as I go on, my ego, that B.E.A.S.T. inside of me, gets more desperate, bringing out all its old greatest hits, the stories, and beliefs, and assumptions, and fears, and expectations that I have… all in an effort to keep me still and not growing and creating. That’s its job. Safety and efficiency. And it was on full safety patrol here. 

So this is step number 3. This is where you’ll actually interpret the dream. Break that dream down, after you wrote it all down, into a few sentences at a time so that you can look at each chunk of the dream and find the symbolic meaning of it. Consider this through the lens of your ego - what stories is your ego telling you in the dream? How are you defining yourself – are you smart or incapable? Strong or weak? Free or trapped?  Look at the assumptions and the fears that are present in the dream. You’ll know these things when you see them… they’re your stories, you’re your assumptions. They’re going to be familiar to you if you’re open to seeing them. So, choose to receive the awareness of them and the ease of finding them and they’ll jump at you. Before you start this, take a deep breath and set the intention to make a connection between what you are experiencing in your life, either recently or repeatedly, and the symbols that show up in your dream. 

Your dreams are your subconscious mind’s way of processing things you are dealing with, recently or repeatedly. 

Let me give you some context for my dream before we break it down.

So, lately, I’ve been judging myself a lot for not using my creative tools consistently, for not being able to form habits as well as others, as easily as others, and for abandoning and half-assing my experiments over this past summer. These experiments were obvious structures that I got intuitively to help me create things I wanted in my life… better health, this podcast, a book I’ve been working on… and to help me reconnect to my creative process. And I abandoned all of them. 

Add to that the ongoing stories in my head that I’m failing at life and will have to go back to the way things were many years ago because I am not a good enough creator, or writer, or business owner, you name it.

I’ve been questioning why it is taking so long for my dreams to come fully into existence and why I’m not where I want to be when everyone around me seems to be succeeding with ease.

On top of all that, I’ve been telling myself that I’ve already settled back into my old life in many ways - but without any of the perks. I am still developing learning experiences for corporate clients. But at a lower pay and with no benefits and no stability.

Now, the important thing to note here is that these are just stories. They aren’t objective truth. It’s what my mind has decided based on my past experience s and my ego is throwing it up at me a lot lately because, the truth is, I actually am creating the things I want. But I’ve been feeling the pressure of these old stories instead of using the Vibrant Living Tools™ to process through them and see the truth of what I’ve been creating.

Another truth is that I actually enjoy that learning & development work and it has always factored into my vision in terms of how I form my business. It fits the vision I have for this period of my life and it’s what I’m choosing. So, the truth is I am creating my coaching programs and the podcast and a life with more freedom than I used to have. But in my ego, I see it as me being very far away from the dream I set out to create years ago. In a dysfunctional way, it actually spurred me to take action. All of this angst caused me to start sharing what I was creating with people, the podcast, the book. I talked publicly about a lack of bravery. I'm playing with new ideas and creations all the time. And this stuff serves me in moving my dreams forward.

So why the dream? Why is my subconscious mind tormenting me? I’m DOING this life, aren’t I? What more can I want?  Well, the truth is, I haven’t been in it 100%. I slip out of it sometimes and I stay out of it for long stretches.  I’m not using my creative tools consistently so there should be no surprise that I wake up in my old life. Even though the truth is, I’m nowhere near my old life, really. It’s all just stories. 

This is a lot of stuff to carry around in my psyche. It’s exhausting. And even though I pushed through this mess recently and moved forward with those creations… it came with some struggle, which shows up as resistance, avoidance, psychological pain, and self-sabotage, even things like throwing my back out and running late to things and warping my schedule so that I’m working late into the night. It’s all struggles, struggles, struggles. 

Now, I tell you all this not to say “woe is me” or even to criticize myself. I share it knowing there may be some of you out there who may think “gosh, she really isn’t good at this, how can she possibly teach anyone to create this great life if she can’t.”  I share this to show you that having grace for yourself is a creative skill. When you are creating the life you want, evolving into the next level of you, you don’t need to be a perfect creator. Perfect doesn’t really even exist in any way. It’s a myth. 

 Awareness, intention, and intuition are the actual skills you need. In all of what I just described and in the dream .. notice what I’m noticing. I SEE what I’m doing by disconnecting from my vibrant living and creative practices. I see the impact that it has on me. I HEAR my old stories coming up. And I KNOW these are egoic strategies at work. My ego’s goal is to keep me safe by not letting me grow into my next level, which it sees as dangerous.  And it is this awareness that allows me to consciously, intentionally shift into a different, non-egoic state. That is the mastery. Awareness, Intention, Intuition, Shift. Repeat. There is no need for perfection anywhere in that.

See, I no longer believe I need to fix myself. None of us does. I’m not even sure it’s possible to fully eliminate old beliefs and strategies. But I can augment them with new agreements, and new strategies, and new tools that serve my highest good, my true nature, and purpose. I can function from a space that allows me to fully express my spirit in the world. And I can do it, not in spite of my imperfection, but because of it. It is because I embrace my imperfection that I can orient myself in my current reality and compare that to the vision of what I truly want and then ask my intuition for obvious actions and insights to help me get to my vision. If I think I’m perfect, there is nowhere else to go, I sit still. And if I wait for perfect to take a step, then I never move, because perfect doesn’t exist. So, either way, pursuing perfect doesn’t lead to the outcomes I want. The power is in USING my imperfection as a tool. Embracing it allows me to have grace for myself and to identify opportunities for growth and creation and joy… and then shift and function from a higher space and energy. 

Bearing all that in mind, let’s take a look at the dream and the symbols in it. Ok, so I’m just gonna break out some chunks of this dream.  In the begin

In the beginning of it, I was driving back from my hometown and everything was familiar and comfortable. And this is a really obvious symbol, right?  The familiar and the comfortable and easy it’s how my ego likes things to be because it’s safe.  

And then, of course, we go right over the bridge and things suddenly get really scary and unfamiliar. Well, a bridge is an obvious symbol of crossing from one state to another, from one place to another, one skillset into another, one set of feelings, experiences… into something else. And that’s exactly what I was working on in my life and it’s what my subconscious mind and ego were trying to show me, like “oh, don’t cross that bridge, it’s too scary.” Their job is to take me back into the comfort and the happiness of being where I was and to teach me that leaving my comfort zone isn’t safe or desirable.

And then, of course, when I crossed that bridge, the scenery changed. That hill was really steep and scary. This corresponds to the work I’ve done in recent years. My world has changed drastically. I changed almost everything about my life, and it’s been scary at times, and I’ve come up with some steep learning curves and I’ve been afraid at certain points in my journey. But lately, I’ve been having lots of anxiety, more than normal, in addition to that fear that comes from changing things. And I’ve been feeling like I’m spiraling downward in this unstoppable momentum, sort of completely losing control of my life. I believe this is because I’m actually leveling up. The dreams I have in my life are bigger and bolder and the skills I have to enable my willingness and ability to act on them. My ego knows this. Change is happening and doesn’t like it.  This time in my life is a chance to see the change coming, and accept that it’s scary, and choose to do it anyway because it expresses my spirit. One of my mentors, William Whitecloud, says we need to be vulnerable and accept the risks of being a creator and live fully. I love that this dream and this bit of the scary downward hill is a perfect example of that. Yes, crossing the bridge, into new dreams, leveling up, trying new stuff, is scary. But I want to create my life, which means I have to accept the risks and do it anyway. Otherwise, I stand still and I’m not actively creating my life. I become a victim and let it happen to me.

So, the next bit of the dream was that I didn’t know where I was or how I got here but I knew I didn’t want to be there, and it was not my planned route home and I felt really out of control. This just mirrors that I was in my day-to-day life, my awake life, feeling very lost and uncertain and out of control. It aligns with how I’ve been feeling in recent weeks and it’s commonplace that my ego goes to take me out when I’m leveling up. So, as I do things and get better and better, as I was working on launching this podcast, outlining the start of my book… my ego kind of goes “ow, whoa, holy cow, we don’t want those things. So, here’s how I’m gonna take you out. I’m gonna start making you doubt yourself, I’m gonna have you feel out of control. Things are gonna happen that you’re gonna feel you can’t do anything about. And in that way, you’ll pull back and resist a little bit. And my dream was showing me that in a different way, trying to help me see that I was not functioning as well as I could function because of that sense of feeling lost and out of control. And the truth is, there isn’t any right way to do things. I think there’s some right way and I had to control it. But there is no “right way”. We all have our own journey and our own gifts and abilities. And we all have our own way, what’s true for us. But that wasn’t what my dream was showing me. It was showing me fear and the impact of fear so that I could see the impact that fear was having in my life and how it was holding me back.

So then, of course, the big symbol in the story is the GPS and me frantically trying to pull it out and figure out how it would work and why it wouldn’t work… and I couldn’t get anything around the technology to work. Well, “figuring it out” is an egoic tactic. Looking for the “right way” or “how” to do something, doesn’t work as well as finding the intuitive way that’s true for you, that’s obvious… just the very next thing you need to do. And not looking inside myself for my own truth is what causes me to feel lost and panicked. I get disoriented when I don’t refer to my own internal GPS. And in this case, I wasn’t doing that, I was referring to an external GPS. MY coach calls the GPS a Genius Positioning System, which I just love. The symbolism here is that I was looking at external guidance instead of going inside to myself.

So, this is another big thing in the dream. It didn’t occur to me to stop and assess or even to turn around… I just kept driving forward, hoping to find my way. One of the things I’ve learned in my life over the last few years is that “hope” is not a strategy. It is not the same thing as connecting to your genius and looking for ways to move yourself forward.  

And the other things that are jumping out at me from this part of the dream is that pausing is a powerful tool. When we give ourselves a minute to get into the gap between a stimulus and a response, it’s the key to acting intentionally, to responding rather than reacting. It’s the key to mature choice. And so when I’m in crisis like I was in this dream, the answer isn’t to keep moving forward and hope everything just works out okay and just ignore the crisis. The answer is to pause a moment and connect with myself and look at what I want and then act so that it’s intentional.

The other part of this, of course, was that I considered turning around, but I didn’t. and the truth is, sometimes we need to go back to go forward.  We need to relearn things or look at it from a different perspective or position. We might need to go back to trusted tools for safety for a little while. Sometimes we slip into old habits and we need to go back to what is working and away from those old coping mechanisms. When we’re creating our dreams and creating the life we want, it’s rarely a straightforward trajectory. There are lots of side trips and backward and forward movement. It’s a normal part of the creating process. And in this dream I was not allowing myself to pause nor was I allowing myself to turn around to look at things from a different perspective, to get off the beaten path. I just kept driving forward. And that represented this mindless, stubborn use of old methods of coping processes and acting in life over the past few weeks was just what I was going to be stuck with, so I was just gonna go on that path.

So you can see how I’m interpreting this dream, these symbols I should say, how it’s personal to me and what’s going on in my life. And that’s what you have to do when you’re interpreting your dream. Pay attention to things like… I was frustrated that the GPS wouldn’t work. It was a sign that I was frustrated in my own life because I was disconnected from my vision, which is my internal GPS. And I was connected to all the external stuff, in the dream’s case, in the external GPS. So of course I was frustrated. I can’t look outside of myself for the right path to go forward. 

There was tons of other stuff in here, and at first, I thought I was gonna share all of this with you, but I think you probably get the sense of what I’m talking about as we analyze what each of the symbols mean in this dream.

I want to see if there is anything else I want to share here.  Oh, so at the end, when I finally made it back to the picnic table and I looked up toward the highway and I saw that sign telling me the town I was in and the highway I was on, this was really just a very vivid sign, a symbol in the dream because signs are everywhere when we look for them. I believe that anyway. And when we take the time to slow down and look at them, to be aware and awake, the information and the answers we need come to us. Just like in the dream when I paused, when I quit fretting over the GPS, when I stopped trying to convince other people to come on this twisted, chaotic journey with me, when I quit caring what other people were doing at the fair… and I just paused for a moment to sit with what I needed to do for myself, I got the sign I needed. I got clarity on how to go forward.

So there’s all kinds of goodness in this dream. It was full of rich, actionable insights. It shows me what my subconscious mind is processing, and really, it’s part of what I need to process consciously but I’m stuffing down, right, so it comes to me in the dream.  This is useful fuel for me. I can see my egoic tendencies in action in a way that I can’t see them in my day-to-day life. And when I SEE that, I can respond to it intentionally, rather than reacting. And I do this without the need to judge or criticize myself.  In doing so, I reclaim my power as the predominant creative force in my life rather than letting things ‘happen to me’ as the “will of the universe”, like I’m some kind of victim and things are “just the way they are”.

I have to see it and own it in order to shift it. If I run away from it because it highlights that I am imperfect, or because it reinforces my stories, or because it’s embarrassing to talk about… I can’t possibly shift it… because I can’t affect what I’m not willing to acknowledge.  

And that is step 4 in the process. This is another mindset moment. Give yourself some grace, a break from the judgment and making things mean anything about you. This gives you room to SEE important things and then USE what you find.

These messages from my subconscious mind are signs and opportunities. They help me get back to that place of loving, mindful observation so that I can act from there with awareness and intention, and intuition instead of acting from judgment and fear. 

Now, I could make this dream or my struggles, or my egoic messages and stories and doubts… mean all kinds of things about me. I could say it’s a sign that I’m lazy, or unmotivated, or incapable of forming good habits, or of creating the life that I want. And in the past, I would have done just that and then I’d have stewed in that for weeks, and further sabotaged myself.  But I don’t do that as anymore. I don’t look at it with self-criticism and judgment.  Instead, I look to be aware so I can evolve.  

The dream analysis, like all the Vibrant Living™ tools that I use with myself and my clients, helps me bring the subconscious into the conscious so that I can USE it and work with it. And it can do the same thing for you. It helps to look at our thoughts and feelings and behaviors and assumptions and expectations and so forth so that we can understand them so that we can challenge and question them, and so that we can shift and rise above them. It’s a tool for seeing where you are and what you’re struggling with so that you can compare that to where you want to be and make the necessary adjustments. 

So, the noticing of where I am is not to berate myself and criticize myself for not being further along. It is simply input. Often, we are afraid to look deeply at current reality. It can be uncomfortable to notice our mental state, or our emotions, or the progress we are making or aren’t making, to notice our triggers, and our longings, or where we are falling down. But it’s an essential tool for the creative journey. And learning to look at it without judgment makes it easier to do over time, and that makes it easier to leverage as a creative practice. Think about that GPS that didn’t work. A GPS, like our own internal genius, your intuition, works by orienting us to where we are and compared to where we want to be. Without that clarity we struggle to create things intentionally, to go forward toward what we want for ourselves. 

So, let’s summarize the 4 steps of dream analysis:

• The first step is to write down your dreams down as soon as you wake up, so you can capture as much of the detail as possible.  
• Step 2 is all about mindset. You need to be willing to create meaning from the symbols in your dream. Being willing to make it up, like we do with everything else.  
• Step 3, you want to break that dream that you wrote down into chunks of a few sentences and look for the symbolic meaning in each segment through the lens of your ego. Look for your stories in action, your fears, your self-definitions, that kind of stuff. And then, choose to receive awareness and understanding of them with ease, to see clearly the connection between the symbols in your dream and what you are experiencing in your day-to-day life. And then follow the whispers of your intuition. 
• Step 4 is another mindset step. You want to make sure you give yourself some grace and the room to see reality and use it to re-orient yourself.

I hope you’ll experiment with the dream analysis technique and that you find this to be a useful tool for connecting to and moving around the levels of your own consciousness. It doesn’t have to be a big deal… try giving yourself what I call a 5x5x5 challenge. Keep a bedside journal for 5 days. When you wake up each morning, spend 5 minutes capturing as much detail as you can about the dream you remember.  Then spend 5 minutes picking sections out of the dream and finding the symbolic meaning and just kind of guessing at it.  And of course, if you have more time, break the entire dream into chunks and analyze each one.  

The dream I had was a wake-up call to reconnect to my magical, creative, Vibrant Living Tools™ and to my spirit. I see it as a reminder of my glorious imperfection and the truth that I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to be awake. Awareness is mastery. Perfection is a myth. And so… with this awareness, I re-engaged with my tools, I got clear, new visions of where I am in this moment and where I want to be, and I let my intuition guide me there. Intuition is the only GPS I really need. And you have the only GPS you really need, too, because we all have intuition.

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. If you enjoyed this show, come join the ongoing conversation, that we’re gonna have about it in our Facebook Group and share what resonated with you. There’s a link in the show notes for that group. Also, please share the podcast with your friends and subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.