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What Dream Is This? Capturing the Message of Our Dreams

Our dreams are the stories of our lives. They are also an adaptive biological mechanism. They are the photographs of the past and the maps for the journey ahead. As we sleep, the brain and unconscious provide visual access to the themes and characters we encounter in our travels throughout our lives. Insights about our strengths and weaknesses emerge from dreams. Messages about our emotional states are encoded from the limbic brain and brought on up to the prefrontal cortex. The darkness that is within us all is brought to light and transformed. Dreams shine the light on our authentic selves and enable us to separate from destructive patterns that cause us to stray from the true path.

You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all other lives that are simultaneous with yours….What you are is an expression of History.
– Robert Penn Warren

I encourage dreamers to record their dreams and bring them to therapy sessions. Together we travel through the tales, the emotions that stir in the body, and the relationships illuminated by the images. The mysteries of the unconscious emerge in colorful characters. Listening to your dreams with your whole self can be exciting and rewarding. As we travel dreamland, you’ll find increased awareness, self-confidence, and a more defined sense of self. Consequently, your fears and sorrows diminish, your relationships are better understood, your identity deepens beyond the superficial, and joy takes on new meanings.
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Is this a dream? O, if it be a dream, Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Is this a dream? O, if it be a dream,
Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. - Sigmund Freud — Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
– Sigmund Freud

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There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect. - G. K. Chesterton — There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
– G. K. Chesterton

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All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. - Edgar Allan Poe — All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
– Edgar Allan Poe

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We are such stuff as dreams are made on. - William Shakespeare — We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
– William Shakespeare

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