Introduction
It's as easy as 0, 3, 6
Why Dreams Are Important
We do not have direct access to our subconscious mind. Our only conscious awareness of the mental activity of the subconscious is via dreams. Dreams as messages from the subconscious are expressed in the language of the subconscious. The language of the subconscious is symbolic and metaphoric (See "Symbolic Language" - Erich Fromm). Of course, that is why most of us dismiss our dreams as non-sensical and unimportant.
The truth, however, is that since our only conscious awareness of our subconscious mental activity is through our dreams, they become incredibly important. Since most of our conscious behavior, a case could be made for all, is influenced by and in some cases determined by our subconscious. (See New York Times Article: "Who’s Minding the Mind?" By Benedict Carey) and ("The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)" by Manda Mahoney) on the same page.
A new study shows that patterns of brain activity can reveal which choice a person is going to make long before he or she is aware of it. A team led by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin scanned the brains of volunteers who held a button in each hand and were told to push one of the buttons whenever they wanted to. The scientists could tell from the scans which hand participants were going to use as early as 10 seconds before the volunteers were aware that they made up their mind. Previous research has shown motor-related brain activity preceding conscious intent by a fraction of a second, but this study is the first to show unconscious predictive activity in a region associated with decision making—the prefrontal cortex—according to Haynes. The results support the notion that unconscious brain activity comes first and conscious experience follows as a result, says Patrick Haggard of University College London, who was not involved with the study. “We all think that we have a conscious free will,” he says. “However, this study shows that actions come from preconscious brain activity patterns and not from the person consciously thinking about what they are going to do.” Unconscious Decisions. Nicole Branan in Scientific American Mind, Volume 19, Number 4, page 8; August/September 2008.
Quality versus Qunatity
Often, in the pursuit of quantity, we cheat ourselves of quality. People appear to be becoming less and less discerning of quality and more interested in how much they can get. But faced with the choice between a single, heartfelt grin and a lifetime of empty smiles, most would, no doubt, choose the former. Using the methods described here, we strive for quality and believe that correlating life issues and events with dream elements provides laser-like precision to the relationship between your conscious and unconscious. You may experience a perception of the essential nature or meaning of something or an illuminating discovery or realization, just by having this connection revealed.
The quality versus quantity debate may best be illustrated by haiku poetry. Haiku is a poetic form and a type of poetry from the Japanese culture. Haiku combines form, content, and language in a meaningful, yet compact form. Haiku is defined by its brevity.
Haiku Poem by: Basho
Sick on a journey -
Over parched fields
Dreams wander on.
Knowledge is Power - Francis Bacon
Correlating dreams with life issues and comparing dream content with baseline data from a statistical sampling of women and men (explained at this website) allows valuable insights that can be teased from the resulting data.
We know when you are asleep your unconscious can dream. You can easily forget that dream when you awaken. As you relax comfortably and begin your dream rehearsal, will you focus on the visual aspect of the dream or the audible? The smells or the tastes? As your comfort deepens, will you drowsily slip into sleep or suddendly drop into sleep? How soon will your dream rehearsal become the dream itself? The very complexity of mental functioning, you drift into dreaming to find out a whole lot of things you can do, and they are so many more than you dream of. You may ask yourself, "Would I like to remember this dream?" You don't have to remember all your dreams because your unconscious is here and will respond in just the right way. And it really doesn't matter what your conscious mind does because your unconscious automatically will do just what it needs to in order to achieve what is necessary. Your conscious mind may be uncertain and confused. And that's because your conscious mind does forget. And yet we know the unconscious does have access to so many memories and images and experiences that it can make available to the conscious mind so you can solve that problem. And when will the unconscious make all those valuable learnings available to your conscious mind? Will it be in a dream? During the day? Will it come quickly or slowly? Today? Tomorrow? Secret feelings you have never told anyone about can be reviewed calmly within the privacy of your own mind for help with your current problem. Every person has abilities not known to the self, abilities that can be expressed in dreaming. Memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations completely or partially forgotten by the conscious mind. Yet they are available to the unconscious and can be experienced within dreams now or later whenever the unconscious is ready. You can forget to remember or remember to forget. You can sleep or remain awake. You can lie down or recline. You can sleep here or you can sleep there. You can interpret your dreams or remain ignorant of them. You can get better or you can remain as you are. You can improve or you can get worse. You can accept dream therapy or you can refuse it. Or you can release your unconscious to find out what you want. Little by little and much by much, ignorance transforms into know.
Using the techniques of visualization and guided imagery, collaborate with your dreams to communicate directly with your subconscious in its own language to move your life in the direction you choose. Your dreams may be only a serendipitous peek at your subconscious at work, lucky you, but you can use them, through guided imagery to communicate back to your subconscious in a positive way. Take charge of your life by taking charge of your dreams (see Dream Therapy).
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Not Satisfied? Contact Us and receive a full refund. Please include your account number (LoginID), Invoice ID and Receipt No with your refund request. Or, follow the suggestions recommended in Dream Therapy for one month, then submit another dream. Your mood will improve and your positive dream score will increase. Still not satisfied? Contact Us and receive a full refund for both dreams.
Qualitative Analysis
The present procedure for dream interpretation is the implementation of a method described by Hubert J. Hermans in the
Waking life and dream life are considered to be a continuum. Upon acceptance of the proposition that a relation exists between the experiences of dreaming and waking means that they can be studied.
By a process of self-reflection we can organize a broad range of phenomena, such as: a dear memory, a person influential in your life, an experience which influenced the course of your life and so forth.
Using the method of self-confrontation, you will construct a list of concerns or issues in your life. Both positive and negative issues will populate the list. For each issue, thirty feeling or emotion terms will be scored by you as to their relevance for that issue.
Next, you will provide a dream narrative, including the chronological sequence of events in the dream as you remember them.
Finally, the parts of the dream narrative that you perceive to be most relevant for the narrative are selected. As was done earlier with the life issues; the same thirty feeling terms will be scored for their relevance to each dream element or part.
Each dream element is compared to every life issue. The degree of relationship that is found can be analyzed and a correlation established describing the strength of the relationship. A correlation between 0 and .20 indicates that there is little or no relationship between the dream element and life issue; a correlation between .20 and .40 describes a small to moderate relationship; between .40 and .65 describes a moderate relationship; and a correlation above .65 to 1.00 describes a strong relationship.
Four indices are utilized to enhance the interpretation using scores from the dream elements and life issues:
- The striving for self-enhancement or self-maintenance and self-expansion (Self).
- The longing for contact and union with other people and the surrounding world (Other).
- Positive.
- Negative
This allows for the determination of a ratio between Self and Other for each life issue and dream element. This reveals whether the experience of self-enhancement or interpersonal is predominant or if they are equal.
The ratio between Positive and Negative indicates the well-being that the person experiences in relation to the associated dream element or life issue. Well-being can be positive or negative or ambivalent when the two are equal.
Quantatative Analysis
This particular technique for dream analysis is based upon work done by G. William Domhoff: The Quantatative Study of Dreams. Please visit the web site for additional information.
How to make sense out of your hprofile
A data analysis is done on your dream. Your dream is marked for certain people, things and events which are "codeable." Frequencies are added up in the content categories being used. Various arithmetic and statistical procedures are done that are fairly simple. Finally, the results are compared with typical findings for either young men or young women, called "norms."
Most of the statistics used are based on percentages and ratios. As explained more fully in page "Our statistical approach", percentages and rates are used because they are the best and simplest way to correct for the fact that the dream reports will be of differing lengths. Since longer reports are more likely to have more of everything, we need to take that into account, and percentages and rates do so in a clear and explainable way.
To see what we mean, take a look at the table and figure to the right. They both compare findings with 12- and 13-year-old girls to the norms developed on the dreams of young adult women. Shown here are only a few of the categories used, but this keeps it simple for now.
Start with the "Friends percent" under the general heading "Characters." Note that we expect the friends percent for women to be 37%, which means that 37% of all the human characters in women's dreams are people they know. Now look at the "h-profile." It is arbitrarily called the "h-profile" because the numbers are determined by "h" points, which are about twice as large as a percentage difference. An "h" point of .01 represents 1/2 percentage point difference from the norm with a plus or minus sign indicating above or below norm. We have to make this mathematical transformation of percentages into "h's" for complicated statistical reasons, which are explained briefly in our statistics page; you can look at if you are mathematically inclined, but for now it is enough to know that "h" is about twice as large as a simple percentage difference.
When you look at the h-profile by "Friends percent," you notice the minus sign, which means that girls have a lower friends percent than women. How much lower? Well, only six "h" points, which you recall means about three percentage points. It's not a very big difference. We are not impressed with a difference until it is at least .20 to .30, and we don't become excited until the difference reaches .40 or higher.
Now take a look at some of the other indicators and findings for "Characters." Whether we look at the percentage and "h" differences under "animal percent," "male/female percent," or "family percent" in the table we see that girls and women do not differ very much as far as the characters in their dreams.
But look at the various categories under "Social Interactions." For the thoughts and actions that we define as "aggressions," girls are higher than women, especially on the subset that are called "physical aggressions," like stealing, chasing, hitting, and killing.
The rest of the findings on how 12- and 13-year-old girls differ from young women can be found in a research paper that are available at the cited web site as one example of the kind of study that can be done.
"Although there is a place for the analysis of dream content in both psychotherapy and personal growth, I have no confidence (and there is no biological basis to believe) that insight into one's mental state can be gained through analysis of dream content with arbitrary symbolic dictionaries."
David J. Linden
Professor of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
The Accidental Mind, p.221
