Dream Interpretation Introduction

Ask the Dream Doctor
by Charles McPhee

From Airplanes To Weddings, What Do Your Dream Symbols Really Mean?

How many times have you awakened from an emotional dream convinced of its significance yet baffled by its practical meaning in your everyday life? In this remarkable book, dream doctor Charles Lambert McPhee, founder of the celebrated website askthedreamdoctor.com, helps you unlock the hidden meaning in your dreams and transform your waking life. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of dreams sent to his website, he provides expert interpretations based on years of expertise and experience. Alphabetized for easy reference, filled with more than 160 real-life dreams from people around the world, Ask the Dream Doctor will help you unravel many common dream symbols, including:

• Airplane Crash ... Are your dreams precognitive? Are they warnings?

• Car ... Are you driving your own car [symbol of self]--or allowing someone else to drive it? Is the car in your dream "out of control"?

• Chase Nightmares ... What disturbing feelings are you trying to avoid? Are you procrastinating making a big decision?

• House ... What is your "dream" house like? It may reveal more about your true self than anything in your waking life.

• Sex ... It's not always about the obvious. Discover what underlies one of the most common metaphors of all.

• Tornado ... Are you in an intense emotional or family conflict? Your dreams may be waking you up to something you haven't recognized.

• Water ... Learn about the kind of dream that alerts you to see a sleep doctor immediately!

Dream interpretation is enjoying a fabulous liberation from so much of the superstition and simple bad information that historically has drained the field of its natural potential. Recent advances in sleep disorders medicine have enabled us to peer for the first time beneath the surface events of sleep, to understand the physical causes of some of our most powerful dreams. The Internet has allowed us to gather very large quantities of data about dreams that demonstrate, very convincingly, the relationship between their metaphoric language and the everyday thoughts and concerns of dreamers. Houses in dreams are consistent metaphors for the self. Cats are feminine symbols associated with pregnancy and childbearing. Dreams about being unprepared for an exam in high school reflect feelings of being tested in our waking lives. Tornadoes represent fears of families being separated due to violent emotional storms. It's all there in the data, and today we can prove it.

The "Ask the Dream Doctor" web site first appeared on-line on March 15, 1998. Since its inception, over three hundred thousand dreams (and growing) have been gathered from Internet visitors from over eighty-five countries around the world. The resulting database is the largest collection of dreams in the world. The database is searchable by keywords, by age, sex, gender and relationship status, and by geographical location: city, state, and country. Today, to learn what single female teens in Australia are dreaming about, we need merely to enter search parameters and let a computer quickly sort the dreams. We may not be surprised to learn that the girls are dreaming about boys, but perhaps our eyebrows will raise when we read consistently about symbols such as water and vampires, throwing punches that can't connect, about flying high above the Earth, and about friends and loved ones dying. These are the same themes we see in teens from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, and India. In fact, these common dream themes appear in every culture. The evidence is overwhelming. Beneath the surface of our geographic and cultural diversity, we are all speaking a common language.

As a person who spends his entire life communicating about dreams on the Internet, through books, and on the radio, the most fascinating aspect of the current state of the art is how little most people know about using dreams in their practical, everyday lives. Despite the pioneering work of Drs. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and in part because of the recent work of Drs. Francis Crick and Alan Hobson, who have proposed that dreams are meaningless, the value of dreamwork today is suspended in limbo. Many people believe that dreams are random events whose contents possess no correlation with their daily lives. If you are suddenly afflicted with nightmares since your divorce, the reasoning goes, perhaps this is only a coincidence. The information contained in this book, however, powerfully demonstrates that random theories are last century's news. Ask the Dream Doctor instructs us that dreams are honest and intelligent portraits of our inner emotional lives. Dreams are practical tools to improve self-understanding, to enhance communication in our romantic relationships and with our children, to identify dangerous and unhealthy relationships in our lives, to broaden our spiritual perspective, and to empower ourselves to become the people we truly wish to be. Understanding the images of our dreams is the key to understanding better the artist who is their creator: our self.

The first step on the road to empowerment is to learn how to recall dreams better. To this end, "How to Remember Dreams" follows this introduction. Read it through and put it into practice as you enjoy this book. In two short weeks, you will have recalled more dreams than you ever imagined possible.

The second step is to learn to understand the meaning of your dreams on a daily basis. Most of us miss the connection between our dreams and our everyday lives because we focus on the literal, surface appearances of dreams. Dreams, however, express their meaning in the great economic language of metaphor, a basic language that allows human beings in a dizzying array of cultures to grapple with the same universal life issues: birth, death, pain, separation, identity, family, status, self-esteem, love, and romance, to name but a few. As you read this book, the outlines of this universal language will gradually become visible to you. Indeed, by sharing our dreams, we learn that we all have much more in common with each other than we do differences.

I have been moved to tears many times as I have sat at my computer, reading the powerful and heroic tales of everyday people faced with burning life decisions — all revealed in their dreams. Souls are in progress, decisions are being forged, and attempts at sense and understanding are being made. You, too, will share in these honest and courageous dreamers' lives, and in their accounts will witness your own reflection. Their willingness to share their stories is a selfless and generous gift to us all. All the names and identifying information in the dreams have been changed to protect the privacy of the dreamers.

How to Remember Dreams

The key to remembering dreams is to learn how to wake up slowly — so that you prolong contact with your subconscious mind. Waking up S L O W L Y means that you lie still in bed, keeping your eyes closed, not talking or worrying about the schedule of the day, and working diligently to try to remember what it was you were just dreaming about — because you always dream just before you wake up in the morning.

If you don't immediately recall a specific image or sequence from a dream, it is important nevertheless to remain still, and allow yourself time to evaluate your feelings. Dreams always leave us with an emotional hangover. Did you wake up feeling tense, frustrated, happy, sad, or worried?

Once you've tuned in to your feelings, you want to answer four questions about your dream in a dream journal that you keep faithfully at your bedside.

What was the key image in the dream? What was the key feeling? Where was the dream located? What situation in my waking life does the dream remind me of?

These four questions and answers will help identify the dream's meaning, and will help you recall the dream later, when you have more time to reflect on it in a clearheaded state.

The next step to having a rich dream life is the simplest of all. Before you go to bed at night, confirm your intention to remember your dreams and to wake up slowly the following morning.

It sounds simple — and it is! I have taught thousands of people to successfully remember their dreams using this same method. If you follow these easy steps for two weeks, I guarantee that you will soon be starring in your dreams. This daily practice is the foundation of an active, exciting, and deeply rewarding relationship with your subconscious mind.

Copyright © 2002 by Charles McPhee. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Charles Lambert McPhee is the former director of the Sleep Apnea Patient Treatment Program at the Sleep Disorders Center of Santa Barbara, California. He is also the author of Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams and founder and president of Ask the Dream Doctor. His radio show, The Dream Doctor, airs nightly in Santa Barbara.