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Living Dreams, Living Life: A Practical Guide to Understanding Your Dreams and How They Can Change Your Waking Life

by Evelyn M. Duesbury, NCC, DCC

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Review from Dream Network Journal:

Evelyn Duesbury's Living Dreams ~ Living Life is among the most user-friendly guides written to help us learn to better understand the meaning of our dreams. In reading the book, I am most impressed by Ms. Duesbury's way of communicating her knowledge; she speaks directly to us--average individuals--in a humble, yet deeply informed way. She is speaking directly, one-on-one and does not assume the posture of a lecturer or know-it-all.

Through years of vigorous and committed research, Ms. Duesbury has developed a method she calls the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID).
PMID suggests a six-step process for dreamwork:

1. What's Happening in Your Life?
2. What's on Your Mind?
3. What's the Connection?
4. What Did You Feel?
5. What should you do?
6. Who's in Your dream?

The method focuses primarily on our individualized, personal dreams... those which constitute the majority of our dreams.

Citing dozens of dreams, including her own, Ms. Duesbury demonstrates how working with this method has assisted many in gaining insight, healing and growth. Emphasis is placed on using this process with a current dream, preferably in light of a review of dreams recalled/recorded over several months, if not years.

The examples shared are offered in categories important in all of our lives, such as Dreams about Parents, Children, Grandparents, Psi dreams, Nightmares and more.

In the Appendices, Ms. Duesbury provides information about the research that went into developing the PMID process, the website where one can engage the PMID process online, suggested exercises that can be applied using PMID and overviews an historical perspective on the evolution of dream appreciation, acknowledging those who have contributed valuable dream interpretation models, e.g., Jung, Ullman, Gestalt, et. al.

This book is highly recommendable for anyone wishing to apply a well grounded and effective process that yields results.

Roberta Ossana
Publisher/Editor
Dream Network Journal

About the Book

Living Dreams, Living Life presents the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID), a researched model for finding answers to most waking life matters including relationships, work, health and the spiritual. ?

In a fun, conversational style, readers learn easy new ways to discover how their dreams are giving them the guidance they need. Living Dreams, Living Life is particularly appropriate for individuals in the general population because it has its roots in practical and direct experiences.

We believe readers will find Living Dreams, Living Life as refreshing as Stanley Krippner, co-author of Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, does.

Living Dreams, Living Life is a breath of fresh air to readers interested in working with their dreams. Its author presents a practical method for sifting through the layers of metaphors and symbols to arrive at a dream's surprisingly direct counsel on solving problems, improving relationships, and enhancing creative spiritual growth.

Most people go through life's difficult periods without professional help. Admittedly, there are many self-help dreamwork offerings. Yet, there are few, if any, researched models that facilitate an individual's work with the system of relationships in the person's life. The model presented in Living Dreams, Living Life, the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID), is a researched model that includes a systems approach to interpreting dreams.

The systems approach to interpreting dreams, innovative with the PMID model, can be used by the individual dreamer or facilitated by a counselor. Living Dreams, Living Life not only focuses on relationship type dreams, but also shows how to use the PMID model for many types of dreams including dreams about work, recreation, career, education, health, and the spiritual.

Because dreaming is common, dreamwork is one of the most universally accessible self-help techniques available.

About the Author

Evelyn M. Duesbury is a National Certified Counselor, American Counseling Association. Her earlier careers were in accounting, as a CPA and as an associate professor. Evelyn's work with dreams began after she prayed, "Please, 100% spiritual work." Yet, when dreams first came she thought, "No, dreamwork isn't what I meant!" Then her husband's question, "I wonder if Ev's dreams could be helpful to her?" convinced her to pay attention. After earning an MS in counselor education, she and colleagues researched and explored her thesis-based Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID) further. She now offers the PMID model in the pages of this practical guide on how to understand when you are living your own life, living your own dreams.

Contents/Excerpts

Section A: Introductory

Introduction to Living Dreams, Living Life

Chapter 1: The Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID) -- Preliminary Work

Section B: Living Dreams, Finding Answers with the PMID Model

The Dream -- Alice’s Dream Series: Dad and the Inventory

Chapter 2: What’s Happening in Your Life? PMID Step 1

Chapter 3: What’s on Your Mind? PMID Step 2

Chapter 4: What’s the Connection? PMID Step 3

Chapter 5: What Did You feel? PMID Step 4

Chapter 6: What Should You Do? PMID Step 5

Chapter 7: Who’s in Your Dream? PMID Step 6

Considerations for Dreamwork in Clinical Settings

Section C -- Series of Relationship Dreams

Chapter 8: Dreams about Parents, Grandparents, and Children

Alice’s Dream Series about Dad (continued)

William’s Dream Series about Father

Eleanor’s Dream Series about Mama and about Grandfather

Bobby’s Dream Series about Grandmother, Parents, and Children

Chapter 9: Coincidence of Psi-dreams of Marital Pair -- Same Night Dreams

Chapter 10: Galen’s Dream Snatches about Victorious Handling of Situations

Section D -- Other Type Dreams, and Putting it all Together

Chapter 11: Facing Nightmares and Scary Dreams. Facing Life.

Chapter 12: Everyday Dreams. Everyday Life.

Chapter 13: Spiritual Dreams. Spiritual Life.

Chapter 14: Lucid Dreams. Living Dreams.

Chapter 15: Living Dreams. Living Life. Putting it all together.

Epilogue:

Table: Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams, fully stated.

Appendices:

Appendix 1: Our Websites

Appendix 2: Research and Explorations of the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID), including assessment instruments used.

Appendix 3: Suggested Exercises for Chapters 1 through 15

Appendix 4: Historical Perspectives and Some Contemporary Dream Interpretation Models

Bibliography

Excerpts

Introduction to Living Dreams, Living Life

How should you live your life?

How do you want to live your life?

These questions are very different and far from rhetorical. In fact, confusion about these questions has reached a crisis point in America and much of the westernized world.

As we have become more modern and prosperous as a culture, we have increasingly lost our way as individual people. Reports of depression rates and sales of pharmaceuticals to relieve our pain are at record levels.

More specifically, we wonder how we can live more fully and experience more happiness, fulfillment and contentment in our lives. In short, we want to know how to live our dreams.

It’s a question all people ask themselves throughout their lives. And not only are the answers sometimes frustratingly difficult to find, they also keep changing.

What works for us as children is obviously different as we reach young adulthood. Even after marriage, family, career and other life “milestones” of being an adult have been achieved, the question keeps coming back and the answer keeps changing.

We are all clearly asking questions, but precious few are finding answers. This results in unnecessary frustration and sadness and, in some cases, a seemingly permanent sense of failure and emptiness.

We have literally and figuratively forgotten our dreams and, in the process, lost touch with our lives and ourselves.

But our literal dreams can provide the single most useful and effective way to rediscover our figurative dreams, the lives we truly want to live and the people we truly want to be.

Before we get into how dream interpretation can provide an unparalleled method to living our lives to the fullest, it’s important first to take a couple of steps back and understand exactly what the problem is, how and why we arrived at this point, and in what ways the basic question of “why dreams” can be the key to resolving these issues.

To truly live our lives to the fullest it’s important first to understand the basic problem that leads to our disappointment, frustration and general confusion in our lives.

Whose life are you living?

Are you living the life you think you should be living, or are you fully living your life in the way that you want to live it?

It’s a deceptively tricky question that has been at the core of spiritual, philosophical, psychological and dream study for centuries. In more modern times, it remains the basic question that therapists had worked to help their patients answer even before the days of Freud and Jung.

The question of personal happiness and life satisfaction often comes down to resolving a basic gap between what we experience in our conscious minds (all the shoulds of our waking minds) and what lives and swims in our unconscious minds (our true beliefs and uncensored desires).

Successfully navigating and integrating these two realms gives you a strong sense of purpose, joy, self-satisfaction and contentment. The greater the connection between your conscious and unconscious, the greater will be your positive experience of yourself and your life.

Failure to balance these elements successfully leads to feelings of frustration, confusion, anger, depression and a general sense of feeling stuck or possibly adrift with no strong direction or purpose in life. The greater disconnect between the two, the more pronounced these feelings become.

Some people may also experience flip-flops between sometimes living primarily in their own little fantasy worlds to other times being immersed entirely in the real world with little or no experience of their own emotions. In extreme cases, an individual can lose touch with this “reality” and, in the process, miss the greater reality altogether.

The question of “whose life are you living?” is deceptively tricky because it’s often easy really not to know. Sometimes it’s hard to know just what we do want in our lives, let alone figure out how to achieve it.

How can it be so difficult just to know what kind of life we really want?

This begs the question of where all this confusion came from in the first place. If the key is simply keeping our conscious and unconscious minds connected, then how and why did we ever stop doing it?

You against the world

Albeit somewhat overstated, the fact remains that from your first breath your life has hinged on the struggle between your needs and desires and those of the people, organizations, and culture that surround you.

This is not to say that every moment of your life is a hard fought struggle for survival. Our own personal experience shows this not to be true at all. However, it is a personal struggle that you face daily in which your defeat can ultimately lead to a loss of your self.

The reason for this struggle is obvious and necessary. We can’t all run around rampantly and selfishly satisfying our own needs and desires whenever and however we please. We can’t just beat up somebody on the street who annoys us any more than we can just start having sex with anybody whom we find attractive, no matter how strong or how aware we are of our deeper desires.

And as we examine our development from infant to adulthood we can see how we’ve slowly learned to inhibit ourselves in order to assimilate and function in an ever-broadening world both to our own personal benefit and detriment.

As infants our whole life (and most everyone else’s around us) centered on our personal satisfaction. From our perspective, the whole universe revolved around our need for food, sleep, and, even when we pooped.

As we grew, we learned that we must restrict ourselves in order to fit into systems beyond our physical self, the first of which was our own family. We learned delayed gratification -- that even if we were hungry, we had to wait until mealtime. We learned to control ourselves physically through the significant step of toilet training. We learned that we could not make whatever sounds we wanted whenever and wherever we wanted.

As we matured further, we continued to learn to restrict ourselves to fit into larger and more complex systems. We adapted to schedules, classrooms and other sets of rules as we entered school. We also learned to do more things (such as homework or helping around the house) based on requests or expectations of others, primarily those in authority.

Our own needs also became much more elaborate and more difficult to satisfy. We found that just wanting to play a game wasn’t enough if our skills weren’t good enough to be picked for a team or play the position we wanted. We discovered that some people didn’t like us and others could be downright mean and purposely hurtful.

Still further, as we reached our teens we began our struggle for independence and self-discovery in earnest, while at the same time the pressures for conformity and acceptance sometimes became all encompassing.

Even the most average of academic students become well-versed students in the school of life, continually being educated and reinforced by waves of mass media, advertising, rock stars, movies, famous athletes, and the celebration and imitation of these by their peers (especially the cool ones).

The deep fears of being labeled “uncool,” no matter how contrived or inane the definition or demands, could often lead to extreme behaviors based solely on external expectations. In other cases, some teens rebel, purposely seeking adamantly not to fit, but always with keen awareness of a rebellion against the status quo.

By graduation from high school, most folks achieve an advanced degree in the knowledge of “normal” and the related expectations as taught by parents, authority figures and society-at-large. In short, many people discover they have defined themselves almost entirely by external criteria and values.

Yet, they had barely begun their own discovery of self or sense of personal values and criteria, long ago burying the narcissistic inner child deep inside and out of sight from public ridicule. People have precious few years’ experience or knowledge of adult emotions or sexuality, with only a confused grasp of mature love based on moments of thumping hearts and back seat gropings. High school graduates had yet even to make a first real step out into the world on their own.

This is not to say the culturalization and some level of assimilation are wrong and not necessary both for society as a whole and for an individual’s well-being. The very ability to develop and maintain mature relationships hinges on these learned skills.

The point of this brief review of human development is to help us realize that people -- all of us were educated much earlier and more intensely in the shoulds of our lives than about our own selves. The discovery of choosing how we want to live for our own satisfaction and fulfillment in a healthy balance with these other social and cultural needs is, indeed, the dance of a happy life.

This makes clear why the question of “Whose life are you living?” can be so difficult. We have been encouraged at times to over emphasize the external and the conscious self to the great harm and loss of our internal selves. Even when we recognize that we may be living our lives for others, it still doesn’t help us answer what kind of life we really want to live.

Finding your answers for your life

Given our understanding of how and why we face the confusion we do, it’s now more obvious than ever why it’s so critical to pay attention to the bias and agenda of any resource we turn to for answers.

And, the fact is, with the exception of highly skilled counselors, any person, organization or resource you find will bring some level of self-serving bias or agenda.

Some are very obvious, such as TV shows that seek higher ratings and, in turn, higher advertising dollars. This is true for all media. Their priority is drawing the greatest numbers of viewers, readers or listeners with information that creates the broadest appeal for the greatest number of people, not in providing the most balanced, factual advice.

We are all very aware of this, yet we pick up the latest fashion magazine to get advice for the best diets. We fully understand that the snippets we see of celebrities’ lives don’t offer a full or at all real picture, yet we feel that we’ve somehow fallen short in our lives because we don’t measure up to them. It’s obvious to all of us that a TV personality has no specific knowledge of our own personal problems or even that we exist to them, yet the person’s fame and mass appeal leads us to expect that they really must know what they’re talking about, so we’d better pay attention.

Advertising is especially insidious in this regard because of its constant attempts to create a personal connection with potential buyers. Tremendous amounts of demographic and psychodynamic research go into creating a sense of need that can best be satisfied by purchasing a product or service.

Again, we are all very aware of this, yet the sheer volume of messages convinces us that maybe we really aren’t up to par in various ways.

A loving Christian church no matter how inclusive and open-minded is unlikely to tell you to leave the flock and become a Buddhist. A spouse in love with you can hardly be expected to tell you that leaving the relationship is the healthiest path for you. A friend may encourage you not to pursue an out-of-state job opportunity because it could lead to the loss of your relationship.

This is not to say that there is anything necessarily insidious about these agendas. Many times those closest to us aren’t fully aware of their own biases and may give us self-serving advice even with the best intentions and desires to care for our welfare.

Even counselors bring their own biases, but the key difference here is that they are trained in the recognition of transference and counter transference dynamics. Thus, they are aware of this process and, thereby, constantly strive to be on guard against putting their personal feelings before a patient’s. This is a constant struggle for even the best-trained counselors.

Even so, the pure objective of therapy or counseling is to help the client reconnect with his or her own true feelings, desires, wants and needs. The role of the counselor is to provide unbiased support and guidance to help facilitate the client’s self-discovery and self-understanding.

Contrary to some beliefs, good counselors do not tell you what to do or how you should feel. One most ironic thing about counseling is that whereas most clients come in wanting to be told the answers to their life problems, they often already have the answers they’re looking for buried deep inside themselves.

The second key role for therapy is helping clients integrate this self-knowledge and understanding into their everyday lives. Obviously, it does no good just to realize that you have a drinking problem if you’re going to keep going out drinking every night. A counselor can help you discover ways (many times very obvious) that you can change, manage or even discontinue this behavior based on whatever is healthiest for you.

Note that unbiased and non-judgmental discussions are paramount. The more trusting and open the relationship between client and counselor, the more successful the work. And, short of criminal behavior or actions that could result in severe physical harm to yourself or others, a good counselor avoids determining good or bad behaviors for you. Those are subjective terms that can only be defined by the clients based on their own personal emotions and perspectives.

In essence helping you find your answers to your life is the whole basis and practice of good counseling and psychotherapy. It is, therefore, no surprise that it is also the whole basis and practice of dream interpretation.

Living Your Dreams

The answer to our question earlier of “why dreams” should now be clear. The study and understanding of your dreams provides you with the ability to reconnect with your deeper self -- your all-important unconscious -- to rediscover your deepest personal emotions and desires for yourself and your life.

Dreams do much more than provide insights into your deepest feelings. Knowing these feelings is just the first step. As we’ve discussed, the real key is to reconnect your unconscious emotions with your waking life.

The final piece of this puzzle, and the greatest value of what we’ll teach you about working with your dreams, is that dreams provide tremendous insights about your waking life actions and suggestions for what you can do to realize your dreams, literally and figuratively.

What’s more, this is not something that necessarily requires months or years of training and practice.

In fact, the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID) we will explain in the following pages was created specifically to provide anyone -- even those with little or no dreamwork experience -- with the greatest understanding of their dreams as quickly as possible.

We are continually amazed how often even the most inexperienced of people almost immediately make startling connections and discoveries that have profound impact on their lives by simply using the techniques explained in the following pages. The following story is just one example.

Carol’s Story: Opening up to the world

(We note upfront that Carol’s only experience in dreamwork was a general understanding of the PMID process gained through various casual discussions with us. She had received no formal training, nor had even discussed the PMID process at any great length with us.)

Carol, a business associate of ours, is an attractive 42-year-old woman who was reared in a somewhat conservative and traditional Christian household. She and her husband have been happily married for 15 years, with no kids, and both are owners of successful businesses. They enjoy spending time sailing on their boat and traveling to far-flung destinations on SCUBA diving trips, a passion of theirs for years.

Somewhat shy and reserved at first meeting, Carol is very intelligent and self-assured, quite witty, and enjoys the company of a wide variety of close friends.

By all standards and appearances, Carol has a very wonderful life, an assessment with which she readily agrees.

Carol had also occasionally mentioned that she was feeling somewhat confused. It appeared that it was of little concern for her, and as was her style, she didn’t really express specifically why and was somewhat reticent to discuss the matter in any depth.

Then, during a recent dinner with her, she surprised us by bringing up her “confusion” again. Once again, she was hesitant to discuss the matter, but did share two additional insights. One, although she wasn’t sure what the confusion was about, she just knew (prefaced with the usual “this is going to sound stupid”) that she wanted to feel “bigger.” By “bigger” she explained that she wanted to feel more alive or more . . . something.

Her other disclosure was that there was a great deal about herself that she always kept secret from everybody, including her husband. She explained the reason was not due to these secrets being so awful or shameful, but that she just felt uncomfortable disclosing intimate things about herself. She even commented that on the few occasions she had opened up a bit more, she often felt strong guilt the next day for being so personal, statements that surprised us given our personal experience with her.

Given what she had shared, we called her the next morning to reassure her about her disclosures, however minor they may have seemed, and make sure she wasn’t feeling any guilt over the conversation. To our pleasant surprise Carol greeted us with an extremely cheery, “Did you read my email?” which we had not yet done.

She then excitedly told us about a dream she had had following our dinner discussion. In fact, she had awakened to this dream even though she reported rarely even remembering dreams.

Her dream had been quite brief, and her memory of it rather vague. But one part stuck out clearly for her. As Carol described it to us:

I was upstairs in my house, and had heard people downstairs. When I went downstairs to investigate, I found my living room filled with strangers, but I was oddly not scared at all and knew they meant no harm.

I wondered how they had gotten in, so I went to the front door to see if it was locked. But when I looked at the door I discovered that not only was the door not locked, it didn’t even have a lock or any kind of latch or doorknob either!

“Don’t you get it?” she asked us in a surprisingly enthusiastic voice. “The door . . . my door, wasn’t locked anymore. It was open so people could come in. And that’s okay. It’s okay to let people in sometimes!” She was thrilled, and so were we.

“I’m sure there’s a lot more to my dream,” Carol continued. “And I’d like to learn about that sometime, but I’m just really excited about that door. I feel great!”

As we noted earlier, Carol’s experience was certainly very significant, but not at all unusual. Her experience was a perfect example of how a dream, even a simple door in a dream, can bring deeper insights about one’s self and open one’s eyes to a new perspective in the waking life that literally opens new doors, as in Carol’s case.

Like anything, the more you learn about working with your dreams, and the more you practice the teachings in this book, the richer and more profound your experiences will be.

But simply deciphering every part of a dream is not the end goal. As in Carol’s case, the true value of understanding dreams is to see those critical connections between your dreams and your waking life experiences in order to enhance your daily life.

Simply put, when you start living the lessons of your dreams, you will start living the life that you dream.

Chapter 3

What’s on Your Mind? PMID Step 2

In this chapter, we are going to move to a deeper connectivity between our dreams and our daily life. As we learned in the last chapter, first recalling the most recent (often the day or evening before your dream) events in your life provides both an easy way to learn what your dream is generally about (the theme) and to help see how your dream connects to your waking life.

PMID Step 1 provides the context of “what” your dream is about. In our example, we learned that the theme of the dream is Alice’s desire to bring to light and address any unresolved feelings of anger toward her dad. This is obviously a critical first step before digging deeper into specific meanings of the dream in the same way that if someone just says “tree” to you, it doesn’t really tell you much. You need the context of what tree they’re talking about, why the tree is significant (is it beautiful or going to fall on me?) to make sense of the word “tree.”
The next step of PMID Step 2 is to connect our pre-dream thoughts (most often, day before going to sleep and dreaming) to our dream contents by treating the dream as a responsive answer to our pre-dream thoughts. PMID Step 2 digs deeper into the question of why you had this dream and what the dream is telling you about the subject of the dream.


PMID Step 2: Record the thought(s) you had before your dream (most often, day before) that connect to this dream either objectively or figuratively. Write “I thought” statements to help clarify which pre-dream thought(s) brought this dream.

Dream researchers have long recognized that thoughts passing through our waking minds are tremendous initiators of dreams.1 In the PMID process, we treat thoughts as questions that the dream responds to or answers. The dreamer is able to identify the question(s) that the dream answers by connecting previous day(s) thoughts to the dream. When the dreamer does not connect day-before thoughts to the dream, it is like having the answer to a question without knowing the question.2

Hildebrant (in his 1875 book on dreams) claimed it would be possible to explain every dream image if enough time were available to trace it to its origin in the “chambers of one’s memory.” He said, “It is impossible to think of any action in a dream for which the original motive was not in some way or other -- whether as a wish, or desire or impulse -- passed through the waking mind.”3

Repeatedly, we find that thoughts trigger emotions into stressful feelings. That awareness makes us acutely conscious of thoughts as keys to dream interpretation. We, the dreamers, must notice our thoughts and take full responsibility for the results of their intensity. Dreams not only help us notice our thoughts and emotions, but they also reveal sources and intensity of thoughts and emotions.

Thoughts that initiate dreams are very often about the events that occurred the day before our dreams. PMID Step 2 requires us to notice what was really important to us from our list of events in PMID Step 1.

We all experience numerous big and small events throughout the day. What’s critical is noticing those events that are important to us. Your list of events in PMID Step 1 could include a call from your child’s teacher, getting cut off in traffic, or spilling coffee on yourself.

But your thoughts may have focused primarily on a surprise phone call you received from an old friend. Clearly, of all the events, the ones that were most in your thoughts are the ones that most likely will be focused upon in that night’s dreams.

Another important point is that when first working with dreams, many people make the mistake of believing the event that connects to your dream is the same as your thoughts -- and so there is no need to record thoughts.

It’s important to remember that our thoughts are implicated in but actually separate from the events. We see this all around us in our everyday lives. Just ask any baseball umpire about calling balls and strikes if you have any doubt about this. Various people interpret the same event in dramatically different ways, based on their own perceptions, biases, needs, fears, and desires.

Even more, our thoughts vary from time to time about same type events. What was once a maddening event (such as locking your keys in your car) can later seem very funny and unimportant. Tragedies, such as the loss of a relationship, may be viewed months or years later as a blessing that helped move you forward in your life.

For this reason, it’s important to record your thoughts as accurately as you can remember them and write them in “I thought” statements -- “I thought. . . .” Include when you thought them (yesterday or last evening) so that later, when you return to your dream, you will know you were identifying thoughts instead of suppositions after or before the fact.

A final and very important point about connecting our thoughts with our dreams is this:

When we record our day-before-the-dream thoughts, we are, in fact, writing questions that our dream will be answering.

This sounds a little strange to some people at first, but it’s really quite simple and a key to understanding the messages, or “answers,” in your dreams.

First, remember that dreams are basically your deeper mind processing images and information and “thinking” about what’s very helpful for you -- in short, providing answers for your life. Also, recall that dreams reach to the peripheries of the mind -- further than usual waking thought generally ever goes, which means that we are often only partially aware of these answers, if at all.

This is exactly why many of us sometimes feel stuck or confused in life. We feel as though we need answers, but we do not know how to access the answers from our deeper minds. But, because our dreams come from the deeper regions of the mind, dreams can combine past and current experiences (as Alice’s dream has), including intuitive-like wisdom to shed light on our thought-questions.

Although much deeper, the process is similar to what we do consciously in our waking lives when we’re trying to make decisions -- say, going to the movies or reading this book, for example. Whichever you decide to do is your “answer” to this problem.

This works the same way with dreams, except that the question or choice you’re considering in your dreams isn’t always so clear. Just having the answer “read the book” has little meaning unless you’re first aware of your choice of either reading or going to the movies.

So, to repeat what we said a bit ago: When we record our thoughts, we are, in fact, writing questions that our dreams will answer. In the process of recording our thoughts, and exploring our dreams for connections to these thoughts, we discover the “questions” our dreams address in the context of our waking-life circumstances.

Record the day-or-evening-before-your-dream thoughts after waking from your dream because it is after the dream that connections to specific thought(s) can be made. Record these the same time you record your dream and as they occur to you during the day or evening.

As an alternative, before going to sleep each night record your prominent thoughts (including various thoughts from the day, as well as thoughts about the day’s events) in a journal. In this manner, you will have a preview of the “thought-questions” your dream(s) may respond to or answer during the night. This alternative may be beneficial for beginners and for people who have difficulty making connections after the dream.

When we look to our pre-dream thoughts as precursors of our dream, we have a selection of possible questions that impelled our dream. We can relate this to the board game and TV program, Jeopardy where the contestant is given the answer, and must supply the question. If we choose to accept our pre-dream incubated words (and not search our pre-dream thoughts), it is akin to accepting only one possible question even before seeing the answer.

So, let’s see it in action.

Applying Step 2

Adding to the “events” of PMID Step 1 -- the book I had been reading that suggested ways to help identify and release anger, and my prayer, Alice now took a look at her thoughts of the day before her dream. Alice’s thoughts that she connected with her dream were:

* I thought about the tactics the author used in his book that included the inventory exercise. His blatant accusations with cleverly worded ways of keeping those accused from defending themselves because the very defense, in his mind, makes them guilty infuriated me. In my view, the author’s accusations were ridiculously and grossly in error. His tactics stirred many memories of my dad’s repeated unjust accusations against me when I was a teenager, and I was unable to defend myself because my dad would say my defense proved my guilt. I then decided that I must still be angry with my dad for his accusations during my teenage years.
* I also wondered if inventorying my thoughts about my dad could possibly affect him in whatever realm he resides. He died several years ago.

Some of Alice’s other prominent thoughts from the day and evening before this dream were:

* I thought about the literature lists and wondered if the books I ordered yesterday would arrive in time for me to read before my next physiology class that I am taking.
* I thought about the rainbow I saw today and wondered if it could somehow be a confirming sign.
* I thought about the differences in people, and specifically the differences between the man who backed out into the traffic lane and the one who came to help.
* I thought about my husband’s suggestion and wondered if my friend would really benefit from my husband’s advice.

Chapter 4

What’s the Connection? PMID STEP 3

When people ask us, “What does my dream mean?” what they are almost always really asking us is to explain the strange, nonsensical and sometimes frighteningly bizarre things, places and events in their dreams. In short, they are talking about the symbolism in their dreams.

PMID Step 3: Select all major dream phrases (and symbols) in your dream and write your personal definitions for each in the context of this dream. Example: Dream Phrase -- Opportunity to buy an organ. Dreamer’s Definition -- I prefer the piano. In the context of this dream, the person who asked me for a date yesterday is not my preferred type.

Our minds record our experiences and recall them, often symbolic in form, during dreaming. Dreams make connections that are more extensive than is typical during waking thought.4 Consequently, understanding our personal dream symbolic language has the potential to give us insights that we are unaware of in waking states. In short, dreams are our deeper minds working through the same events and thoughts we think about consciously throughout our day, but without the myriad of personal and social restraints as discussed in our Introduction.

That’s the good news. The challenge, of course, is making sense of it all. To interpret our dreams for use in the conscious state, we need to understand our own dream symbolism.

The other good news about the symbolism in your dreams is that you’ve made a great deal of it up all by yourself. Understanding symbolism in your dreams is not about learning and remembering abstract interpretations. It’s mostly about understanding your personal dream language that you have created. As Delaney (1996) says, “We are the producers of our own dreams.”5

Using dream dictionaries

People often use dream dictionaries to help them understand their dream symbols, especially when they first start working with their dreams. Dream dictionaries can be very helpful in providing quick explanations for common dream symbols. These common dream symbols -- also known as universal symbols -- are symbols that often have similar meanings for most people.

Dream dictionaries are also helpful as a resource for novice dream interpreters to learn about the breadth of possible symbols. It’s not only the talking cows and flying bicycles that are important. More common details, such as whether you’re in a house or an office building, which floor or room you’re in, and even the color of a building can be important.

But along with positives of using a dream dictionary, we also want to caution against using them.

Dream dictionaries are fine for what they are: a basic reference for universal dream symbols. However, dream dictionaries are not explanations of what your dream symbolism means for you. Synesius of Cyrene (cited in Kelsey, 1991) insisted that the essential nature of dreams is personal. Consequently, only by looking to the dreamer’s own experiences can dreams be truly understood.

This is not a minor distinction at all. We understand this obvious difference in our waking lives when we talk with each other. We know that you can’t just look up some words to understand the meaning of a sentence. What we say is often not literally what we mean. We all understand that you have to know the context of the conversation, the tone of the speaker, her facial expressions, and whether you’re at work or play in order to fully understand what is being said. If you don’t know the topic or theme of a conversation, a word or sentence can be pretty hard to make sense of.

These same rules apply with dream symbolism. The more we apply our understanding of our waking life events and thoughts, and explore the general theme and messages of our dreams, the more the individual symbolism will come to life with meaning for us.

So, feel free to use dream dictionaries as thought-starters. Just be sure that you don’t confine yourself to the precise definitions described in these.

Dream phrases (and symbols)

It is often very helpful to look for dream phrases instead of having to limit yourself to defining the one-word dream symbol by itself. An example of a one-word symbol is door. Universal meanings of the word door are “challenge” and “opportunity.” An example of a dream phrase is “locked the car doors,” which one dreamer understood to mean, “I think I have to protect myself from danger on the road of life without my spouse.” Another dreamer understood “closed the door” to mean he had overcome a difficult relationship issue that was represented in his dream.6

Defining whole phrases from the dream helps the dreamer connect definitions to the context of the dream, the context being day-before-the-dream events, day-before-the-dream thoughts, and earlier experiences.

Your ability to bridge the gap from defining one-word symbols to defining dream phrases is very often a major key to capturing the unique-to-you meanings of your dream.

When selecting dream phrases to define for your personal definitions, we often find it helpful to select exact phrases, word-for-word from the dream. Your written record of the dream is the closest to your actual dream picture language, so using those exact words often retains the intent of your dream language.

And one final consideration about dream language and symbols in particular: As Freud once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Keep your mind open to symbolic meanings in your dreams, but don’t feel that everything need have a deep significant purpose. Sometimes we fly in our dreams because of a powerful spiritual awakening in our lives. Other times we fly simply because it’s fun and we can. Sometimes a door can represent a new opening or opportunity. And sometimes, it’s just a door.

We strongly recommend that you keep the mantra “less is more” in mind as you begin exploring your dreams in order to avoid confusing yourself by over-interpreting dream symbolism. What’s important is to keep your mind open to what catches your attention most in a dream. These are always the most significant parts of your dream to understand, and the ones in which the meanings will be most apparent.

Now, let’s see all this in action with our example dream. You may want to turn back to the dream for a quick reminder before continuing. (See the dream near the beginning of Section B.) As you read the dream this time, keep your mind open to possible dream phrases and their meanings that you find based on what we’ve learned from PMID Steps 1 and 2. After you’ve explored the dream in this new way, continue to see what we’ve found in the dream.

Applying Step 3

PMID Step 1: Based on day before the dream events the dream seems to be Alice’s desire to bring to light and address any unresolved feelings of anger toward my dad.

PMID Step 2: Adding day before the dream thoughts the dream now seems really to focus on my thought question, “Am I still angry with my dad for unfair accusations of me when I was a teenager?”

PMID Step 3: Define dream phrases (and symbols). Based on our knowledge of the focus and subject of the dream, we can start to make sense of specific phrases in the dream and how they connect to waking life events and thoughts identified in the first two PMID steps. Next are the definitions for the dream phrases and symbols Alice developed for her “Dad and the Inventory Dream.”

• Tara coming back alone without her children: The gap between Tara's true personality (that of a loving concerned mother) and the Tara of the dream. The dream is not about Tara; the dream is picturing me doing something that is not according to my true personality.

• Inventory of furniture: The thought-inventory exercise I was doing. Perhaps furniture represents that I was treating thoughts about my dad as if they were inanimate, lifeless, like furniture instead of alive and full of emotion.

• Old tapes playing suspicious things about us: My day-before-the-dream suspicious thoughts that prompted me to do the thought inventory exercise. I was “playing old tapes,” going over happenings from the past.

• Our untended yard: Not like my family. Shows I neglected my responsibilities and actions while focusing too much only on Dad's activities.

• Thomas: My husband, who is himself in this dream, and in a very wise role.

• Realize I am dreaming: Opportunity for me to direct the dream or to deal more consciously with the issues in my dream.

• Dad coming out of the junk pile: Refers to old “junk” about Dad that I’ve been thinking about.

• Long tarpaulin/canvas-like sack: Symbolic of “sackcloth and ashes" to me. Sackcloth -- "cloth of mourning and cloth of repentance."7 Probably the sackcloth came in answer to my thoughts about whether my dad suffers because of my remembering and inventorying his transgressions against me. Sackcloth is “a coarse cloth made of goats' hair, which was worn as a sign of mourning or distress."8 Of course, I also suffer when I hold negative thoughts about my dad.

• Dad turning into a Tree: “Christian symbolism . . . is fully aware of the primary significance of the tree as an axis linking different worlds.”9

• Implement business buildings: These are the actual buildings located on the family property. Here they could signify the building years of my personality, referring to my childhood.

• Repaired buildings on the family property and house: Repaired perceptions about my “building years.”

• Unpainted strip on the family house: Could signify one piece of unfinished business left to deal with in my childhood emotional makeup. The dreaming mind doesn't forget sideline details. A sideline detail in this dream is the unpainted strip on my parents’ house, which derives from some years back when I took a major part in painting the family house. We finished it all except one strip.

So, how many of these dream phrases and symbols did you discover in the dream? How many others did you see that we didn’t address here? Maybe you’re wondering why Alice chose some of these and not others. Or maybe you saw slightly differing meanings and are wondering how she can be so sure of these meanings.

Keep in mind that the most important thing in this exercise is the process, not the product. That means this isn’t a test to see how many dream phrases and symbols you can correctly identify and can define in Alice’s dream. As we’ve noted repeatedly, dreams are extremely personal and, therefore, difficult to interpret for someone else. This is an exercise to practice the process of recognizing important dream phrases and symbols and how to connect these with important issues in your life.

The PMID model was developed both to help open your mind to the symbolic language of dreams and meanings and to provide additional ways to “check” yourself, wherein you’ll find that some dream phrases and symbols will come to life with more richness and others may not seem as important as you work with the dream. In fact, the rest of the PMID steps are designed to help you learn even more about your dreams, dream phrases, and symbols.

Epilogue

No matter what our individual histories, cultures and family backgrounds, it’s clear that understanding our dreams is a most profound and effective way to understand ourselves and our lives as has been proven from centuries of ancient practice through today’s modern scientific study. Understanding our dreams about others, in particular, is an excellent door through which we arrive at a deeper understanding of ourselves.

You can interpret your dreams about others since you now hold the resources for understanding your dreams. Those resources are the ability to recall day-before-the-dream events, thoughts, and emotions that will connect you to your dream, and the ability to realize that your personal experiences largely create your dream language. Those resources, together with the staying power to revisit dreams for new insights, are what you need to begin using this system.

As you use these resources, we trust you will find -- perhaps already have found -- that your dreaming mind is an almost infinite reservoir to help you discover and build the relationships of which you have always dreamed. Enjoy your journey. We trust you will be amazed.

Dream on!

Evelyn M. Duesbury, MS Counselor Education,

NCC (National Certified Counselor)

DCC (Distance Credentialed Counselor)

Pen name: Eveland Fairfield