Photo: Bhaskar Banerji

Here’s my claim up front: working with your dreams (that you have while sleeping) will revitalize your career, rekindle your love life, and unleash your creativity so you can go after what you really want in life.

I admit it’s an arrogant claim that paying attention to those nightly dreams can revitalize every aspect of our lives. But it’s true. Dreaming is a window into our most naked needs, desires, fears and aspirations. So if you are looking for a quick path to invigorate your unique skills and passions, tending your dreams is an easy first step.

First off, I’m not talking just about dream interpretation here. Instead, I’m talking about dream work. Simply by remembering our dreams, and focusing on those significant dream images and related emotions, we are building bridges between our nightworld and our dayworld. These bridges connect the dynamo of our emotional intelligence to our rational waking life.

Dreams and Intuition

You might have heard about multiple intelligences before: the idea that we have more than a few ways of making sense of the world and our place in it. Compared to logic, emotional intelligence is an older, deeper and a more intuitive way of knowing. Intuition is tied to our basic drives (sex, shelter, nourishment), our relationships with loved ones – and that hard-to-pin down sense of “purpose” that each of us has.

Emotional intelligence is not irrational, however. It has its own logic, its own center of gravity. And in dreams this way of thinking is in the driver’s seat.

So what else is dreaming about? When we are dreaming, we explore intense emotions at the same time as we delve into long-term memories. The brain’s visual centers are triggered, making the experience a powerful hallucination that, if we had it while awake, would definitely be considered crazy.

That’s why dreaming can be considered the original altered state of consciousness: it’s a pretty wild ride.

Discovering the Language of Dreams

Here’s where your career, your sex life and your creativity come in. We now know that dream content (the actual images, emotions, and experiences we remember) is far from random, despite the brain stem pulses from which dreams originate.

Photo: Venetia Joubert Sarah Oosterveld

Researchers such as William Domhoff have statistically shown that the content of our dreams is correlated with our most pressing daily thoughts and concerns.

This is the only part of Freud’s dream theory that is still considered accurate today – the so called day residue.

In other words, our dreams are speaking our own private language, and telling stories that make up our own personal mythology, connecting our oldest fears with our present life situation, our jobs, our relationships, and our daily grind.

But rather than focusing only on what that dream experience means, it is more powerful to bring those dreams into our waking life and honor the image with action.

3 Ways to Honor A Dream Without Buying A Dream Dictionary

• Live in the uncomfortable parts. What in waking life does this dream remind you of? Sit with the discomfort until you can find its analogue in the present. Where do you notice the feeling? Pay attention when similar feelings come up later – this is key to developing your intuition and strengthening that emotional intelligence.
• Give a gift. If a tree sheltered you in a dream storm, thank a tree in your own way. If you had a dream argument with your long-dead family member, work on cultivating forgiveness. If you dreamed of drowning, go down to the ocean or a river and throw a stone into the water. There’s no recipe for this; be spontaneous and make sure every act contains gratitude or thankfulness.
• Speak your truth. Write the dream down, speak it out loud, or act it out. Some even do dream theater where people play out different characters in dreams to make it more real. Make the dream come alive. You may be surprised what you learn in the process.

This is just scratching the surface, of course. Over time, by simply paying attention to your dreams, the dreams you have will also change, becoming more clear, more directed, and more focused on the issues you are most interested in. This approach was known by the ancient Greeks as dream incubation.

Within a couple of months, you will feel more alive, more centered, and more in control of where you’re going in life.

Now that’s really “so you can rest medicine!”