Everyone dreams many times during each night but often we don’t hold on to them because they aren’t seen as valuable and there’s no place to put them in our daily lives. I’ve found that dreams are like friends. If you’re interested in getting to know them, they visit more often, and if they are understood accurately, they really start flowing. A person can start remembering many dreams in a single night. This is an indication that the unconscious is quite eager to express itself, to contribute its wisdom in helping to guide us.

You can sometimes understand the top layer of a dream (what Freud called the manifest content) if you spend some time thinking about it and trying to connect it to feelings in your day time life. The deeper layers of the dream (what Freud called the latent content) are the creation and expression of your unconscious mind, the part of your mind that is out of your conscious awareness. For this reason, you can’t recognize what is in this layer of a dream because, by definition, these are thoughts and feelings that have been made unconscious because, often for a variety of reasons, they were too much for you to experience. Understanding these deeper levels can only be achieved with the assistance of an objective, compassionate person who understands the language of dreams and can help you face these important and very powerful feelings. After time, you will become better able to interpret your own dreams if you spend time thinking about them, because you will have diminished the gap between your conscious and unconscious mind.