Lauri Loewenberg - Dream on It: Unlock Your Dreams, Change Your Life

To all the dreamers who have shared their dreams with me. Only with your trust in me would my research and this book be possible.

And to my grandfather, Miles Quinn, who came to me in a dream and changed the course of my life.

Thank you.

Contents

Your Many Roles in Life

The Different Areas of Your Life

Navigating Your Chosen Paths

Your Instincts and Behavior

Your Emotional and Psychological Abilities

Your Self-image and Your State of Mind

Your Emotional Forecast

The Urge to Merge

Ignored, Mishandled, and Difficult Issues

Rules to Remember

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank God for creating us all with these built-in nighttime theaters. Its a rather cool design feature, I think, that not only allows us to view our lives and our behaviors from a wiser perspective, but also makes us all a bit more interesting. I am eternally grateful to my strikingly handsome husband who is and always has been my biggest supporter and cheerleader. I want to thank my son for putting up with and complying with my constant requests er, demands to, Turn the TV down! Mommys writing! Katia Romanoff, PhD, I cannot thank you enough for mentoring me and for being a lifelong friend. I am full of gratitude to the wise individuals who paved the road before me in bringing the practical common sense of dreams into the main stream: Carl Gustav Jung, Patricia Garfield, PhD, and Gayle Delaney, PhD, just to name a few. I am thankful to my agent Meredith Dawson for believing in me and working hard for me and to my editor Hilary Teeman who gave birth to her first child at the same time she helped me give birth to this book. I want to be sure to let all the dreamers who contributed a piece of their psyches and their lives to this book, know how much I appreciate you. And finally, I want to thank Facebook who provided a format that allowed me to easily network with dreamers, which expedited the process of putting this book together. Who would have dreamed of such a thing only a few years ago?

Introduction

Twilight Avatar Google the Sewing Machine the Theory of Relativity

These were all inspired by a dream an actual REM kind of dream that you have when you sleep. Throughout history, artists, writers, inventors, and scientists have solved problems and drawn great inspiration from their dreams. Youd be surprised how many great ideas and personal solutions you are literally dreaming up each and every night, too.

You see, we all dream every night, whether we remember them or not. In fact, we enter the dream state (also known as REM, Rapid Eye Movement) every ninety minutes throughout the night. Every cycle of dreaming grows in duration throughout the night. The first dream of the night may only be three minutes or so and the last dream you have before waking in the morning, provided you had a good seven to eight hours of sleep, can be forty-five minutes to an hour long. On average, you will dream about five times every night, and if youre lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, you will have had well over 100,000 dreams throughout your lifetime!

Cant remember your dreams or want to remember more of them? Its easier than you think. Whenever you wake up, whether it is in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or youre waking up for good in the morning, stay put! It is essential that you remain in the same position you wake up in because that is the position you were dreaming in. If you move your body you disconnect yourself from the dream you were in just seconds ago . If you have to wake up with an alarm, go ahead and turn it off then get right back into that position you woke up in and give yourself just a few minutes to let the dream come back to you. Dont think about what you have to do that day. Quiet your mind. Stay put. Youll be surprised what is there, waiting for you to capture it.

If nothing comes to you then start asking yourself questions such as, how am I feeling? Who was with me? What was I doing? These questions will help jog your memory because we always experience some form of emotion in our dreams, we are usually with someone, and we are certainly doing something. Whatever it is you remember, even if its just a tiny piece, please be sure to write it down or at the very least, tell it to somebody or it will be gone after breakfast. Make this a habit and youll start remembering more and more. Its like a muscle, the more you do this simple exercise the stronger your dream muscle will get. I promise, those floodgates will open and you will be amazed at how much of a life you have been living at night,

Thats a lot of great ideas, advice, and solutions that unfortunately will go unnoticed, unremembered, or simply dismissed as just a dream. Let me assure you, after reading this book, youll never dismiss your dreams again.

So, what are these strange movies that play in our heads at night when we sleep? Where do they come from? What purpose do they serve? Does my dream last night about purchasing a baby crib full of spaghetti mean I need to seek professional help? WTF?

Since prehistoric times mankind has wondered about dreams. In 2001, an expedition into the Chauvet Cave in the valley of the Ardche River in France discovered cave drawings that are believed to be depicting a dream. The ancient Romans thought dreams were messages from the gods and many would take long pilgrimages to dream temples where they would spend the night in hopes of receiving a dream of wisdom or healing. There are over 700 references to dreams and visions within the pages of the Bible, all suggesting that dreams are messages from God or His angels. The ancient Chinese believed that a dream is when the soul leaves the body to travel the world. However, if they should be suddenly awakened, their soul may fail to return to the body. Even today some Chinese arent too keen about having an alarm clock! Essentially, the time-tested consensus is that dreaming is a powerful experience and is connected to something greater than ourselves.

The Greek philosopher Plato was one of the first to get it right that dreams dont come from some outside source but rather from the self although the part of the self he believed they originated from was the liver. Two thousand years later, Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, affirmed that dreams indeed come from the self, the subconscious part of the self. He even brought us a step closer by teaching us that dreams not only come from the self but are about the self the sexually suppressed self. According to Freud, just about everything in our dream can somehow be connected to our genitals and our wanton, misguided, and lustful desires. Sigh. I guess living in the prudish Victorian Era will do that to you. Thankfully, Freuds protg, Carl Gustav Jung, came along and taught us that yes, dreams do come from the self, dreams are indeed about the self, and whats more, understanding dreams helps us to improve the self, not just the sexual self but the entire self. In fact, I subscribe to Jungs dream philosophy. I believe that everything in our dreams is connected to some part of the self or to something or someone that directly affects the self. I believe there are many common archetypes (symbols, images, and themes) that appear in all of our dreams that hold a collective or shared meaning for almost all of us. I believe that dream analysis, or oneiroscopy, which is the medical term for it, is the most insightful form of self discovery available.