Kenneth McRae - All About Dreams: How To Begin Understanding And Interpreting The Meaning Of Dreams

by KennethMcRae

Copyright 2013Kenneth McRae

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Youre lyingin bed at night after a long, tiring day. Your eyelids become heavyand you feel yourself beginning to drift towards sleep. Soon,youve left the world of conscious awareness altogether and areapproaching the oblivion of deep sleep. After a while - though ofcourse without any consciousness of time passing - youve reachedone of the first of the REM (rapid eye movement) phases of thesleep cycle which is the sleep cycle where much, but not all,dreaming occurs.

This is whereyou pass the portal into the dreaming world. Later when you awakeyoull be unable to consciously recall much of what you experiencedin the dreaming state, either with absolutely no memory of it atall or with only faint fragmentary snatches of it which rapidlydisappear from your mind as you wake.

However somedreams are so intense, fantastic and surreal that they somehow staywith you into waking consciousness and beyond, and throughout theages since time immemorial people have sought to understand themeaning and significance of these wild, weird and wonderfultableaux which sometimes parade through the sleeping mind.

Are they, assome neuroscientists believe, merely the result of the brains wayof processing and absorbing random thoughts and bits of informationwhich the brain has been bombarded with over the course of thepreceding day or two, or are they messages from the divine or thesuperconscious, whichever you prefer to call it, which, ifinterpreted accurately, can reveal to us the source of and thesolution to problems or difficulties we may be experiencing in ourcurrent lives?

Can dreamsalso be a source of inspiration and problem solving Eurekamoments? Many, many people, not only creative artists, writers andpoets but also scientists and mathematicians, believe so. Needlessto say, this strongly implies that there is indeed at least acertain amount of meaning and purpose behind vivid and exceptionaldreams, that they are not simply random jumbles of thought, imageand emotion automatically processing their way through thebrain.

The overallimplication seems to point toward there being something - which Ipersonally believe to be the subconscious mind - which is oftentrying to tell us something about ourselves and our lives and whichuses symbolism through dreams to try to convey the message to us.Later on in this book well be taking a look at dreaminterpretation and analysis.

Obviouslynormal, everyday waking consciousness and the dreaming state arecompletely and entirely different. The logical, critical andlimited conscious mind, thoroughly preoccupied as it is with thehere and now of its immediate surroundings, is generally unaware ofthe existence of the subconscious mind and is only very vaguelyaware of anything that the subconscious may be trying tocommunicate to it.

It wouldtherefore seem not only fitting but natural that while theconscious mind is asleep the subconscious would use dreams as a wayof trying to show us what we need to know and do in order to solveproblems and improve our lives.

My name isKenneth McRae, aka Kenny, and some years ago as an offshoot of myresearch into psychology and hypnosis I developed a keen interestin dreams and their possible significance. One of the main reasonsfor this related to a particular dream - or dreams - that I hadsometime back in 1991.

Back then Iwas pretty much a different person living a different kind of lifeand at that time it never occurred to me to make any attempt tointerpret or analyze the dream(s), I simply knew that Id had oneor two intense dreams and left it at that. While the memory of thedream(s) has more or less stayed with me it wasnt until quite along time after Id had it, when Id eventually begun studying theworkings of the conscious and subconscious minds, that I consideredtrying to interpret the experience.

However I soonrealized that this was going to be irrelevant and pointless, as,like I said, so much had changed in my mind and life since the timeback when Id actually had the dream(s).

Neverthelessit was (to me) a vivid and powerful experience and I can stillrecall the gist of it.

It wasnt likea nightmare as such, but wasnt particularly pleasant or anythinglike that either. The dream started whereby I felt myself to bestanding in a small, bedroom-like room where everything seemed tohave a pinkish, orangey kind of tinge to it. There was a large pileof old and worn looking soft shoes or slippers piled haphazardly upagainst one of the walls.

There was alsoa narrow closet or wardrobe kind of thing on the other side of theroom and a medium sized bed which took up most of the actual floorspace in the room.

Sittingupright on the bed were two people, (many dream analysts interpretother people in dreams as often representing different elements ofyour own psyche), one of whom I knew and the other who I wascompletely unfamiliar with. The person that I knew was clearly awoman that Id known previously but hadnt seen for several years,and the other person was a youth of around mid or late teenageyears who in the dream I clearly felt or realized was in some waymentally disabled, somehow stunned and seemingly unable to move. Hehad his back to me so I couldnt see his face but could clearly seethe womans face.

She waslooking at the youth with a peculiar expression in her eyes which Isaw as being a mixture of callous disregard, faint amusement andmild curiosity, and at that point she picked up from the bedsomething like a tube or wire which had some sort of small plug onthe end of it and then inserted the plug somewhere into the side ofthe youths head at which point there was one short bleep sort ofsound and then he instantly disintegrated into nothingness, leavingonly a small heap of clothing or something on the bed where hedbeen.

The dream thenshifted to a different scenario - or another different dream -where I felt myself to be flying at very low level over slightlyundulating grassy territory. I was flying at such a low level thatI felt myself to be moving slightly up and down in accordance withthe territorial undulations.

I was flyingvery fast and it seemed to be quite bright and sunny when suddenlyI noticed or felt a somehow ominous shape above me which castitself as a shadow on the grassy undulations below me and whichtook the shape of a large bird or plane. It seemed to be rapidlyfollowing my movement almost exactly so that I was always directlyunderneath whatever it was. This went on for some unmeasurableperiod of time (it could have been anywhere from 10 seconds to 10minutes) during which I can remember having a feeling of indecisionas to whether or not it mattered if I managed to somehow escape orotherwise break away from the thing above me that was following mymovements so closely. At that point the whole dream vanished.