Rose Inserra - Dreams: What Your Subconscious Wants to Tell You

To Paul M, for inspiring me to follow my dreams.

A Rockpool book
PO Box 252
Summer Hill
NSW 2130
Australia
www.rockpoolpublishing.com.au
http://www.facebook.com/RockpoolPublishing

First published in 2015
Copyright Rose Inserra 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Inserra, Rose, 1958- author.
Dreams : what your subconscious wants to tell you / Rose
Inserra.
9781925017175 (paperback)
Includes index.

Dream interpretation.
Dreams.
Psychoanalysis.

154.63

Cover design by Farrah Careem
Typeset by TypeSkill
Edited by Katie Evans
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders of printed material. The publisher welcomes hearing from anyone in this regard.

Contents

Introduction

WE ALL DREAM. Thats a fact. Its one thing we have in common with the entire human race and mammals, as research suggests. The ancient Greeks believed that when you fell asleep youd fall into the arms of Morpheus, the god of dreams, where you would surrender to the divine messages given to you through your dreams in forms of symbols, images and prophecies. Indigenous peoples have held strong beliefs in dreams as a spiritual connection to spirits, guides and their ancestors. Dreams have featured in holy texts, such as the Bible, and across traditional religious beliefs from all nations. And modern science has made enormous progress in the understanding of our dreaming mind and its purpose and function in our lives. Both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud conducted extensive research on the topic of dreams and provided valuable information that has increased our awareness and understanding of dream interpretation. Their findings on the purpose and messages of the sub conscious have shaped our view on what dreams mean as a tool in helping us navigate our waking-life issues.

My belief is that dreams are a gateway to understanding yourself. Images you see in a dream highlight parts of your personality whats going on at an ego level and episodes in your life that may need to be examined or analysed.

In my experience, analysing our dreams is not simply a problem-solving device, even though dreams in fact help us with solutions. The magic that dreams provide is that they reveal feelings that need to be dealt with. They are a wake-up call from your soul or subconscious self. But how do you enable the emotions that surface in your dreams to transfer into your consciousness?

For those who want to understand their dreams but cannot remember them, Dreams: What Your Subconscious Wants to Tell You will motivate you to want to recall your dreams. For those of you who remember your dreams, this book will help you to take an active role in interpreting them and discovering the layers of meaning from their symbols and images. As dreams are a reflection of your inner world its essential that you , and only you , are the final authority on what your dreams mean.

As a creative writer I love using metaphors and vivid imagery in my prose, and it became my mission to search for the perfect metaphor to encapsulate my own personal connection to the study of understanding dreams.

After a number of concepts that led to a dead-end, I finally discovered the thread metaphor. Comparing our existence to threads is closely associated with the thread of life spun for us by the Three Sisters of Fate from Greek mythology, the Moirae, who determine the life and death of all mortals. Clotho weaves the threads at the beginning of our life; Lachesis determines the shape and length of it and decides which events should occur in everyones life; and Atropos cuts the thread when the time has come for death.

These threads represent the parts of ourselves that make up the greater tapestry of our lifes experiences and that includes the six years we spend dreaming during our lifetime.

I have also used the symbolism of thread in the three parts of the book to represent our connection to one another as fellow dreamers. Dreams are threads given to us by our conscious to hang on to they are everyday threads. We usually hold on by a thread to our reality when life gets too challenging, as we hang on by that invisible thread when we are desperately lost in our nightmares.

Dreams help us enter our subconscious and ensure we return back safely.

The thread is also a metaphor for the process we use as we wind our way through the labyrinthine dreamworld holding on to an invisible thread of hope that we will be able to interpret the extraordinary dreams we weave. This process is made up of three parts:

1. Knowledge
2. Intuition
3. Application

Once applied, the three parts will provide you with tools that I believe will enable you to understand your dream messages more fully and empower you to make changes in your waking life.

The case studies used throughout the book reinforce the success of this process and Im very grateful to have had the permission of the dreamers, whose names have been changed for confidentiality, to use their dreams to encourage insightful dream interpretation.

By viewing dreams as a wealth of resources rather than possessing rigid meanings, you can make the most of their gifts of wisdom. Then watch for magic to happen.

WE ARE ALL connected to each other through the magic thread of dreams that we share as humans. This part of the book looks at the knowledge we can gain from how symbols work in our dreams and their magic in bringing to light all that you need for self-understanding.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says:

An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of the time, the place or the circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.

According to ancient Eastern beliefs, when a child is born, an invisible red thread extends from the childs spirit and connects him or her to all the significant people present and future who will play a part in his or her life. As the child grows, the thread shortens; this draws those people who are destined to be together closer.

The concept of destiny and the red thread extends to the folklore of the old lunar matchmaker god, who ties an invisible red string around the ankles of men and women who are destined to become soul mates and will one day marry each other. This magical thread, too, may stretch or tangle, but will never break. And so it is with the dream thread. You dont know why a theme or a piece from a scene is carried through the dreamer to the waking world, but you trust it because it will reveal itself to be significant.

The magic of understanding our dreamscape is all about the journey we take into our dreaming world and how we bring it back into our conscious lives. You may ask, what do I do with these dreams? How do I journey safely? How do I retrieve the symbols and meanings so that my lifes better? What does it require?