Walk into any esoteric bookstore and you are likely to find a dreaming dictionary – those books that explain the dream meaning of images. These books consider the images in dreams to be symbols – where a cat always means this, and a broom means that. The lineage I teach looks at things very differently.
In the lineage I teach (and vetted by current research in cognitive neuroscience), dreaming is the language of experience. Dreams are composed of images, which are the putting into form all of our sensing experience: what we hear, see, touch, taste and smell, in addition to any analogies, memories, emotions, knowledge and other responses we have to that particular sensing experience. That form of the sensing experience – the image – becomes a holistic information packet; dreams are the organizing of these images in order to present back to us our experiencing so that we can understand and respond to it.
Because we are completely unique individuals, with completely unique experiences in life, our images 
will have meaning particular to us. And, since experience is present time, our dreams are present time and thus fluid. So, while I may dream of the US Flag tonight, it can’t be assumed that I am feeling particularly patriotic, or thinking about the upcoming election. Instead, the image of the flag will have specific meaning for me, in all the current-time and past experiencing, emotion, memory and senses that are carried in that image, and in how it is contextualized within the dream itself. And, that image may inform me quite differently tomorrow, next week or next year as my life experiences change.
Symbols are images which are externally derived. They are something we create with our thinking mind to use as cognitive or language short cuts to refer to something, such as the US Flag I mentioned, or the Nike Swoosh. This makes them static and one-dimensional. My response to them (and what’s behind them; e.g. the country or the company) is fluid and multi-dimensional. Dreams are internally derived. Thus, in our dreams, each aspect of the dream, or image, is an aspect of the self. This includes people, landscapes, objects and animals.
Therefore, there also is no interpretation to a dream; there is no such thing as a “something is always a something”. Dreams are alive – they move, shift and play. The only way to understand the objects, animals, people, landscapes and other details of a dream are to dream them back by opening the dream. To hear a short example of opening a dream check out my video Images and Dreams posted on my Video page. Or, to have a dream of yours opened, contact me or look for an upcoming dream opening class on my Classes page.
Happy Dreaming!
