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You are here: Home / Working with Dreams / Dream Interpretation without a Dream Dictionary

Dream Interpretation without a Dream Dictionary

By Ryan Hurd

Over the next week or so, I am going to cover my ten favorite ways of working with dreams without buying a dream dictionary.

oneirocritica-artemidorus-dream-dictionary
The Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, probably the most modern dream dictionary you need. 2nd century A.D.

It’s not that I think dream dictionaries are useless.  Actually I have one and consult it at least once a week.  However, the dream dictionary can only provide one way of working with dreams, which is the cultural significance of a symbol or some pan-human experience such as shame, mortality, or stress.  To put it mildly, our dreams are much more than the dumping grounds of our culture’s symbols and our fear of realizing we are butt-naked in public.

Dreams, like any imaginal or hallucinogenic event, have dozens of emotional, cognitive, and physical layers to consider, as well as significance on the personal, communal and transpersonal levels. To say a dream means one thing is to have insulted a dream.

The Quest for Experience

Luckily,  traditional “dream interpretation” is not the only way to honor our dreams.  As world mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

With this in mind, the quest for meaning seems better suited for the interpretation of dead languages, not for the rich sensory experiences of our dreams, some of which we feel more alive than in our day-to-day existence.

So these 10 ways of working with dreams all have one thing in common: a unique way to extend the experience of dreaming.   Don’t worry, meaning is still part of the package, but it’s not the only end result of working with dreams.

A Holistic Approach to Working with Dreams

Instead, this approach to dreamwork brings a fuller and richer sense of the dream, it highlights our fears and passions in life, and reminds us of our unique possibilities as well as the dangers we face as individuals, and as a culture.

By no means are these my “patented” methods or anything like that — most of these techniques are thousands of years old, but have been forgotten in today’s information-saturated world.  What we’re after here isn’t information, but knowledge.

And maybe if we’re lucky, and accidentally can’t look away: wisdom.

Some of these dream work methods you will probably be familiar with, and a few will seem a little bizarre at first, but all together these “dream deepening” techniques bring all of our best capabilities to bear on our uncanny, yet somehow deeply familiar, participation in the dream world.

Stay tuned.  The next article in this series is about Dream Sharing.

Filed Under: Working with Dreams Tagged With: Artemidorus, dream deepening, dream dictionary, Dream Interpretation, holistic dreamwork, Joseph Campbell, Oneirocritica

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Comments

  1. David George says

    March 16, 2010 at 8:58 am

    i have a lots of dreams a bout the bible some of my dream come true just want to know more

    • Ryan Hurd says

      March 16, 2010 at 9:37 am

      Hi David, thanks for commenting. I don’t write often about psychic dreams but you may interested in this article about Christianity and lucid dreams.

  2. Renee Hassani says

    September 13, 2012 at 2:19 pm

    Hi! I’m new to this site and I’m very much enjoying every little article in it! I’ve read a few and am delighted to know that there are people that shares the same strong interest for dreams and consciousness and how one affects the other. I’ll keep reading (and learning more) tho. Just wanted to shout this out to you 🙂

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