Learning to Understand the True Nature and Value of Dreams

Posted On June 11, 2025 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

Our nightly dreams have always been something that’s mysterious and perplexing, often making us wonder what they mean, or filling us with a form of superstition and premonition. We wonder . . . what the heck was that about? Where did that come from? Dreams can often seem bizarre and outlandish, or terrifying and ridiculous. Occasionally they can seem to be communicating an important message of kind from what seems like a higher or divine power. We know dreams are meaningful in some way, because they’re being produced by our own subconscious mind, we’re just not quite sure what a dream is telling us, or more importantly, what it’s showing us about the deeper, hidden aspect of our own psyche.

We know that our subconscious is symbolic, metaphorical, and emotional in nature, rather than literal, and seeing how dreams are a product of our subconscious, we can attempt to make sense of them by interpreting them symbolically. We can extract the symbols that make up the dream and attempt to interpret them to find their hidden meaning, especially in terms of the feeling or emotion they invoke. This can bring us a certain form of insight, but only in a subliminal, indirect, and fleeting manner, because as soon as we begin waking up, moving from one state to another, the details of the dream steadily fade, and as we begin moving around, can disappear altogether.

We can resort to books on “dream interpretation”, which provides us with an extremely generic interpretation that’s more of an opinion, or a vastly universal one that can be a hit or miss by slating everybody into the same category. And while this may be helpful at first to get us in the mode of understanding how to interpret universal symbols, it can also have a detrimental effect in preventing us from penetrating the deeper aspects of our own psyche, causing us to remain on the surface of our mind instead. While we can clearly say that symbols are universal in nature, where a general interpretation may suffice in forming the seed or basis for deeper thought, the real significance of symbols generated and laid out in a story-line of some kind, can only be correctly understood through higher forms of intuition.

Intuition is the aspect of our mind that bridges two worlds into one experience. Symbols are metaphorical ideas that are holistic in terms of connecting every aspect of our mind – impression that forms a feeling, correlated with an emotion, that invokes a correlating memory and thought process. Each person will form a personalized interpretation of a universal symbol, which, while it holds true to the basic idea the symbol represents, always involves a personal twist. In terms of a dream, the symbols are more like metaphors that serve to invoke an emotional response that forms a distinct type of experience.

Spiders, for example, can mean something different to everyone based on how they’ve been taught to feel about them, rather than from an actual experience. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with spiders, and bugs in general. I thought they were really cool. I went around collecting various spiders, including black widows, and putting them in a mayonnaise jar, while making an environment for them out of grass and sticks, and then I would study them. When my mom saw what I was doing, she freaked out and told me they would kill me if they bit me, causing me to feel afraid. My grandpa, on the other hand, was a farmer and had taught me that spiders were “good bugs” that killed the bad bugs. He taught me that I needed to put holes in the lid of the jar to give them air, and helped me by taking a small nail and hammering several small holes in the top. Then he told me I needed to find other bugs to put in the jar for food. But up until my mom freaked out, I wasn’t afraid of spiders at all. So, while many relate to spiders as being scary or invoking a feeling of fear, I don’t. A fearful response to certain things is often a ”taught response”, rather than a natural one.

I went the whole gamut with studying dreams. I read all the books, practiced a variety of methods on how to interpret them symbolically, metaphorically, and where every aspect represents an aspect of ourselves, because of course, dreams are seemingly self-contained and self-generated from our own subconscious. And while this is true to a certain extent, due to our subconscious being the aspect of our mind shared by others and all of Nature, all methods are relative up to a certain point. We can literally share or acquire dreams from anyone that we sleep with in the same bed, close to, or in proximity of.

I also explored and became proficient at lucid dreaming, which is where you literally become “aware” (awake) while in the dream and you’re able to influence and direct how it transpires and progresses along a particular type of story-line. What I found interesting about this experience is that when I was “trying to do it” as a deliberate practice, I couldn’t seem to actually do it, yet as soon as I quit trying, and simply set an intention to do it, it started happening fluently. It took me awhile to realize what I was doing, because it came in an unexpected way. I didn’t have a pronounced sense of being aware while in the dream, but rather started thinking about the dream while in it, having it, and then started realizing I was thinking about it. It was more of an indirect awareness, where I didn’t realize what I was doing.

I started by thinking about the significance of certain colors and what was happening where I started interpreting the dream while in it. The interpretation wasn’t generic or the result of what I learned through studying and other peoples account of what happens, but rather about “why things were a certain color or symbol, and what the different ideas playing out “meant”. I didn’t see them as abstract symbols that were unrelated and set apart from each other, but more like “ideas” formed through a dynamic series of corresponding symbols that formed the overall idea being played out. Instead of picking it apart in terms of this aspect or that one, I thought about it as an idea that gave me a certain type of experience as a feeling, and out of the feeling it gave me, a train of thought ensued spontaneously. It was as though my conscious mind was behaving like my subconscious mind – in an automated fashion, rather than a self-aware one.

As I continued to develop this method of dreaming, I came to call them “thinking dreams”, because through the thoughts I formed while in them, or as soon as I began waking up, showed me things I didn’t know before, or that I sort of knew, but couldn’t quite put my finger on in terms of articulating it. I began literally “learning new things” from my dreams that were hidden while in a fully conscious state. I also realized that what makes a dream begin to instantly fade as soon as I woke up, was because I moved – the more I moved around as I was waking up, changing positions, the quicker I forgot what the dream was about. Physiology is directly related to state of mind. Also, if I woke up too fast, rather than lingering in a semi-conscious state for a while, it disappeared almost instantly.

So, from this I learned to remain perfectly still as I was waking up, and to meditate on the dream for a while so I could “capture” the essence of the dream, forming a memory of it. I would recall as much as I could and in as much detail as I could, and then go over the main idea it conveyed until I could maintain it, and then as soon as I got up, I wrote it down and journaled about it. Journaling is a very powerful tool for penetrating the deeper aspects of your own mind and Soul. By journaling about what originates as a vague idea, you steadily develop it into a detailed and coherent one. It’s as if you draw information out of the deeper aspects of your own psyche that you weren’t aware of before.

Out of this practice, a whole thought process would transpire in a systematic manner, that gave me deeper insights into the meaning and relevance of the dream. The dream itself, in its metaphorical essence, wasn’t significant in and of itself, but rather in terms of the thought process it served as the foundation for and birthed in a systematic manner. We’ve become so accustomed to neatly separating and compartmentalizing the dual aspects of our mind into individual categories, where one is presented as being independent of the other one, rather than realizing their complementary and function as an extension and continuation of each other. Instead of separating them out and then analyzing each one in a separate state, we need to realize they operate as a single unit in forming a greater whole we experience as reality. One is formed on the inner plane of our mind as a metaphorical representation that forms the basis for experiencing as an outer reality of a similar nature and feeling. All experience originates as a feeling and serves to give us more of the same feeling.

The dream sets the feeling and ambiance as a mood that stimulates and gives rise to its correlating aspect of thought, which forms meaning, out of which an experience is produced as a story-line. Experience isn’t produced by one aspect of our mind or the other but rises naturally out of the combination of both aspects which form a whole. While many remain invested in picking apart a dream in terms of key symbols and different aspects and interpreting them to try and find the dreams overall meaning, I invite you to approach it in a different manner. Think of the symbolic dream more in terms of how it makes you feel, what emotion it acted to naturally generate and make prominent, and out of this emotional-feeling – notice what memories naturally come to mind in relation to it, and what you naturally start thinking about as a result. Bridge them as a continuation of each other, rather than separating them. Don’t intentionally generate or try to direct the thoughts that transpire from the dream, but simply allow them to occur naturally in an automatic manner, while simply observing them. Allow correlated memories to rise out of the feeling the dream leaves you with, and out of that, a natural train of thought. This process will allow you to understand dreams in terms of the deeper, harmoniously correlated aspects of your own psyche.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher