The use of dreams

[MisterRabbit]

Hey guys, I'm a psychology student and I'm kind of into Depth Psychology, a school which has branched mainly from the work of Carl Jung and those who followed after him and continued his line of thought. While I'm still not that far along, I can tell you that dreams definately are important. Jung's school of thought says that every aspect of a dream is a part of yourself. So, much in the same way that we are, in a sense, the one infinite creator dreaming of itself unaware that it is itself, when we go to sleep and dream the same thing happens in a microcosmic sense. It's really quite a fascinating subject that I can't really cover here, but an excellent website for explaining the concepts and the terminology of interpreting dreams from the Jungian perspective (which I think is very useful) as well as a dream dictionary, is:
http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/dda.html
Anyway, from my own experience, dreams are absolutely fascinating and helpful, like having a relationship with your soul. In fact, that's just what it is really. You go to sleep and some aspect of your consciousness arranges experiences for you that, if you learn their language, let you in on what's going on at deeper levels of your consciousness, that level which is symbolic. In response to your comments about how to record them, I don't think it necessarily matters unless the person has an individual preference. Personally, I began by writing them but then one day I treated myself to a small tape recorder, which has proven to be MUCH more convenient, resulting in many more of my dreams being recorded. What the dreams also do is give whatever current issues are going on in your psyche, or you could say catalyst, a sort of mythology, a symbolic representation. So, it's like your dreams produce you your own individual mythology by which to understand your catalyst, which is often much more interesting and novel and stirring than your normal waking awareness of it. The soul speaks in the language of images, and that which is only words to your conscious mind comes to life in your dreams. For instance, one thing that I need to learn in this life is how to go through experiences and open to my feelings and not just analyze them, and also not to analyze that part of my experience having to do with my spirituality, so one reocurring theme in my dreams is that I am measuring water or aquatic creatures, which represent the unconscious, emotional energy, sometimes life and spirit. Consider also how simply amazing it is that dreams happen at all, I mean they're really like a miracle when you think about it. I've had a few slightly precognitive dreams, and also paying attention to your dreams often leads to a greater realization of the syncronicity that's going on all around you, or possibly causes more of it to happen? Anyway, I think they're very important, and I think that even if you can't lucid dream then they are DEFinately worth the while to record. In fact, lucid dreaming to me seems only like it would be useful if it gave you a greater ability to face the things that your dream is trying to tell you; but simply to have a good time defeats the whole point of dreaming, to me. It is to learn, to be guided, to be enriched and to add depth to your life as you know it.

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Oh, and another good website with more symbols is http://www.dreamhawk.com/d-dic.htm