660 Million Dreamers

A lot of people are interested in their dreams. According to Google there are 660 million people who type the word “dreams” into their browser every year – 660 million. But most of those folks don’t understand their dreams and the internet in general does not help that much. If you type in the phrase “what does my dream mean” mostly what you find is pages and pages of dream dictionaries. None of these say anything about the real meaning of your dream.

Our dreams are trying to speak to us. They are trying to get our attention. With 660 million people a year researching their dreams on Google alone, then they are succeeding on that level. From there though, there is a huge gap as most people are discouraged by the wide range of information and misinformation that is our there about dreams. In the end, for most people, their dreams end up as a mere curiosity. There is a huge language barrier between us and our dreams. So they wake us up for a moment but we don’t know how to listen to what they are saying.

If we knew what dreams were trying to communicate then we could begin to break down that barrier. But this is the catch. Dreams by their very nature are communicating to us about what we don’t know. That is the gift of dreams. If they were speaking to us about what we already knew then they would not be that helpful.

Yet if we could at least accept this -that our dreams are trying to reach us, trying to be in relationship with us, then that would begin to change everything. It would open possibilities of feeling into dreams on a whole other level, in a whole other way. Instead of trying to find an answer to what our dreams mean, it would open us to wondering what we needed to ask about our dreams. Understanding dreams is all about knowing what to ask and not about trying to find an answer.

Nobody can give you answers about your dreams. For better or worse there is no way to tell you what your dream means, there is no dream dictionary out there that knows what your dream is about. Done right, working with your dreams is really about asking the right questions – not answering them.

These questions lie in relation to your own very particular and personal relationship to this inner world. For example asking what you feel in a dream is often the absolute most important thing about a dream. Dreams communicate on a visual level yes, but also on a deep experiential level. Exploring, asking questions about what you feel in a dream and what that feeling experience really means to you, often says a thousand times more about any dream, than any dictionary could ever tell you.

This way of exploring dreams opens a conversation with the world of dreams. It allows us each to overcome our own barrier to understanding our inner world because it changes our relationship to it. Instead of being in the world of needing an answer it opens a vertical reality of living with curiosity. It opens a different relationship to our dreams because it shifts the relationship to being in relationship.

My hope is that this blog will help open this understanding of dreams, will help others find their own relationship to their own dreams and help bring the teaching of dreams into this world.

Bill St.Cyr 12/27/11