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Spirit Guides, Angels, loved ones and your own unconscious often use symbols within  dreams to send messages.  Pictures speak a thousand words.  This is an example of how to interpret them.

The symbols given to you are for you alone, and you need to interpret them.   It is what they mean to you that is the important thing, not what is written in a book.   If you have never seen a shape or another image before, then of course researching and asking others is useful but at the end of the day it is what, embedded within the answer, resonates with you that is most important.

Take the Caduceus for instance. This is a symbol often used to represent healing and Archangel Raphael. It is two snakes entwined round a rod and coming together at the top with two wings.  The snakes cross at all the chakra point’s base to third eye. The rod can represent the body, the snakes activate the chakras, the third eye opens to cosmic knowledge, and the Kundalini rises up the rod and out of the crown forming the wings of a free spiri

In this symbol, the wings have always been what I noticed, and therefore I need to interpret it accordingly to what wings mean to me: wanting to be a free spirit and therefore how much of my life I restrict.   Snakes may be what someone else notices, and therefore it would need to be interpreted by what snakes mean to them.   The rod may be what someone else notices.   At different times in my life I may be drawn to other parts of the symbol, such as the snakes, for example. What comes to me currently about snakes is that they shed their skin as they grow- perhaps it is time for me to shed a skin, a persona that I carry about who I am, or what I am or am not capable of.  Perhaps it is time to shed the skin and let the spirit fly again to a new level, a new chapter in my life.

Symbols have different meanings in different cultures, and this is another reason for ensuring you stick to what a symbol means to you.    For instance, in western cultures, owls usually mean wisdom. But in Native American culture, they mean deception.   So it is important to interpret symbols for yourself.    In most books, horses mean power, but for me they are about freedom.    (See how I keep coming back to freedom? What is this telling me?)

When you dream, keep a dream diary. Angels will use dreams to communicate with you.   If you write them down you will begin to see a pattern forming, which will point you in the direction you need to be taking or confirming that where you are and what you are currently doing is just right.

There are many different ways of interpreting dreams; we have discussed briefly how to interpret the symbols in a dream, but there is also the dreams themselves.

Dreams work on many levels.   They act as a way of the brain sorting relevant and irrelevant information.   They act as a means of communication from your higher self and the angels through your unconscious to your conscious mind.    Dreams often do not seem to relate to anything at all, just a confused mess. But when you stop and begin to play with a dream, it can become quite easy to understand.

Because dreams are multi levelled, you can work with them on multi levels as well. One level, by taking each individual part of a dream as a symbol and asking yourself what the symbol might mean, and the other by accepting that each element of a dream is representative of part of your personality.    When you accept this, you can work imaginatively with it.   I will illustrate what I mean by a personal example of a dream I had about 8 years ago, which was 4 years after my husband’s death.

EXAMPLE:
As with all dreams, it seemed very odd and jumbled to begin with.  I was in the sitting room of my old house watching television with my children   The floor was cracked, with great big gaps, and the room seemed to be slipping away down the hill.  In the middle of the room was a piece of machinery.   It looked like a misshapen tree.  A root seemed to be trying to hold a crack together, and a branch seemed to be trying to hold the ceiling up.  As we watched television huddled together in a corner, the tree kept sprouting new roots and branches, trying to keep everything together and protect us all.    I noticed all this going on but did not seem bothered by it.  In fact, it all seemed quite normal to me.

I went into the kitchen to get something and noticed that at the back of the house the garden was being built on; there was a huge great glass ugly building being constructed in my garden.   It was completely overpowering my home.  I returned to the sitting room and tried to ignore what was happening at the back.  It appeared this state continued for a few weeks or months and the monstrosity at the back got bigger and bigger, and more and more dangerous, because nothing seemed to be holding it up. In the sitting room, the metal tree was continuing to sprout more and more branches and roots as the house continued to keep slipping and falling down around me.

Then, as happens in dreams, I seemed to be walking down railway tracks going through the middle of a desert.   I felt as if I was going to work but I had missed the train.   The children were not there but I was being followed by my dog.   The dog would not go home when he was told, he just trudged on behind me.    The dog had a cut on his head and was bleeding (In real life he had had a cut on his head which bled for a while, he had escaped from the garden as a puppy, had run over the road and been clipped by a passing car).  I was following the tracks because that way I would not get lost and I hoped to catch up with the train.  I was getting angrier with the dog because he would not do as he was told, and I was really quite nasty to him, but he just kept following me.  Eventually, I gave up telling him off and just let him come with me.  I assumed it was because he loved me that he wanted to be with me.  Then I woke up.

At first the two parts of this dream did not seem as if they went together.   It felt like they were two different dreams.  I started with the train track one because it seemed easier.

Trying to catch up with a train taking me to work made sense, as I felt I had a long way to go with my career and that most people were succeeding quicker and better than me. Metaphorically, they were on the train. The desert also made sense; I felt, at that time, I had no particular skills or experience or even a specific career outcome in mind.   I was just working to pay bills.    However, the dog was the bit that really interested me, so I used the following technique:

I relaxed, closed my eyes and went back into the dream in my imagination.

First, I took the role of my dog.

I started to ask my dog questions.

I had a conversation with myself in my imagination.

It went something like this:  “Okay, what are you doing, what part of me are you, I have told you to go home and you just follow me, what is going on?”

He looked at me from those sad brown eyes and replied.   ‘I am the part of you who loves you unconditionally.  I am your love and your joy but you keep trying to put me behind you, but I am always there, following you, where-ever you go.’

This took me a bit by surprise- my dog did not look happy.  Perhaps I was not as happy as I thought.  Next I asked him about his head that was bleeding.  For this there was no reply.  ‘That you need to find for yourself’ he said.  So adding another technique I decided to become the blood dripping from his head.   I imagined myself being the blood, coming from his head, and asked myself what I represented, who I was.  The answer was shocking. The blood responded that I was my pain. I would always be there, I could not be left behind, I could not be ignored, I could only be healed by accepting it as part of myself.

Now it was making sense, my love, my joy, my pain, were all part of myself, all part of my life, I could not just cut off a part of myself and leave it behind as a dog.   Dogs of course are very loyal, loving and never let us down.    So here was a loyal loving part of myself that carried all my pain (of my mother’s death when I was 9 years old which I had tried to ignore).

Next I started on the other part of the dream.   My old house falling apart made sense because my life had fallen apart.   My husband had died and I created a new career for myself in marketing so I could put the children through university.    I was now a single was not as good at as I thought I was, and certainly did not like as much as I had hoped. I certainly did not find it fulfilling, with no time to grieve my lost husband and her life.

I became the iron tree, which by now was very ugly and straining to keep the house together.    What was I?   I was the part of me that managed.   That kept things together, that was very strong, and never gave up.    But I was very tired and would appreciate a break if possible.   The house was falling down, I really was not sure I could keep it going any longer, and I was really unhappy. Why did I demand so much of myself?  Why could we just not have a break? We did not need to keep the old life going, it had come to an end for a reason, needed to be doing other things.  The tree went on for a very long time.

I asked about the glass house with no foundations out the back, and was told it was my ego building a new career with no foundations.  It was an ugly monstrosity that was not part of who I was, but it was an illusion and if I allowed it to get any bigger it would destroy all of us.  But I had to acknowledge the truth of it.  I did hardly ever see my children, I was not happy in the new career-financially it was very rewarding, but I found it frustrating and did not feel at home or comfortable in the business environment and never had.

So metaphorically speaking, I left the old house and the new glass house behind and moved out into the world to see what else there was and where I should go next.

Now the train in the desert took on new meaning.    Perhaps I was not catching up, perhaps I was looking for something new.  Perhaps I needed to accept the pain, rather than trying to run away from it.  The dream was beginning to make sense.  It was telling me to stop trying so hard to keep things the same and to explore the new.  It was telling me I could not leave parts of myself behind that I did not want to acknowledge, but I needed to accept them.

I arranged a holiday for myself and the children,  I took a little time to review my work and my skills, what I did enjoy and what I did not.   I started to notice the things in life that made me feel happy.  The sun, the trees, my family and animals. At my husband’s death I had started to explore life, death, world religions etc.  I had learned healing.  I was already a Reiki Master doing healing and teaching, clairvoyance etc. at weekends, but not as a full time career.   I noticed that it was when I was doing those things in my spare time, when I was helping people, that time flew by and I was happiest.  At work what I enjoyed doing most was the staff personal development part of my job.   So I decided to change my life again, but this time in a gentler, more caring manner for myself and others.  I started to slow down and stopped trying to catch up with the train.  The desert was a quiet a restful place for a while, and when I slowed down enough, the angels connected to me and showed me a new path out of the desert.

Remember this technique, because later as you journey to meet your spirit guides and angels, the symbolic journeys will yield a rich mosaic of how you and your unconscious view your life, and what you need to do to create the life you want.

By Joylina

www.joylina.com