What Do Your Dreams Mean? And Why You Should Study Them 

According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average person dreams four to six times per night. Throughout a night, you might spend as much as two hours dreaming, reports the National Institutes of Health. 

We all dream, but shortly after waking, we tend to forget our dreams immediately. When people say, “I don’t dream,” they actually just forget them.

One theory about the purpose of dreams is that they can help you sort through complicated thoughts and emotions. They help store essential memories and things you’ve learned, while also getting rid of unimportant memories.  

Our dreams may show us something we are not giving conscious attention to during our waking life. These thoughts, feelings or ideas are yearning to be expressed through us, breaking through when our inner head critics are shut down during dreamtime. 

We are only consciously aware of five percent of ourselves; the other 95 percent sits under the water’s surface. Like an iceberg, you cannot see what sits below. 

Our dreams show us what is beneath, and they come bubbling to the surface during the night. Sometimes they are strange and other times beautiful, moving stories and visions that come to us to show us something we need to look at. 

Keep reading to learn more about what your dreams mean and why you should try to understand them so they can guide you... 

How Your Dreams Can Guide You  

There is no right way to look at Dream Work, as there are so many lineages from around the planet. 

"As I've gone deeper and deeper and learned under many different traditions and many teachers throughout my life, I've come to realize that a lot of the 1/3 of our life that we spend asleep is not downtime, but really a time for supra consciousness to go beyond our waking minds and to look at our life and our situations from new vantage points, new perspectives, and to really take advantage of those opportunities to give us a greater choice.” – Cordell Jacks.

“There's a lot of different schools of thought on dream interpretation. And unlike modern-day science, there's no right way. There's no one right interpretation of a dream. What I say is, when there's a good dream interpretation, it lets the dreamer see things for themselves that they hadn't otherwise seen. There's an ‘aha’ moment where they all of a sudden transcend their old meaning, and some new meaning comes, some new insight comes to them. And that's good dream interpretation.” – Cordell Jacks.

There is a difference between simply understanding, and moving to the knowing. Many of us understand a thing, but the problem is we stand under the truth instead of in the truth. Do you have an ‘innerstanding’ of that? Because when our subconscious speaks, it’s speaking from our inner world. And the inner world is the real world.

Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” But you have the opportunity to bring conscious awareness to your dreams and your patterns. You can shed light on your shadows, on those things that are buried beneath. 

How to Understand Your Dreams

Most of the time we don’t understand what our dreams mean, but there are a few occasions when a dream shows us something and we get it. But most dreams are puzzles to be solved; there is a reason that dreams are weird -- they are trying to get us to do some work. Dreams are there to stretch our minds and think about things in new ways.

Learning the language of your dreams takes time and practice. 

“Your dreams are this beautiful inner guidance system every single night that if you slow down, if you take the time to listen to and if you start just a few minutes, every single day of reflecting on what you were dreaming about. What could that have possibly meant? That has a resonant effect throughout the rest of your waking day as you look for those signs, symbols and triggers and how you might transcend them in your waking life.” – Cordell Jacks.

Transcendence comes from the knowing of one's truth. You should pay attention to the signs because life always conspires in our favor.

Your dreams can tell you a lot about your true emotions. Think about what emotions the dreams trigger for you, and where the similarities are in your real life. Is there something you don’t see in that real-life situation? Maybe it could be something that is causing you pain that you aren’t acknowledging? Or a person you are developing feelings for without consciously knowing it? 

Want to Understand the Deeper Meaning of Your Dreams? 

This post should have helped you understand more about the meaning behind your dreams and why you should try to listen to them to help guide you in your real life.

Listen to the full podcast episode Awaken Your Greater Potential with Cordell Jacks to learn how Dream Work can guide you. 

The game is to learn who we are through having this human experience, and so it’s not about finding the truth, but many truths along your path that further align your true being, your true authentic state. When you learn and discover that new truth, then you live in that new truth and become LIT for life. You allow your flame to begin to shine without needing that external influence or validation. 

Ready to understand the deeper meaning of your dreams and begin to uncover emotions that you have hidden beneath the surface? Download a copy of my FREE guide: Getting Started with Shadow Work, to learn more.