Sleeping and dreaming takes up a third of our lives.  Dreams can be described as wish fulfilling, problem solving, stress relieving and inspirational.  Some dreams are prophesizing ones too.  Lucid dreaming is when you become aware that you are dreaming and this is a very powerful state of consciousness.  Also when you are dreaming, you can do things that you can't do when you are awake; like for instance, experiencing flying, transforming into an animal or something more complex.  Keeping a dream diary by your bed and writing down any dreams or parts of dreams you remember on waking is essential if you want to do dream work.  Dream working allows us to analize how our unconcious proccesses of our mind relates to our personal everyday lives.  During sleep, we proccess a vast amount of experiences, situations, unresolved worries, fears, emotions and desires.  The proccess of bringing your dreams into your daily life awareness can prove to be beneficial for your self-development.  Because dreams are personal and unique to each of us, they also hold certain symbolic messages or meanings that only relate to us; so not everyone will translate certain symbols or archetypal representations in the same way as someone else would.  In this case dream dictionaries are of limited value, as the symbols may have different meanings to you.  Dream dictionaries are very simplistic, but fun to read also.  By you keeping a dream diary, you will eventually realise a pattern that reoccurs and you will be consciously listening to your unconscious self.  This has a positive effect on the harnessing of your energies and the pay off in your waking lives can be very beneficial and spiritually enlightening too!  In a way it's like you counselling yourself; your  own psychotherapy - no charge!  Using your dreams as a basis to work on yourself, will help you gain perspective on your life and really just becomes part of your life in the end.  Nowadays, I don't always feel the need to write them down, but I do try to share my dreams with my husband and children quite alot.  I am more likely to write down the ones where I am lucid dreaming, as I have on occasion, had glimpses into my future, that have come to fruition.

One such dream happened for me a long time ago...I remember the dream quite vividly.
I woke early one sunny morning at 5.30am.  i immediately put my pen to paper and wrote about a dream I had that morning about a place near me and what was happening there in my dream.  That day a friend popped in to see me and said fancy going to Mumbles today?  It just so happened that was what I had been dreaming about that morning, even though my friend did not feature in the dream itself!  Well, I went to the little seaside village and really wasn't thinking about the dream anymore, when all of sudden there were sirens from ambulances, firemen, police and the front of the co-op shop had fallen down and injured a few people outside the shop.  We were actually headed that way and the incident had only recently happened.  How freaky is that?  Well, you can imagine the impact that had on me, and for once I was able to prove that I had actually dreamt of something that was to happen in the future.  My friend was spun out from the idea and didn't really believe in such things.  Obviously, I was eager to show her what I had written that morning in my dream diary, but that just freaked her out more.  Not everybody is open to the mysticisms of the universe, but if you do decide to follow this path of dream working, do it with an open mind and don't expect great miracles and great changes to happen overnight.  Excuse the pun there!!  Just take it one step at a time, and gradually your dreaming will become more memerable and easy to work with.

So happy dreaming everyone!