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Dream Learning Techniques use the skills of both of your Brain Hemispheres

Dream Learning Techniques: Integrating Left and Right Brain Hemisphere Thinking

You need to be able to experience and think from both your left and right brain hemisphere modes of thought if you want to live your dreams.

Using distinct left and right hemisphere brain functioning is a useful dream guidance and dream therapy strategy. These strategies are helpful as long as you realize that these distinctions are only metaphors. The brain actually operates as a whole.

Your brain is only one component of your conscious awareness, and your brain is only one component of your intelligence.

Your brain is a component of a greater Holistic system. Just as arms and legs perform different jobs, but can be trained to do the same jobs, so does your brain function in the ways that it is trained.

In our modern culture, mental training is predominately for verbal, logical, analytical, time and sequence oriented thinking. Modern societies emphasize recalling facts and numbers. Modern societies prize cause and effect analysis and the analysis of sequences for problem solving and decision-making. This keeps our brains busy, but these skills are only some of the things that our brains do well.

Although your brain looks like each side is a mirror image of the other side, your brain functions differently on each side.

Peop1e who 1earn to process their experience primarily with their right brain tend to be visual thinkers. Peop1e who 1earn/process predominate1y with their 1eft brain tend to be verbal thinkers.

People who learn by experiences are called haptic learners. Haptic learners process with their right brain hemisphere or alternate brain processing from side to side.

Traditiona1 verbal "Dream Dictionary" techniques do not help understand the communication of our right brain hemisphere. In those "Dream Dictionary" classifications, one symbol or picture is identified with one meaning. This effort is attempting to make the holistic-visual, fantasy-based system of the right brain into a rational, logical, organized encyclopedia system. This strategy doesn't get far.

Imagine a portrait artist completing the painting with skills only derived from verbal directions. Can the painter of landscapes complete the painting from only word descriptions of the outdoor scene?

Talking and listening are left brain oriented.

But, creativity, visualization, memory, relaxation and feelings are important right brain functions which you can use to help make positive changes in you life.

You need to communicate with both sides of your brain if you wish to use your dreams efficiently.

You need to know that all internal functioning is reflected by external body processes and behavioral signals, and that you can discover the meaning of these processes and signals for yourself and for your own unique, internal language. If you observe keenly and question intuitively, if you rely on your right brain hemisphere's thinking skills; then you will be successful.

Stereotyped exercises and stale questioning will not uncover your cognitive orientation and multiple abilities.

Each person's functioning is unique - and a source of creative potential. This means that no one thinks, feels, learns, processes information, or experiences exactly like you do.

Right brain questions should be open ended and require visual, auditory and kinesthetic processing; emphasize both memory and imagination; and include meta-questions about how you process information, about how you know what you know and how you remember.

To use your dreams effectively, you need to observe the answers to questions as much as you 1isten for answers. When helping another person explore their dreams, you need to communicate non-verbally as well as verbally.

The right brain hemisphere communication that expands creativity is not the same as body language analysis that uses left hemisphere skills to symbolize body positions and expressions. Right brain hemisphere communication is done by visualizing the message you wish to send to the right brain and trusting that your body systems will reflect the correct posture, body signals, etc., which in turn, are understood by your right brain.

This is a natural process that already is happening, but we are so involved with our verbal, left brain functioning that we generally don't notice our holistic thinking activity. But, as we can learn to rely on this Right Brain Hemisphere communication process, we can test our communication by watching the effects upon our body systems.

We can become more aware of ourselves, and we can expand our creativity in exciting new ways using Dream Learning Techniques.

Left-Right Hemisphere Modes of Consciousness

Specialized Training of Brain Hemisphere Skills

Left-Right Brain Problem Solving Models

Left-Right Brain Cause and Effect Models