Dream Perceptions increase your Perceptions (and Skills) for your Waking World

Waking experience and nightly dreaming can seem to be opposite experiences with different perceptions. But dream perceptions and altered states of awareness co-mingle during our waking moments, just as they do during our dreaming times.

This co-mingling of awareness while we are awake can be conscious, such as with...

• Meditation
• Affirmation
• Self-suggestion
• Daydreaming and Guided Imagery
• Creative Expression
• Hunches and Intuition
• Rapture and Loosing Track of Time with Music

This co-mingling of awareness can also express through below-conscious-level experiences.

Examples of these adaptive levels of awareness that are often below conscious awareness are Dream Mirrors, where we project qualities and perceptions innate within ourselves (but unrecognized) upon other people.

Another way that altered levels of consciousness co-mingle during our waking awareness is through our storing our experience and language learning with Representational Systems.

Representational systems are our individual and unique method for storing and reacting to experiences and learning. Many times, it is only necessary to change our stored processes of consciousness, so that our life experience (beliefs, attitudes, emotions, perceptions) improve for the better. Dreams offer a strategy for instituting and implementing changes in perception and outcome.

Our dream perceptions are unique representations of our sensory awareness (five senses) and how we developed our language.

Images by themselves are just pictures. Our images, especially the images found in our dreams, are coded with other information.

In some ways, the dreams we perceive are similar to the signs that we see in our waking life. For example:

• Outlines of a man and woman on restroom doors
• The outline of a child chasing a ball to indicate a residential zone
• An image of flames, indicating that the truck is transporting flammable materials

Or, similar to traffic signs or signs in commercial building such as:

• A letter "P" with a line across it, indicating “No Parking”
• An outline of a cigarette with a line across it, indicating “No Smoking”

Some signs are more direct:

• Keep of the grass
• No fishing
• No diving from bridge
• Park closes at 11:00 p.m.

Dreams can use all these types of communication.

What is so exciting about how dreams work is that everyone can develop their own special dream language.

This individualized language really is like our ordinary verbal waking language, although we don't usually recognize this fact.

For example, when the teen age girl says that she loves the Beetles, what does she mean?

• She likes their music
• She is promiscuous with all the band members
• She hopes to become an entomologist after college

Or, what does "late model" refer to?

• A not so old, used car
• A dead pretty lady
• A pretty lady that is not on time for the party or photo shoot

What does a stable model refer to?

• A prototype that finally isn't breaking>
• A movie star horse
• An architect's mock up of a proposed barn
• A pretty woman's condition after plastic surgery

What is important to note is that dreams often us bad puns and poor humor such as these examples in order to communicate their coded messages.

Dream Mirrors

Dream perceptions also function as mirrors.

If a characteristic is not within us, we cannot recognize it.

This is similar to the remote control used by almost all modern televisions. The "“remote”" sends infrared light to a sensor on the television. In this way, the remote functions in a way that is similar to a flashlight.

However, since human eyes do not perceive infrared light, the remote looks like magic.

You can prove that the remote uses light by pointing in the opposite direction. Result: remote doesn't work. Now, place a small mirror opposite the television, and aim the remote at the image of the television in the mirror. Now, the remote will control the television, when pointing in the other direction into the mirror.

Dreams also communicate to us as though we were looking into a mirror.

This dream mirror function takes several forms:

• We see aspects of ourselves that we don't recognize
• We see others who represent aspects of ourselves that we recognize in them, but do not recognize in ourselves
• We see ourselves as others see us
• We see others as we recognize them, but not how we consciously think about them
• We see ourselves as we really are
• We see others as they really are

Sometimes our dreams communicate these mirror messages with caricatures, exaggerations, puns, symbols or satire. Sometimes the message is a literal interpretation of language.

For example, if someone dreams of themselves at work with the head of a bull, their dream could be telling them that they are being “bull headed” at work. The question would be, “What does this person think that the phase “bull headed” means.

It is always important to ask the person who had the dream what are their associations, experiences or relationships to the dream images and symbols.

For example: it might make a difference in the “bull head” dream if the person was born under the astrological symbol of Taurus, or if the person worked as an artificial cattle breeder. It might also be good to know if the person had any experiences in their lives with bulls. Other questions to ask would be what kind of bull's head, i.e., did the dream image have horns, a ring in its nose, or other characteristics? What color was the head, and did the color of the head match the color of the body? What was the relative size of the head was the head larger than the body, smaller than the body or in similar proportion to a human head?

The puzzle of deciphering the personal meaning of your dreams is one of the more enjoyable pastimes associated with learning from our dreams.

Learning to obtain useful information from our dreams is a marvelous hobby, a lucrative pastime, and a way to make our time asleep even more productive.

People who believe that the time that they spend sleeping is wasted have a lot to learn.

Representational Systems

Another line of thought also helps in our learning from our dreams. This is the concept of “Representational Systems,” an idea developed by practitioners of NeuroLinguistic Programming.

The idea here is that as we develop, we learn a language; but, we also create associations with that language through our senses.

What happens is that some of our senses connect more strongly with our language and other senses connect less strongly. This pattern of connection with our senses leads to general patterns of preference of thought, and leads to specific and complicated sub-patterns.

The reason that representational patterns are important in the exploration of dreams is that an understanding of how our language and senses intertwine to produce thought helps us to decipher our dreams