Starting in the Leader this week, a delight for readers with a taste for the esoteric, as we introduce our new columnist Robert Readings. Robert is a professional dream analyst, psychic reader of playing cards, and hypnotist. He has been on radio and television all over the world explaining and demonstrating his abilities.
This week he poses the intriguing question: “Why do we dream?”
Before we ask that question, we really should ask, why do we dream? The answer to that is both simple and complicated. The first thing to understand is that we create almost all of our dreams. The dream did not just happen to us.
It is our subconscious mind at work, the mystery part of our mind that is always on.
It records every experience and emotion that we have. If we suppress our emotions, or we decide not to deal with ongoing issues, as soon as we enter the sleeping state, our subconscious mind takes over and tries to make sense of our unresolved problems. This is when we will often have a dream that makes no sense to us, the one where both the imagery and storyline are bizarre.
It is for this reason that a number of people dismiss dreams as having no meaning. This is a mistake. Our dreams have a direct correlation with how we are currently living our lives, and the people in it. Consider the viewpoint we take on nightmares – it is a widely held belief that this type of dream is because of late-night eating, or a horror movie that we recently viewed or countless other theories that are not correct.
In fact, nightmares are our subconscious way of literally shouting at us to deal with the unresolved issues in our lives. Once we become more aware of what our dream is trying to tell us, we become more empowered in our decision-making.
There are all manner of dreams that we will have in our lifetime. Some are straightforward while others are downright bizarre. The man who is credited with giving dream analysis their meanings, Sigmund Freud, said that the more bizarre the dream is, the more it is based in truth. I tend to agree with that. As a professional dream analyst for over 20 years, I feel that I have encountered and analysed most types.
The type of dream that still fascinates me to this day is referred to as a precognitive dream.
Not even the hardened sceptics can explain this type of dream.
Essentially it is a dream of an event or a person/people that is based in the future. This dream then comes true at a later time. There is no explanation for this. I have been fortunate to have experienced many of these dreams and it is my hope that I will have many more before my final sleep.
My late mother had incredible precognitive dreams that I still remember her telling me about. I am sure that some of the readers of this newspaper have also had them, but for one reason or another have never told anyone else.
One final tip, if you’re really interested in understanding what your dream means, leave a pen and pad by your locker. Upon waking and before you even move out of bed, scribble down what you can recall from your dream and over a very short period of time you will see a distinct pattern form. This is a great starting point in trying to understand what does your dream mean.
In my next article I will give meanings to the ten most frequent dreams that we have.
