The Principles of Dream Interpretation — Reading Symbols Through Tradition and Psychology
After waking from a striking dream, anyone grows curious about 'what could this mean?' Dream interpretation is the wisdom that has answered such questions for ages, as people in both East and West have sought to read the symbols of dreams and find signs for life.
Why Have People Interpreted Dreams?
Because dreams are a flow of images not explained by logic, people have believed since ancient times that some message lay hidden within them. In the East, dreams were seen as omens of fortune and misfortune, and books of interpretation were made; in the West too, from antiquity, dreams were regarded as divine revelations or mirrors of the mind. Dream interpretation is, in this way, humanity's old attempt to converse with the unconscious.
The View of Traditional Interpretation
Traditional interpretation reads the symbols that appear in a dream as a language of fortune and misfortune. In the manner that pigs, dragons, and feces mean wealth, ancestors mean tidings or a warning, and a dream of teeth falling out means change or parting, long experience accumulated into a dictionary of symbols. The same symbol is read a little differently from country to country and culture to culture, which shows that dream interpretation is a cultural wisdom steeped in that society's life and values.
The View of Modern Psychology
In the twentieth century, dreams became a subject of psychology. Freud saw dreams as a channel through which repressed desire surfaces in altered form, while Jung understood them as the language of an unconscious in which symbols (archetypes) shared by the individual and by humankind speak. Modern psychology sees a dream less as prophecy than as the mind's work of sorting through the day's emotions and worries. So a dream is less a notice of the future than a mirror reflecting the state of your mind right now.
Auspicious Dreams, Ominous Dreams, and Reverse Reading
Dream interpretation distinguishes between auspicious dreams and ominous dreams to be careful of, but interestingly there is also a tradition of the 'reverse dream,' read the opposite way. A dream of weeping hard is said to mean a joyful event instead, and a dream of fire blazing to mean wealth. This reflects the long experience that a dream's emotion and reality's outcome can be inverted, telling us that the same dream may be read differently according to its feeling and context.
A Wise Attitude Toward Dreams
The best way to enjoy dream interpretation is to take the reading as a reference while reading it against your own situation. Even the same dream of a snake takes on a different meaning depending on your mood that day and the circumstances you face. Receive good dreams as encouragement and ominous ones as a sign to be careful, and above all, looking into the emotion a dream leaves behind is the path to the true message it offers.
Dream interpretation is an old wisdom and a delightful pastime for reading the symbols the unconscious hands us. If you are curious about last night's dream, search a symbol or choose from a category and see both the traditional and modern readings together.