The Art and Science of Dream Interpretation

Dream interpretation is both art and science. It begins with something established and applies it to the obscure, employing the known and a bit of pattern recognition to make sense of the nonsensical.

Let's say you want to interpret your own dreams. A dream dictionary is an enormous help, but it takes more than that to get an accurate overall picture of what your dream means. A printed or online reference gives you just the jumping-off point. I do suggest investing in an inexpensive print version, though there are also several helpful sites online that offer extensive dream dictionaries at no charge.

I'll use an example of a dream I recently interpreted. The dreamer was the passenger in a car when she saw a row of several houses on her left, each of the structures in some stage of burning. She noted that the flames were progressive: the first buildings were little more than the charred skeletons of homes, while the last in the row had as yet not received any fire damage at all, though the dreamer knew instinctively that it would soon burn, too.

There was considerably more to this dreamer's recollection, all of which I took into account while working on her interpretation. I also knew quite a bit about her life, which also helped to pinpoint a meaning. (This is where self interpretation wins out over paying a stranger to do it for you!) For the sake of brevity, we'll examine only the first phase of this dream.

Taking things strictly from the dream dictionary, the row of houses would imply the lives of people around the dreamer. The fire could imply a number of things, from sexuality to being "burnt out." In this case, using all components of the dream and looking at how it related to the dreamer's life, all of the houses represented all of the times the dreamer had been forced to start her life over from scratch. Coming to the end of the row with only one house left was indicative that she felt she was approaching a point of no return, a final burnout from which she couldn't recover.