When you first start to pay attention to them it is common to experience alarming ones, sometimes even nightmares. This is nothing to be afraid of; it happens because you may be uncovering the experiences that you have accumulated over a lifetime, some of which will not have been assimilated or accepted on a conscious level. Not all those experiences were good. Those that frightened you may be represented in your dreams by monsters that chase you through dark, ominous landscapes. Those that hurt you may manifest as vicious dream characters that seem intent on doing you harm. Such things appear in dreams when something in the present is linking with them on a subconscious level. Perhaps because the present situation is eliciting a similar emotion or perhaps because the original emotion is still active in your life. Analysing these dreams will give you the opportunity to bring all those repressed emotions into consciousness and integrate them into your psyche. This will allow you to move forward and make informed choices about your life.
When psychic energies are denied and pushed away into the abyss of forgetfulness they become distorted and they become powerful because they attract the energy of emotionally similar situations. They can rear up into consciousness unannounced or, more usually, find expression in our behaviour or beliefs. They can trap you in a world of self-delusion, self-denial and destructive patterns. You become your own jailer. By analysing your dreams you can free yourself from this self-imposed prison.
Having the courage to do this is the first obstacle; often we feel safe within the narrow confines of our projected persona; safe within our own illusion. When you strip this away you are exposed and vulnerable; the iron bars that once kept the demons at bay are gone.
The second obstacle is to have the courage to face those demons and, in facing them, find the inner strength to either vanquish them or accept them as a part of yourself and begin to heal and integrate them. It is only by doing this that we can hope to achieve inner peace and harmony. It's always worth remembering that those things in our past that may have caused us pain, actually may hold within them the seeds of new growth. Take the child whose natural talent or ambition was stifled because the childhood environment in which she grew up was not conducive to developing that talent. This may have caused a great deal of sadness at the time, to such an extent that the child may have started to hate the thing she loved the most, or maybe diverted her passion into something more covert. Re-discovering the pain associated with that denial can result in the rediscovery of a dormant talent that can now be brought back into full consciousness and enjoyed with the heart and mind of the child who was denied it.
There are many roads to self-discovery; analysing your dreams is only one way. It is not an easy option but I believe it is more honest and more powerful than many other methods. It can be done at your pace and in the privacy of your own home. Only you can decide whether or not you are ready to face the truth about yourself and your life.
Remember, you need to seek out and slay the dragon before you
have a hope of finding the treasure.