3 Good Reasons to Pay Attention to Your Dreams

Discover the hidden value in your nighttime escapades

Dreams are something that everyone has, but few people pay attention to. Like junk mail, a dream arrives in the inbox, doesn’t seem important enough to read, and gets skipped over or thrown in the trash bin.

But unlike junk mail, a delete button won’t make your dreams disappear. They tend to keep showing up, reiterating the same themes in new and different ways until you pay attention, and finally get the message.

Dreams are messages from one part of yourself to another.

They emerge from the subterranean caverns of your subconscious mind — the abyssal depth of what you know but aren’t yet conscious of. Exploring a dream is like taking a deep-sea dive into parts of your psyche you’ve never been to before.

Learning to read your dreams is like learning to access your own private oracle into the multi-layered nature of YOU.

Here’s the thing… everyone dreams, and we dream for a reason.

If you are an active dreamer, you don’t need convincing. But, if you are one of the 95 to 99% of people who don’t remember their dreams, a few notes in this direction may be helpful.

Believe it or not, most adults dream an average of 6 times per night, even if they don’t remember a thing. There are lots of ways to improve dream recall — something you may wish to look into once you realize how valuable your dreams really are.

Here’s 3 big reasons why you should pay attention to your dreams:

1. You spend one-third of your life asleep and dreaming.

That’s right. One-third of your life is spent ticking away in bed. That equals about 8 hours per night for most people. I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s a rather large bite out of my time here on earth. Isn’t it worth knowing what your mind does during those hours?

Think about it…. one-third of your life is spent in sleep time activities. What are those activities?

Even if you remember your dreams well, perhaps you’ve never taken the time to explore their meaning because you simply didn’t realize the impact it would have. As it turns out, there is a lot more going on than the presumed burning off of psychological steam.

2. Your dreams help you to heal and evolve your life.

They can motivate you toward change, a call to action, conflict resolution, or even inform you of potential physical illnesses. Recently I had a dream in which Donald Trump came into my room and woke me up out of a deep sleep. In my dream, I sat up and looked at him, and he said with absolute definitiveness, “You’ve really got to wake up now. It’s time.”

Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, he is the President of the United States, and thus the most senior ranking executive officer in my life as an American citizen. So, as a dream symbol, he represents the most senior ranking executive faculty of my mind showing up to tell me that “It’s really time to wake up. No more messing around.” Talk about a wake-up call! Suffice to say, here I am, a short time later, publishing on Medium.

There are many accounts of people who have physically healed due to messages from dreams. In She Who Dreams, author Wanda Burch describes many dream accounts indicating that she had a rare type of breast cancer, even though her mammograms showed her as cancer-free. Her dreams eventually prompted her to get an ultrasound, which pinpointed the very deadly development of cancer that was evolving in her breast.

What I love about Wanda’s story is that it illustrates how dreams can make visible what otherwise would stay hidden in the deep recesses of the subconscious mind. So, even though Wanda had no waking awareness of the cancer growing in her breast, her subconscious knew and brought it to the attention of her conscious mind through the porthole of her dreams. Her story also illustrates how your dreams may not only help you to heal, they might also save your life.

3. Your dreams can help you to solve major problems.

Inventors, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein, both claimed that solutions to problems they were trying to solve came through their dreams.

In dream work, there is a process called dream incubation, in which you can pose a question to the dreaming faculty of your mind, what my shamanic dream teacher, Ariadne Green, calls the “dreambody,” in order to receive an answer to a particular problem.

The dreambody’s consciousness is vast with a seemingly endless abyss of depth and breadth of information. It is what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious, and within it is all the awareness known to humanity for all time.

When you present a problem to your dreambody to solve, whether it’s a complicated mathematical equation or a delicate relationship issue, your dreambody can give you access to a universal mind that knows how to solve it while you sleep.

So I ask you… How cool is that to solve problems while you sleep, to constructively utilize one-third of your life that you’ve literally been sleeping on, and to open a porthole to information that may heal, guide, and save your life? I mean, you’re basically getting a massive amount of therapy, coaching, and guidance for FREE, if you pay attention to your dreams.

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