The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

A dream is information you should have, but don’t.

Robert A. Johnson

Dreams are hard to understand and impossible to write about. I’m publishing this mainly because I want to put some sort of stake in the ground, not because I have anything particularly special to say about the subject. I want to share a little of my experience documenting and trying to decode my dreams. I hope I can continue to develop this skill and above all, listen more carefully to the unconscious parts of myself.

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It took months for me to recognize I was the main barrier to understanding my dreams. Quickly writing the dream down helped me to remember it, but my left brain, who does most of the planning and linear thinking during my waking life simply can’t help but jump to wrong conclusions, ignore obvious points and ultimately fail to connect the dots. To this part of ourselves, unconscious material filled with unicorns and dragons needs to be scrubbed out quickly, like a plate stained with egg yolk. Robert Johnson explains that the ego simply wants to pin down a meaning for the dream so that it can hold a prize in its hands. So even if we don’t dismiss our dreams, we almost certainly get them wrong.

Once I could accurately capture them, I noticed the content of my dreams is often bright, colorful and deeply symbolic. My dreams can be filled with animals, and over time, I realized the animals sometimes stood in for people, places and emotions I was encountering in my waking life. One night I had a vivid dream about a long tentacled, bright red squid terrorizing a city. Rational Josh brushed it off as nonsense until I re-read it later in the day and I realized that the squid was a exaggeration (something dreams do to get a point across) of how a friend had been acting. Like any good insight, it felt so obvious and true, all I could do was smile to myself.

It’s also a relief to discover that no matter how messed up we are or how many mistakes we make, dreams tend to want the best for us. The images and symbols are said to be vivid arrows pointing us to own up to our mistakes, say the right thing and generally be a decent human being. Dreams seem to exist for this very reason. “One can never presume to already know what a dream is about, or the dream wouldn’t bother you with it.” Something as harmless as a burp or life-altering as the decision to poison your lab professor can be commented on, complemented or corrected with dream symbolism. For example, you might have gone a bit too far trash-talking your friends during basketball and a dream will balance this behavior with the image of a mouth gripped shut, or brown liquid pouring out of you. Get the picture?

Putting aside the symbols, exotic animals and moral guidance, I believe dreams are useful primarily because they contain something that gets us a bit closer to the truth. Like an insight that arises from a therapist or friend suggests what might actually be happening, a dream opinion could be seen as a sort of psychic fact, that can help us to step back and objectively look at our thoughts, feelings and actions. If we spend most of our lives with blinkers on, a dream is like the viewpoint from the horses tail.

Accurate analysis seems to be impossible (and likely expensive), so I think the best most of us can is the following:

• Face the fact that you do dream (yes, nearly everyone does, unless you have major depression or are very old)
• Write down your dreams.
• Practice looking at your dreams objectively. Don’t react to it as ‘rubbish’ and don’t leap to conclusions. This is really hard. Be okay with the fact that you may never understand it.
• If you feel like you have a significant or recurring dream, give it some more attention and ‘air’. Roll it around in your head. Brainstorm, list out some associations to your waking life, but again, do not try and understand it.