They say that listening to someone describe their dream ranks among the most boring topics of conversation.  Why? Well, because it's a dream.  If your best friend were to tell you that when they went home last night their front door really was made of chocolate, and the carpets had turned to marshmallow, you'd be at least mildly interested.  But because we all have such crazy and wild dreams, they tend to be difficult to appreciate in conversation afterwards. And yet, dreams are hugely important to our well-being.

We have long known that dreams are our mind's way of sorting things out.  sometimes they are reflections of our lives... sometimes not.  Sometimes a dream is just a reflection of how we're feeling, or is prompted by a conversation or a movie.

People often ask me to help them analyse their dreams, especially if the dream involves something they can't understand.  I tell them that I'll try, but the best person to analyse a dream is the person who had it.

When I was a child, I used to have a recurring dream that I was falling off my bike.  I couldn't understand why I kep having this dream because riding my bike came easy to me, and I did it everyday.  It wasn't until years later that I understood that this dream was a reflection of my frustration at not being able to succeed at something else in my life at that time.  Probably the latest school lesson I was struggling with.

Dreams use metaphors, and as such they don't always appear logical to us.  So when we dream about death, it doesn't usually mean a death.  Often it just signifies that something in our lives has come to an end.  That can be anything!  It can be graduating university, changing jobs, selling a house, ending a relationship, all sorts of things. 

Similarly, dreaming of a birth can signify the beginning of something new.

I once had a very embarrassed colleague share with me that she had dreamt of having a sexual relationship with a member of her family.  She was embarrassed and terrified.  "Does this make me... you know... perverted?" she asked me.  The truth is that most of us have such dreams at some time in our lives.  It can often reflect a desire to protect that person.  It can signify our feelings that our relationship with that person is not as close as we would like, and our subconscious mind plays with this and creates a dream in which we restore that intimacy.

Some dreams are easy to understand.  For example, dreaming that your drowning or falling is often a reflection of a life in which we feel out of control.  Drowning under the workload or stress of our lives, or falling "out of control".  Dreams in which we find ourselves frustrated, such as my childhood dream od falling off my bike, often reflect a frustration in our lives, although they may not appear at all related.

Another reason why the dreamer is best placed to analyse a dream is because the language of metaphor can be unique to each of us.  If I call my loved one "flower", it's not beyond possibility that if my relationship breaks down that i could dream of wilting or dying flowers.  But to someone else that dream might have an entirely different meaning.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of books and articles about dreams, many are superb.  It is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating areas of the human mind, and one about which we still know precious little.