Analyzing your night visions

Veronica Tonay’s book “The Creative Dreamer: Using Your Dreams to Unlock Your Creativity” (Celestial Press, $14.95, 238 pages), includes suggestions and questions in worksheet-like formats to help readers understand what their dreams mean to them so they can use the information to unlock their creativity.

For example, she suggested one client conduct an imaginary dialogue with a recurring figure in her dreams. The technique sounds simplistic but had meaningful effect for the dreamer.

“It sounds really odd,” Tonay says. “The fear is that they must be schizophrenic or something, with different voices in their heads, but it’s normal. These are just different aspects of ourselves.

“(Eventually) you get thoughts arising that are surprising,” she says, “just as sometimes what happens in dreams seems surprising, even though you are the creator of the dream.”

Some tips to remember:

A simple and effective tool for understanding dreams is writing them down. Before going to sleep, remind yourself that you want to remember your dreams. Upon waking, remain still and quiet to recall your dreams. As soon as you stand up, the neurons start firing and the dreams start fading. Keep a notebook nearby so you can immediately write down any dreams.

Dreams may have references to the past in them — past events, places or people — but they are really about the present and the future. Dreams relate to what issues you are facing at the moment.

Consider your feelings in the dream. The emotional reaction you have to an image tells you more than any dream dictionary can.

A symbol can be a person, an animal, an object. “If it shows up in more than one dream, consider it a symbol,” says Tonay. If you don’t understand a symbol, try expressing it creatively, Tonay suggests. Write it down, draw a picture of it, think about it and pay close attention to what feelings are tied up in it.