The questions below will assist you in determining your own interpretation and understanding of your dreams. Interpretation is a highly subjective practice, just as personal symbols and metaphors are also highly subjective. If you take any dream and ask the following questions and write down the answers, this will be a large step toward understanding your dream. These are the questions that a dream therapist would ask you.

General Dream Questions

• What are the main events of the dream?
• What are your dominant feelings during the dream?
• Is it possible that something influenced your dream while you were sleeping like a sound, smell or something that touched you: i.e. a pet, your spouse, your child, something shifting on the bed...
• Describe each dream element: people, places, situations, animals, objects, etc.
• What are your feelings related to each object in the dream?
• What were you thinking before you went to bed?
• What were the main events of your day?
• What resemblance (or lack of) do these dream characters or your dream ego have to your daily life self?
• What is the difference between your waking emotions and your dreaming emotions?
• What situation in your dream resembles daily life?
• Have dialogues with the dream characters, including your own dream ego (yourself). What do they say?
• What are the sub-personalities, or unknown aspects of yourself, portrayed by each of these dream characters? How are each of them your own self?
• Experience the events of the dream through the dream character's or dream object's eyes?
• What information is delivered in this dream?
• Is this an innermost honest statement about your current situation?
• How do you feel now?
• What are the other possible meanings for this dream?
• If this were someone else's dream how would you interpret it, what questions would you ask, and what does it say to the dreamer?
• Summarize the dream in one sentence.
• What does the dream seem to be about?
• Do you see a pattern in this dream?
• If you know about archetypes, what archetypes are in your dream?
• How am I acting in this dream?
• What relation does this dream have to my future?
• What message does this dream have for my personality?
• Is there an adversary in this dream?
• What is being wounded in this dream and what is being healed?
• What healing or helping force is in this dream?
• What does this dream want from me?
• Why did I need this dream?
• What would I like to avoid in this dream?
• Why have I dreamed of so-and-so now?
• How can I make this dream real in daily life?

Questions For Dialogue With A Dream Character

• What is your purpose in my dream?
• What do you symbolize in my daily life?
• How do you represent me?
• Are you a friend or foe?
• What do you want from me?
• What can I do for you?
• How will the situation be resolved?

Finding Patterns In Dreams

• What symbols (situations, objects, people, and others) show up frequently in your dreams?
• What animals show up in your dreams, if any?
  
  What are you often doing in your dreams?
• How do you feel emotionally most often in your dreams?
• How do your dreams usually endØon a happy note or a sad note?
• Do your dream endings tell you something about how you handle life?

Re-entering Or Rewriting A Dream

• How would you change the events of the dream?
• How would you act differently in the dream?
• What could you do or say to make the change happen?
• How does the dream make you feel once it is changed?
• Ask yourself how you stop this positive change from appearing in your life?

Next: Cataloging Dream Symbols >>