Dreams extract relationship from the content of experience. Dreaming about real life encounters provides us with opportunities to make sense of particular events. Dreaming about events is how we understand and learn so we can adjust our expectations and become better equipped emotionally for comparable future interactions.

Write it down – Capturing the story provides a summary of the dream characters, plot, setting and your emotions about the dream. Include how you feel upon waking.

Dreams consist of characters, emotions and a learning. The key to extracting the message in the dream is to unpack the dream story into its key elements.

List the characters – Are the dream characters recognizable? If not, look into the relationships between the characters to determine their relationship to you and to each other. Are there animals in the dream? Consider how you feel about that type of animal since someone in your life prompted that feeling. If there are no characters other than yourself, a new experience has provoked an emotion.

Look for the emotions – The emotion is the result of the gap between their expected and actual behaviour. The type of emotion we experience is a clue to unpacking the reason behind the gap. How do you feel about the dream overall, and each character? Are the characters behaving as you would expect them to behave?

Putting it all together – Consider the way in which the characters interact in the dream, and how the dream makes you feel. When we don’t understand something or someone, we try to relate it to something or someone we already know. Putting people together in a dream is a way of comparing potential likenesses in their real life behaviour. If you are the only character in the dream, a real life situation has prompted a new emotional experience which has the potential be become a new learning.