Angela Kahn

I had this dream once that I was hiking through a snowy park.  A snake hanging from a hot air balloon told me about the importance of wearing neckties, then I stepped on a clam who swallowed my foot.  When I turned around, I was suddenly at the Santa Monica Pier selling violins from a kiosk with my fifth grade teacher.  When I woke up from this dream, I was pretty sure I was a giant weirdo.  Or, at least, that my dreams were weird as hell.  I got into the habit of packing them away into a cardboard box and shoving that box into the basement of my memory so that I could get on with my day.

It wasn’t until I worked with my therapist and learned how to interpret my own dreams that I no longer needed that cardboard box.  (Or the basement, for that matter.)  With her help, I learned that dreams are the language of the subconscious—that is, that dreams are the only way my inner self could communicate with my outer self.  For a while, I still couldn’t understand why they had to be so weird, but with practice, I came to understand that weirdness just comes with the territory.  Lemme ‘splain.

From the time you are born, maybe even while still in utero, your brain stores every single experience you have into your memory.  Every object you see or touch, every person you encounter, every morsel of food you taste, every sound you hear…every single sensory experience you have ever had in your entire life is stored somewhere in your memory.  But your brain is incredibly organized, and has a whole filing system for storing these memories: First, it makes associations that remind it what that experience was like.  Think of these associations as “tags” that get attached to each object, person, sound, etc.  For example, if you put a handful of dirt in your mouth when you were five years old and got yelled at by your mean Aunt Sally, your brain will “tag” each symbol in this experience.  The symbol of dirt might get a tag that says, “bad taste.”  Aunt Sally might get a tag that says, “scared me when she yelled at me.”  These symbols will get filed away in your memory accordingly.

Second, it prioritizes.  Each experience that gets stored into your memory is prioritized according to its importance, and your brain’s top priority is to keep you safe.  In that way, it will store important memories about staying safe toward the front, and put less important memories toward the back.  That’s why it’s easier to remember Aunt Sally yelling at you than trying to remember what you ate for breakfast that day.  Aunt Sally’s yelling didn’t make you feel very safe—that’s important information.  Breakfast was a neutral experience, so it got stuck in the back.

Now, how does all this matter?  Well, this is where we get into the subconscious stuff.  Thoughts, feelings, ideas, or experiences that you are having that you are not aware of are called “subconscious” experiences.  Some people think of it like the ocean—you know there’s something under the water, you just don’t know what or where it is.  The stuff we tend to push into our subconscious—that is, that we make ourselves unaware of—are thoughts, feelings, ideas, or experiences that are unpleasant or uncomfortable, or that we believe are shameful in some way.  You might have heard of someone “subconsciously” sabotaging a relationship, or “subconsciously” enabling an alcoholic, for example.  We all act subconsciously at various times in our lives, and dreams are exactly how our brains try to let us know.

When you are awake, your subconscious doesn’t have a chance at getting your attention.  You are way too busy working, playing, thinking, talking, eating, driving, and Facebooking.  There isn’t a chance in hell that your subconscious will be able to get through to you to say, “Hey Larry!  You know that girl you’re dating?  She is bad news, dude!  Get out now!”  Sure, you might be vaguely aware of some general sense of dread when you think of her, but you’re way too busy checking email to deal with that feeling for now.

So your subconscious waits.  Patiently.  When you finally go to sleep, it jumps into action.  It knows that you won’t listen to reason, so it doesn’t type up a nice letter with words on it to let you know that you are afraid of your girlfriend.  Instead, it heads to the file cabinet and locates symbols that have those words written on tags.  Remember Aunt Sally?  Remember her tag?  (Hint: It has to do with scaring your pants off.)  Your subconscious will definitely choose that one.  It might also choose a dinosaur—not because you saw that dinosaur movie today, but because one time your fourth grade class took a field trip to the natural history museum, and the giant dinosaur skeleton made you briefly imagine the terror of being eaten alive.  Yep, that’s right.  “Dinosaur” has a “will eat you alive” tag attached to it.

So, you wake up the next morning wondering why the hell you had a dream about your old Aunt Sally riding a dinosaur.  You meet your buddy for your daily Egg McMuffin and laugh about the dream, then move on with your day.  Too bad.  If you knew how to interpret your dreams, you might have realized when you woke up that your girlfriend is scaring you because when she yells at you, it feels like you are being eaten alive.  Maybe you would have even realized that this is a dysfunctional relationship, and you would have ended it instead of being intimidated into buying a ring.

Isn’t it cool how our dreams are talking to us?  My clients constantly bring in their dreams so that we can work together to uncover their hidden messages.  I always remind them to pay attention to the symbols so that they can read the tags—that’s how we can find out what the subconscious is trying to say.  By the way, it’s important to note that only you know what is written on those tags, because you are the only one living your life.  This is precisely why you can’t buy those dream interpretation books—the only way those help you is if you want to know the author’s tags, not your own.

What if you can’t remember your dreams?  Well, practice makes perfect.  Many of my clients are in the habit of keeping a dream journal, so that they can train themselves to remember their dreams in as much detail as possible.  I’ve been keeping a dream journal for years now, and sometimes I feel like writing my subconscious a thank you note.  My dreams have helped me make important decisions, opened my eyes to a person’s true nature, and shed light onto my innermost feelings.  I have come to the point where I depend on them.  You should too.