What is Important to Interpret a Dream?

What is a dream?

A dream, the way I understand it, is images my subconscious chose to show me in order to communicate a message. It's quite simple. It assumes certain beliefs — that we have a subconscious. That it is quite autonomous, and that it wants to communicate to me, the waking self, what I have buried or missed. Sometimes it confirms that what I am working towards is making a difference. It's a very psychodynamic view of the internal world. It resonates with me, maybe because it resembles our waking life a bit. But crucially, our psyche selects images meaningful to us individually to communicate a message.

Every Dream is a Personal Message

Since dreams are personal messages, the interpretation has to be personal too. Without our own take on the images, we are missing the key ingredient to see through them.

This is true even with the archetypal layer of dreams. Jung was the first to use this layer in clinical practice. It makes sense — we are part of a society and we inherit the fabric of it: the stories, the metaphors, what we value and how we express those values. But in our connected world, where we watch shows from across the world and travel wide and far, we inevitably have our very own interpretations even for symbols that might be quite local in nature.

So we have to take ownership of the interpretation ourselves. Three things help.

Feelings and Impressions

The first thing to notice is what impresses us most from the dream. There is usually a key image that stays with us. If you are writing your dream down after a bit of time, usually parts of the dream are much clearer than the other parts. That's ok — it's an indication that parts of the dream feel a lot more meaningful to you than others. Lean on it. This helps to distinguish what's core and what's periphery.

Feelings carry key information as well — intensity and type. An objectively scary situation in a dream where we feel calm carries a very different message than the same situation where your dream ego feels scared.

Personal Associations

After noticing the parts of the dream that carry the most weight for us, we need to sit with those images, and with the other images as well, and let our subconscious speak to us. What does the color blue really mean to me? Is it more "feeling blue" or a "summer sky blue"? This is especially important when trying to understand what people from waking life try to convey in a dream. It's easy to take the image at face value, but remember — all images in a dream are parts of our subconscious, parts that we neglect or need reminders about. Images come from our waking life, but the image is just the surface; what we need to pay attention to is not the image, it's the message that image carries. So if I see my sister in a dream — what does my sister mean to me in waking life? How is our relationship? Is she someone I am close with, or do I feel guilty for neglecting this relationship for a while?

Personal History and Life Context

The final piece is to see the dream in the broader context of your life. Zoomed out — where are you coming from, what have you been through. Zoomed in — what are you dealing with right now, what makes you happy or worried this week, today. Seeing a dream as an integral part of your reality will help you be a better and more aware human. After all, dreams are messages from our unconscious, something that we disregard in our waking life.

A Deliberate Compromise

For several months I worked through the process Robert A. Johnson describes in his book "Inner Work." It was illuminating. It was also not practical to spend sixty to ninety minutes on dream interpretation with all the other commitments in my life. So I made a deliberate compromise — I traded some of the insight for the ability to analyse all my dreams.

That trade-off shapes how InnerWork works. The structured fields are there so you don't need to remember what to write apart from the dream itself — the app walks you through feelings and impressions first, then personal associations, then how the dream sits in your life context. It's the same flow as above, made fast enough to actually do every morning. The aim is to sit somewhere between the thorough inner work Johnson describes and just rolling with what a generic dictionary would give you.

In the app coming out this summer, I will add zoomed-out and zoomed-in histories, and previous dreams, to make interpretations even more personal. This will be possible because that information will not leave your phone — and therefore you can be completely open about your life.