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Best Books to Learn Dream Analysis?

MMX2010

By MMX2010
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Kevin Beal Newbie

Kevin Beal

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Inner Work by Robert A Johnson is the book I read to get better at it. It also has some mecosystem type stuff in there as well. I found it helpful, but I haven't read any others to compare it to. I know that Stef has recommended Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

 

Inner Work was recommended to me by my therapist, and it applies the same principles beyond the realm of dreams into waking fantasy and inner work generally.

 

The approach is to write down the elements of your dream and make associations with those elements and let those interpretations (especially the ones that resonate with you) tell a broader story that may apply to your life.

 

The author is a Jungian psychologist and so they tend to see significance in sets of 2's, 3's and 4's. If there are two birds in your dream, that's a clue that the bird symbol is significant. They also seem to focus a lot on shapes like squares and circles. I'm not familiar enough with the Jungian perspective on these things and why they are important, but I tend to trust that when I look at my own dreams.

 

Some tips that (maybe) aren't in the book, but that I found useful are:

  • if something is impossible in real life, like humans flying, or falling upward, or something like that, this is probably important
  • consider the dream in the context of recent events in your life
  • if somebody else's association doesn't fit, then feel free to disregard it (dream dictionaries can lead you in the wrong direction)

And I would say to just practice. I've found that simply sticking with my dreams, reflecting on them generally causes me to make lots of interesting and helpful associations that might have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the dream, but that metaphor generation machine in your head works in the same way, I believe. So it's all a kind of self work when you think about your dreams.

 

Here are some podcasts on dreams that you may find helpful in looking at your own:

 

FDR#307 A Holey Vision
 
FDR#354 Junkyard Dreams - An Deep Analysis
 
FDR#359 Holy Bat-Dream!
 
FDR#413 Two Dreams Part 1: The Jesus Bunny
 
FDR#414 Two Dreams Part 2: Ice Flying
 
FDR#456 Dream Analysis - The Heart Is An Organ Of Fire
 
FDR#488 Paralysis in Flames - A Dream Sequence Analysis
 
FDR#581 Tornado Dreams
 
And there is a really great conversation between Daniel Mackler and Stef in this call in show:
FDR#1572 Sunday Show 31 January 2010 - Guest Psychotherapist Daniel Mackler - Freedomain Radio
 
And there are a ton more that would make this post very long. I'll probably link a playlist soon, once I figure that out.
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Tyler H Newbie

Tyler H

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Thanks for pulling up those podcasts Kevin, that's awesome.  I was just going to go and find some of these to show my friend and voila!  

 

I remember junkyard dreams was one I particularly liked, though I've only been through the first 5 of those.  I find this process fascinating.  

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Kevin Beal Newbie

Kevin Beal

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So, as I said I was going to, I managed to get a full playlist together of the many dream podcasts here. I designed the page to accept tags in the url so that you could link directly to a playlist of a particular tag, in this case "dreams".

 

It currently accepts these urls:

http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/tag/dreamshttp://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/search/lovehttp://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/volume/6http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/359/holy-batdream
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