My first dream I remember to this day because it was a precognitive dream of my high school friend, Spacey. I don’t recall the actual date – the recall came later after she had passed away.
Nearly a year after her transition I experienced my first visitation dream. That’s not to say I didn’t have any dreams before then, I just don’t recall any. In between these two dreams I had others including another precognitive dream, this one about an event in my future which came to pass. I recall these dreams with clarity to this day without having to consult a journal. In my experience visitations and foretelling dreams such as precognitive and prophetic are dreams or experience’s that stayed with me.
Since that first dream forty years ago, I continued to have dreams, some that I could recall without the aid of a journal to remind me. Although it was not precognitive or a visitation dream, I was learning to recall and remember my dreams. As soon as I recalled the dream, upon awakening or later in the day, I wrote it down on a scrap of paper. One scrap of paper with dream details on it eventually became an accumulation of pieces of notebook paper, backs of receipts or the envelope of a bill or junk mail that was within reach. I then knew it was time to get organized and buy a journal to put these into and continue writing down the details of my dreams. But the reason for writing my dreams down was that they began to increase in quantity and intensity.
I had become aware that I was having more than one dream a night. It didn’t take very long to fill up that first journal with my nightly dreams: nightmares, prophetic and precognitive, visitations, sleep paralysis and other helpful and interesting dream types. I had also filled the journal with doodles to illustrate what I could not always put into words and so that I could refer back to the dream later, especially if I had the dream again (recurring dream).
Recalling and journaling continued for a time. I shared my dreams with those I knew in an effort to share this new interest and to me, phenomenon. I don’t believe that I shared these dreams to start a conversation but that is exactly what happened…eventually. Some people thought it was a novelty, like when we all started to see psychics that became so popular to do in the 1990’s. Others thought dreams didn’t mean anything in particular and that maybe I was a bit odd. And then, sometime later, those same people began to share their dreams with me!
Not very long after I started to keep a dream journal, I went to a book sale and found Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s The Encyclopedia of Dreams: Symbols & Interpretations (Berkley edition, 1995). I needed it. The universe was telling me I was ready to start assembling the symbols and solving the message. This book had enough of the more common symbols to get me started on interpreting and understanding my dreams. I got some help from Shyla, a spiritual teacher and I learned to intuit what I could not find a symbol for either in the aforementioned book or a couple of dream dot com sites that I found on the internet in the late 1990’s. Ultimately, I learned to gather all the symbols and my intuition and go with what resonated with me. And that I feel is the most important component of dream interpreting. A bunch of dream symbols put together are just symbols. But, how does that feel to the dreamer? Does the dream symbol or symbols resonate? The meaning of the dream should be a good fit, after all, the message is specific to the dreamer.
The Universe has guided me through each stage of dreams: recalling, journaling and interpreting. Dreams have been one of the most enlightening lessons on my spiritual awakening path. They have become, for me, a helpful divination tool to download messages from my consciousness with the help of my guides and the universe. Being a teacher of dreams to others has been an unexpected gift. People I have helped like to have the dream interpreted for them, but I also want to teach and empower them to interpret their own dreams. And that is because the universe has a message for them.
*all photos by Leslie Sheraden
Leslie Sheridan 