Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

All About Dreams – A Martha Jette Column

May 2, 2007

Martha Jette, friend and author will now be taking over the dreams column formerly presented by Parthena Black of Bella Online.  Many of you know Martha and will agree that her columns are always fresh and exciting.  Martha explains the unexplainable with style and grace.

Martha Jette

marthajette@yahoo.com

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Martha Jette, Editor & Author

Please take the time to visit my site!

http://www.freewebs.com/paranormalbooks

P.S. - If you take my advice only 1 time this year, take
it now... I just picked up $397 package at no cost! You
need to see this right away:

http://www.intensivegiveaway.com/thank-you.php?id=3813

Martha Jette, Editor & Author

Please take the time to visit my site!

http://www.freewebs.com/paranormalbooks

Use the dream state to work out problems

Are you experiencing a recurring dream? Clara Hill, Ph D. of the University of Maryland may have a solution. She believes there may be an underlying problem that you’re not dealing with and dreams can act as good therapy for working it out.

She and her colleagues conducted an experiment on 60 people, who took part in three different types of therapy. They had one group look at their own dreams. Another group was asked to analyze troubling events in their lives and a third control group studies someone else’s dream as if it were their own.

Each participant spent one hour in therapy assessing how the dream applied to their own life and rating how satisfied they were with the therapeutic process. Hills discovered that those examining and tried to make sense of their own dreams were much more satisfied with the therapy.

"People carry dreams around with them for years and years, but it's only once they begin to work on the underlying issue that the dream breaks apart," she says. "The dreams you need to pay attention to are those that haunt you."

Lisa Richmon, a 46-year-old advertising executive in Virginia Beach, Va., had a recurring dream for 13 years of her mother abandoning her and woke up continually feeling both hurt and depressed. Their relationship had been a difficult one and she had died rather suddenly from lung cancer.

Rather than deal with the fact that they didn’t get along, Richmon buried her memories of their mother-daughter disputes and focused instead on her mother's best attributes.

"By day, I missed my mother and extolled her virtues whenever possible, but at night, I cast her in my dreams as unloving," she recalled.

In 2004, Richmon went to a therapist for answers. In only two sessions, she realized that she needed to face the truth.

"The experience helped me really look at some painful things that I needed to examine," she says.

Emotions are often behind what we dream about, so pay attention to them.

Here are a few dream symbols that focus on our mortality.

a)      Funeral: This type of dream does not indicate a death, but rather the need to find closure over something. If you dream about the funeral of someone you know, it suggests either a need to get over your relationship with them or your own desire to end the relationship.

b)      Burial: This may signal your own suppressed anxieties or a welcome end to a particular period in your life. If you are being buried alive, it reflects your own feelings of claustrophobia.

c)      Coffin: If the coffin is open, Freud suggests this is a symbol of female sexuality. If you’re lying in the coffin, it suggests a fear of death or that you are dying to old ideas and making way for new ones.

d)      Grave/Tomb: An open grave indicates leaving the unpleasant past behind and starting on a new path.

e)      Sculls/skeletons, etc.: The symbols of death remind us that life is too short. They may also reflect the pressure you feel over a strict deadline.

f)        Cemetery: Rather than indicating death, this symbol represents family unity because it is a place where family finally comes together.

g)      Obit: If you dream about reading of your own death in a newspaper obituary it suggests feelings of insecurity with your job or relationship. If it is someone else’s obit, you may be harboring bad feelings about that person.

h)      Hanging: To Freud, hanging symbolized male castration or male sexual insecurities.

Source: 1001 Dreams by Jack Altman