The world of dreams is many layered, infinitely rich and varied, stocked with the most astonishing possibilities: in it you can fly, move forward or backward in time, meet the living and the dead, experience total strangers, visit foreign countries, take a trip to outer space. The list is endless. On top of that, you can use your dreamtime to solve problems, receive information from mysterious sources—including your own unconscious mind—be creative, get ideas for new projects and ongoing activities. Most important, you can get in tune with your own inner psychological processes, which are constantly changing, as you yourself are constantly changing. All in all, dreaming is one of the most fascinating and rewarding activities available to human beings. Best of all, it’s entirely free (and also nonfattening). However, let me issue a word of caution: dreaming can become addictive! So intriguing is this world inside you that comes vividly alive when you sleep that you may just want to spend a lot of time there. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s a good thing—as you will learn all through this book.
Now, you may be asking, Why would someone write a book on dreams just for teens?
The answer is both simple and complex. The simple part is this: as a teen you have the special opportunity to take advantage of your dreams while you are still in the process of becoming an adult. This is especially useful because you’re in a time of rapid change and development. Your entire bodily chemical composition is changing—new hormones are being produced, your brain is generating its secret substances that allow you to think and make mental connections, your emotions are in flux (sometimes swinging wildly around in the course of a few minutes). It’s an exciting time, but not necessarily an easy one. Dreams can be of great help. Not only can you use your dreams to solve practical, everyday problems, you can get in touch with your inner self on a nightly (or daily) basis.
Why Pay Attention to Dreams?
“Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality.”
Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku,
Openness Mind
“Our conscious minds are needed if we are to make the most of our dreams; by bringing them into waking consciousness and learning to understand them we may be led to a reappraisal of our whole mode of being.”
Ann Faraday,
Dream Power
“When you look into yourself, the very effort involved extends the limitations of your consciousness, expands it, and allows you to use abilities that often you do not realize you possess.”
Jane Roberts,
The Seth Material
Did I say simple? Well, that was the simple part! So what’s the complex part? The complex part is invisible. It’s what is going on inside you all the time, the part you don’t know about. While you sleep and dream, your inner mind is busy as a bee (and your body’s chemical factory is also active producing dozens of substances that affect your growth, your brain, your emotions, and everything else about you). This deep mind is called the unconscious, and it never sleeps. Entire books have been written about the unconscious mind and its activities and processes, and more than a few books have been written about dreams and their connection to the unconscious mind. However, when all is said and done, dreaming remains a mystery. That’s the complex part! The truth is that nobody, but nobody, really knows why we dream, where dreams originate, exactly what they mean, or much else about this most complex of human characteristics.
What we do know is that everybody dreams—even those who claim they don’t. (They just don’t remember their dreams.) If you tell a dream to someone, no matter how fantastic it sounds, you will be believed. No one will ever say, “Oh, you couldn’t have dreamed that.” Arguments may spring up about just about everything else (and teens spend a lot of time rapping about the questions about life to which there are no simple answers). But you’ll never be accused of lying about dreaming.
The trick then is not that you have to believe in dreams. They are a fact of life, everyone’s life. What you need to do is to use your dreams. Teaching you how to do that is the purpose of this special dream book for teens. By learning what dreams can do for you at this early and crucial stage of your life, you will have an advantage that will last you the rest of your life. Paying attention to your dreams is like putting money in the bank that will draw interest as you get older. When you sleep and dream, your unconscious mind is sending you important messages that may hold keys to your personal happiness, now and in the future.
This summary doesn’t begin to cover all the dream possibilities, for that inner territory we visit each night (and during daytime naps, too) is extremely vast and mostly unexplored. But as you read through this book and do the exercises, you’ll get an overview of what awaits you each time you catch a few ZZZZs.
The famous Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung wrote, “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend. . . . In dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal [person] dwelling in the darkness of the primordial night.”
