My previous article regarding dreams and how they’ve influenced my life started the same way I’d like to start this one: It has been an age-old debate as to what exactly dreams are.
Many questions have arisen on the topic, and dreams are filled with so much speculative history that it has become a concept of wondrous intrigue. Throughout documented time, dreams have been revered, feared, judged, and interpreted.
Entire careers have been created for the purpose of understanding dreams, and entire lives have been spent driven toward answering the question: what are dreams and how can they help us?
This article is not meant to answer these questions specifically, but to shed light on one aspect of our dreamscape which I have personally studied in depth: our dream sanctuary.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people about their dreams from an analytical perspective. Every single person I’ve talked to rarely experiences recurring settings in dreams, but there’s always one dream, and it’s always one aspect of each person’s dream which is consistent: the feeling masked behind the setting.
Sure, the specific setting may change in each recurrence of the dream, but the person dreaming always knows it’s the same place.
One of my close friends’ “Sanctuary” is in the depths of a forest alongside a beach.
Each time she dreams of this place there is something highly relevant to a stressful part of her life, something which she needs to think through that ultimately helps her through whatever hardship she is facing.
My sanctuary is a palace with hundreds of rooms and off chutes – skyways to separate buildings, and a racetrack for a driveway.
After a lot of thought and research into this topic, I’ve come to the conclusion that dream sanctuary is a representation of our subconscious mind. The best example I have out of all of the sanctuaries I’ve discovered is my own, the palace.
Within this palace, there are many locked doors, many things which my subconscious knows my waking mind is not prepared to accept or face.
Also, there are many levels, many buildings, and the external influences which can alter the layout of this palace. It is so vast that I could never imagine exploring all of it, even if I was dreaming all of every day, but every room and hallway seems to hold significance.
I’m 26 years old and have only dreamed with myself in this setting on 4 occasions, but each time was a significant part in my life, and each time, reflecting upon the dream helped me to get through a particularly hard time.
Aside from the feeling of familiarity and significance, these dreams can be recognized by how vivid they are, and how well we remember them the next day.
That is because our subconscious construct represented in a dream state is just that, a viewport into our own minds, and at a time that our minds “want” our conscious selves to remember.
I do believe that about 80% of our dreams are significant and that dreams are entirely based in the subconscious realm, sometimes even to the extent of bringing the astral realm into our perspective.
Great caution must be used in interpreting dreams, though
Our logical minds have a tendency of seeing what we think we want to see and creating justifications to believe what we think we want to believe – as such, our own analysis of our dreams may very well be completely wrong and should not be acted on, only speculated about.
I have warned many people of the issues which acting on personal analysis could create, and absolutely do NOT want any of my readers thinking they’re qualified to act on what they interpret their dreams to mean.
Only use them and what they show you for speculative figuring and leave any conclusions you reach as a part of your overall view on reality, but not a driving factor.
