Signals of a Dream

By: Jerry A. Greene

Learning to interpret your dreams and understanding just what should signal to you that you are dreaming, is the most important part of learning to have lucid dreams

I'm Not In School Anymore!
The first step in creating lucid dreams, at will, is to take a look at the current dreams that you have been having. A lot of times you will see certain themes happen over and over again. Perhaps it is seeing friends that you haven't seen in a long time, then all of a sudden you find yourself dreaming about them a few times in one week! Or, perhaps you're like me and are dreaming about attending the first day of high school, or college, despite the fact that I am now almost 30 years old and have been out of school for over 8 years! Believe it, or not, I have these types of dreams almost every other week, or so and my mind STILL tricks me into thinking that it's completely normal! I usually end up very stressed out in the dream (emotions are high and therefore the subjective is in control). I can't ever seem to find my schedule, and don't know what class I am supposed to be in, or even where my locker is . nothing ever seems to be right.

Some people believe in the symbolism of dreams. They feel that seeing a dog in your dreams means this, that running from a gigantic plant means that...and you know what I mean. There is definitely no shortage of books on the subject of dream symbolism. Freud comes to mind, when talking about dreams in this manner. Whether or not there is truth to dream symbolism, it is not the point of view we're looking at as lucid dreamers, although I will be covering some of those aspects in articles to come.

As lucid dreamers, the symbols we are looking for are dream-signs as described by Dr. Stephen LaBerge in "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming". These dream-signs are strange peculiarities..Things that just don't seem right. A dream-sign can be a person, place, thing, feeling, or situation, or a combination of these. Let me give you a few examples:

Dream-Sign Examples
A person, .that doesn't quite seem right, could be a person in your life, that has passed away, many years ago, but yet appears to you in your dreams alive and well.

A place, could be somewhere impossible to be, like sitting on a moonlit cloud, or on Jupiter in the middle of the night.

A thing, could be a digital watch that shows the time as 103.56 instead of normal time. And each time you look at it the time is all out of whack.

A feeling, could be a sensation of someone standing over you, yet no one is really there.

A situation, could be similar to what I had described, as in being in school on the first day, without a schedule, trying to find your way to class, yet you have really been out of school for many years.

Look for Dream-Signs
In order to be successful at lucid dreaming, you need to start remembering and cataloguing these odd features of your dreams. As I said, we tend to dream about things with re-occurring themes. If you take the time to think through something that happened in your dream and realize that it should have tipped you off to the fact that it was a dream, then you should make a distinct point of writing it down and setting it to memory, to question it the next time that it occurs.

I would like for you to take some time to think about a dream that you had recently. It doesn't have to be one from last night, it just needs to be something you can go over in your mind with some sort of clarity. I want you to try to replay the "movie" of your dream, and search for clues that, now looking back, should have tipped you off to the fact that you may have been dreaming. Again, these are dream-signs and you need to make a conscious effort to see them for what they are. Write them down if you have the time, but more importantly, start to do this each morning as you are getting ready for your day. If you have a few minutes to write your dreams down, before you get out of bed as this would be optimal because the more your objective mind starts to take over (as you become active), the more your dreams will fade and it will be hard to remember them with any clarity. If you did have a lucid dream, then definitely take the time to write down what dream-sign it was, that signaled to you have the lucid dream. You may want to rehearse the situation in your mind later, so that you solidify the concept of what happened.

After a while, you will probably start to notice that certain dream-signs will almost always work for you in stimulating a lucid dream.

One that is particularly good for me, is to notice the clocks in my dream. They never seem to work right and every time I try to look at them, the numbers are changing. Of course, that doesn't happen in real life, so it's almost obvious, as long as my objective mind is not too far recessed.

There are things that you can do all the time to get your mind in the habit of checking to see if you're dreaming, or not. Click Here to Read "Real World Excercises" so that you can practice spotting dream-signs throughout the day.