This course will give you a basic understanding of dream symbolism, insofar as it is currently understood, and an introduction on framing an interpretation to the dream reporter such that you can talk about personal or delicate matters without upsetting them or intruding on their sense of privacy.

Very often, people do not want to know what a dream means so much as they want to know what it does not mean: they want to know if dreaming of a person dying means they will die (it does not), or if dreaming of a lover leaving them means the lover will leave them (it does not), or if dreaming of having sex with someone means they desire at a deep level to have sex with that person (it does not).

What these things do mean is a more complicated question, and largely one that must be answered on a case-by-case basis. Dreaming of death, for example, might reflect a fear of death or it might be a preparation to change one's identity: in growing up, for example, the child identity might feel it is dying; in getting married, the bachelor or bachelorette identity might confront a symbolic death.

The important point to keep in mind at all times is that dreams are not prophetic -- or if they are they lie so often we must not trust them -- and they do not tell us anything about the outside world, but rather about the inner world of the dreamer. When we are confronted with the mysterious and the truly uncanny -- as I have been and you, sooner or later, will be -- the best policy is to find the strength of character to say, "I do not know."













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