dreams, mind, spirituality, imagination and inner world

Are you experiencing intense, vivid dreams while on an ascension journey (shamanic or twin flame paths included)? Are these dreams perseverant or keeping you up at night, causing you lack of sleep and groggy mornings after?

And do you want relief from these dreams?

Last night, I experienced an intense, vivid dream that I easily processed at about 5:30am. I then went back to dreamless, peaceful sleep for another 4.5 hours! (I usually get out of bed at about 10:00am.)

In this article I want to share with you why I had the dream, how I interpreted and processed the dream quickly, and how this helped me in my waking life as well.

Why You’re Having Vivid Dreams

There are lots of scientific reasons that Google can give you for why you’re experiencing vivid dreams, including changes in diet or movement routines, stress and anxiety in your waking life, winter blues or depression, or even rapid physical changes like illness or pregnancy.

Any of these may be the physical source of your vivid dreams, AND it’s also likely that there is a spiritual reason this is manifesting for you.

When you are having vivid dreams, it is often because you are healing something in your waking life. Vivid dreams are a shortcut to the healing process.

In your physical life, you grow and change as a person and soul through two things: active efforts to heal and physical experiences.

With active efforts to heal, you use your thoughts and emotions to heal and release negative energy so that you don’t have to play it out in a physical experience (which will take longer and sometimes be the harder or more painful lesson).

Some examples of active efforts to heal could be working with spiritual tools like tarot cards or pendulums or essential oils, journaling through emotions, speaking to a therapist, going to an acupuncturist, or expressing and releasing your emotions through art or physical movement.

Most of these efforts deal with negativity that is already conscious to you. It’s critical to clear this negativity right away, of course!

Your vivid dreams are your soul’s effort to bring negative energy from the subconscious to the conscious. You are not (or feel like you are not) in control of your dreams. Your brain is making connections beyond your conscious and offers you the chance to clear them quickly through these vivid dreams!

In my case, I can easily see the physical source of my vivid dreams. I also know and understand the spiritual source of my vivid dreams because this dream directly related to a huge and collective wound I am clearing for myself in real life.

While in many ways vivid dreams are a spiritual gift, they may not always feel like one. They often bring up feelings of intense anxiety, hurt, frustration, or fear. That’s why I use the following process to clear these vivid dreams quickly so I can go back to a restful sleep!

Journaling Questions:

  • What is the physical reason you experienced the vivid dream? What does that symbolize for you? Mine is due to diet and physical changes I’m making in order to manifest a different body.
  • What is the spiritual reason you experienced the vivid dream? Mine is due to a collective wound I’m healing for myself that is primarily around being born female.

How to Interpret and Process Your Vivid Dream Quickly (So You Can Go Back to Sleep!)

You may be feeling like you can’t control your vivid dreams, which is true in the physical. You can try to change the physical source of your vivid dreams, though that will produce limited results. You can also try to treat the symptoms you’re experiencing through medication or other means, which will also produce limited results.

But the best way to stop vivid dreams is to stop avoiding their content and spend time processing and releasing them. This is the spiritual approach to vivid dreams, and in my experience it works much faster than trying to deal with them as if they are merely a physical symptom of your waking life.

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Remember the Dream

If you are the type of person who tosses and turns all night but can’t remember your bad dreams, you may want to start a document on your phone or a notebook next to your bedside that you can use to write down the details of your dream right when you wake up.

Remember, the spiritual point of dreams (not just vivid dreams) is to bring negativity in the subconscious (usually in your energy field that you are unaware of) to the conscious. It is only in the conscious that you can heal that negativity. Additionally, if the negativity continues to be ignored, then the universe will let it be played out in your physical life, where you will have no choice but to move through it in the conscious.

Write down as much as you can about the dream immediately when you wake up. Important details include:

  • Who was in the dream?
  • What happened in the dream?
  • What symbols came up in the dream?
  • What tones or colors came up in the dream?
  • How did you feel in the dream?

My dream took place in a high school or college setting and included several characters—myself, three other students (one female I recognized, two males I didn’t recognize) and a female professor. There was also a character that I never met but heard news about, and a “committee” that was grading me on something.

In the dream, I was taking a writing course and had won or achieved some sort of award. But my female professor alerted me that the older man in charge of the award found my work offensive and did not want to give me the award. He had broadcast this to all in the industry.

The female professor told me it was unfair, that I had done nothing wrong, but that the ONLY option was for me to draft an apology to him admitting my work was offensive.

Then she took my work to a committee of people who would evaluate it.

Additionally, in this dream was a female I recognized who was my peer. This young woman is someone I know in real life, who had been somewhat of a frenemy in high school. This is important, because every time you see someone you know in real life, there is something symbolic to interpret!

My first encounter with this woman was in high school when she essentially stole my boyfriend. She had decided she liked the guy I was starting to date and he had “such a connection” with her too. He was trying to decide between us and she confronted me about the situation at a live performance of a choir all three of us participated in.

She came up to me, told me he had chosen her over me (not her place, and he later told me he would have preferred to tell me himself), and that she hoped we could be “mature” (manipulative) and still build a friendship since we were both in the same choir program for the next several years. She made it clear that it wasn’t her fault and she expected me to be understanding.

This was in mid-December. By New Year’s Eve, the guy showed up at my party upset because she had broken up with him. We were still friends and he expected me to comfort him!

Needless to say, I was not feeling “mature” or like I should be friends with someone who I felt used and disrespected people. Everyone I talked to about this girl, however, basically agreed with her. They did not feel I should have an enemy that I still had to see and work with for several hours a day for another 1.5 years until we graduated. So I sucked up my feelings and tried to get along with her.

As those 1.5 years went on, she said many more manipulative and horrible things to me, including the worst: “I am so glad we can still be friends even though we’re always in competition for the same things and I’m always getting them over you. Except in physics. You’re better at physics than me.”

On the surface I remained friends with her, but under the surface I seethed as my rage toward her grew with no outlet.

In this dream, this same female was morose over my “win.” We were once again peers and competing over the same thing, apparently. Her moodiness implied that I owed her an apology for beating her, which my dream self almost gave her!

Step 2: Process the Dream Logically and Systematically

In a dream, every little thing is symbolic of a feeling, emotion, or wound you experience in your physical life. Said another way, the contents of your dream point directly to the contents of your energy field that you can not see. The contents of your dream are usually full of negative energy that you need to release from your energy field. The dream is your soul’s way of bringing the subconscious to the conscious.

If you are new to analyzing dreams, you’ll want to get out your Google search and start looking for details that you can interpret.

To start, every person you recognize in your dream is symbolic of something. For example, in my dream here are the symbolic representations of the people:

  • The older white man in charge of the award → an authoritative, patriarchal figure who refused to recognize me despite my efforts and lack of wrongdoing
  • The older white woman who was my teacher and mentor → a woman who buys into or allies herself to the patriarchal system that allows this injustice to continue
  • The female peer → a competitive and manipulative figure who makes me feel small and disempowered, who I was once afraid to stand up to and instead choose to “go along to get along” though it violated my morals
  • The male peers → although we were two males and two females in the class, this referred to how I often feel like it’s me and one or no other woman in the room… and to be clear, I have often been the only woman in a room, or the only person of color in the room, or both!
  • The committee → a diverse group of men and women, across many ages and races, who ended up supporting and defending me. I was grateful to them, and at the same time, they were not able to influence the situation regarding the award.

In addition to people, you’ll want to interpret colors and symbols. What I’ve found is that when you can summarize a symbol as a wound, you can heal the dream faster! For example:

  • I received a grade (M over M in my dream) from the female teacher/mentor → To me a grade symbolizes the wound of judgment or feeling judged. M/M is not a grade that has any meaning to me in real life, but during the dream I felt, “Is this grade good or bad?” Likely, the M/M is a nonsensical grade on purpose, because whether the grade is good or bad is of no matter. People’s judgments of me should not matter to me.
  • I missed my homework and had anxiety over it → the female teacher/mentor assigned me homework to write an apology to the authoritative man in charge of the award. I showed up to class after a weekend with no apology. I immediately felt anxiety over it, then dug in deeper and realized I didn’t have the apology because I didn’t agree with having to write it in the first place. This wound is likely around guilt of wanting to meet external expectations and be a “good girl.”
  • The female peer kept saying “woe is me” things to me → I could feel that she wanted me to apologize to her and was fishing for it. I felt a strong urge to apologize, and yet never did in the dream. This wound is around trusting the opinions of a group (peer pressure) instead of trusting myself.

You can find symbols all over your dream to interpret.

For example, a door would typically represent an opportunity. Walking through a door means accepting the opportunity, while having a door slam in your face would mean a block against an opportunity.

Use your logical interpretation of symbols. It’s fairly easy! If you are drowning in your dream, for example, you’re probably overwhelmed by your physical life and feel like you’re “drowning” in problems.

If you are unsure of how to interpret symbols, do a Google search! For example, you might use “door dream interpretation” or “drowning dream interpretation” to find explanations and clues.

Do not feel like you have to find every symbol or interpret every part of the dream. Use your intuition to look up key elements of the dream so you can simplify the dream to a few key phrases.

For example, there were desks in my dream, but because they didn’t seem like a key element I didn’t bother to interpret that part. However, if I had reached into a messy desk and couldn’t find a critical item I needed and had anxiety around it, that would be something I would examine more closely.

Using my symbolic representations of the dream, I can summarize that the dream is about a few key things (or has a few key themes):

  • Injustices I’ve personally experienced in the patriarchal system (due to my age, gender, and skin color)
  • Frustration with women who allied themselves to this same patriarchal system
  • Past inclination to “go along to get along” instead of standing up for myself; taking the advice of others instead of trusting myself; inability to stand up for myself

Step 3: Heal the Wounds Coming to the Conscious

Once you have interpreted the dream, you can heal the dream right then and there (like I did through lucid dreaming) or you can heal the dream when you’ve awakened later through a simple journal exercise or meditation.

I have been interpreting my dreams for two or three years at this point and was able to heal my wounds right then and there inside the dream through lucid dreaming, which is the ability to take control of your dreams and direct them.

I want to say that neither way is better than the other as either way brings about near-immediate healing.

I also want to say that I don’t always heal my dreams through lucid dreaming and the topic of lucid dreaming is for another discussion. I have only recently been able to lucid dream, and I believe the main reason is because I’ve been interpreting and healing my dreams for several years now. There are likely ways you can practice lucid dreaming itself as a skill; for me, it has come naturally and sporadically.

I often still heal my dreams consciously after waking up, which is still a wonderful way to immediately get the peace you need to fall back into a restful sleep!

Here’s what happened in my dream:

My female teacher/mentor confronted me about not having my homework done. The homework was to write an apology to the authoritative man who had the power to dispense the award. I felt the urge to do as told and write the apology, but instead I walked to the wipe board and started writing:

Dear Sir,

I understand that my work has offended you, however, I cannot apologize for it. I have done nothing wrong and stand by my work.

It’s possible this has nothing to do with my age, my gender, or the color of my skin, and that’s okay!

I feel, however, that this is discriminatory toward me.

I understand and accept the negative grade or punishment I may receive from writing this letter. I also understand that you will not be an ally to my career as a writer now or in the future.

Sincerely,

Monica

At that moment, I woke up, so I have no idea how the other characters in my dream reacted to this declaration—but do I really need to?

The healing was complete. I stood up for myself (against both the authoritative man AND my mentor/teacher for whom I refused to do her assignment) and called out the discrimination I felt. I then declared my values: that I would rather not degrade myself with fake apologies just to gain peace or help for myself in my career or my life.

And while this happened through lucid dreaming for me in this case, I could have easily written this same note as a journal entry, or written it in my head during a few moments of meditation.

How Healing the Dream Immediately Helps You Immensely

In my experience, what you avoid healing now will just keep coming up until you heal it.

That means if you ignore your vivid dreams (or any dreams), you will likely keep having them!

And because your vivid dreams often represent what’s going on in your physical life, those feelings of anxiety and fear will likely continue in your physical life. Either you will continue feeling them or you will continue experiencing them.

Spiritually, the universe is giving you a gift or fast track through your vivid dreams, so you don’t have to let those feelings manifest things you don’t want in real life. You have the opportunity to release those negative feelings and thoughts now rather than release them through a physical life experience.

There is no ignoring those feelings. If the are coming to your conscious, it’s because they are part of your journey. And if they are part of your journey, it’s because you are meant to release them one way or another!

In my waking life, this is one more thread of the wounds I’ve been working on for awhile. I’m grateful to release another small piece of them and to more deeply understand the pain I didn’t even realize I was still experiencing around age, race, and gender. I’m also grateful to release another piece of anger around the female peer from my high school experience, along with all the people who supported and defended her. I should have stood up for myself at the time instead of pretending to be this person’s friend!

What questions do you have about this process? I’m happy to answer your questions in the comments!

Monica Leonelle Grace writes about tarot, card reading, and other spiritual topics like manifestation, twin souls, and astrology.