Unlocking the Wisdom of Dreams

Summary: 

Join Nancy as she delves into the fascinating world of dreams with Judith Dreyer, an author, educator, and holistic healer. Discover how dreams can serve as powerful messages for healing and growth, and learn practical steps to decode your own dream symbols.

Highlights:

• Judith's unique blend of science and spirituality in understanding dreams.
• Practical applications of dream guidance, including historical examples.
• Tips for beginners on how to start decoding dreams.
• The importance of dream journaling and recognizing recurring symbols.
• Insights into the symbolic language of dreams and its impact on personal growth.

Links and Extras:

• Navigating Your Dream World - Judith's book on dream interpretation.
• The Gift from Chiron - Judith's upcoming book on archetypes.
• Connect with Judith Dreyer on LinkedIn and Instagram

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Transcript

Nancy (00:02.287)
If you have ever woken up from a dream and thought, what the hell did that mean? This episode is for you. Today I am with Judith Dreyer, author, educator, and holistic healer who blends science and spirituality in the most fascinating way. With a background in nursing and nutrition, plus decades of experience in shamanic work, Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine,

Judith helps people to understand their dreams, not just as random stories, but as powerful messages for healing and growth. We're diving into how to work with your dreams, what recurring symbols might be trying to tell you, and why your dream world might be way more connected to your waking life than you think. Thank you so much for being here today with us, Judith.

Judith (00:49.865)
thank you, Nancy. I'm delighted to be here and talk about my favorite subject.

Nancy (00:56.189)
Well, we're excited to have you because I know so many people who have really vivid dreams and are constantly trying to make sense of them. So let's start simple. When you say that our dreams are trying to guide us, what exactly do you mean by that?

Judith (01:16.362)
It's a complicated question, but it has some very practical applications. First of all, dreams come to guide us because we are connected to the divine source that we are. And it comes to us in the language of symbols, which makes them weird or hard to understand. However, once we can crack our own code a little bit, we can get

tremendous guidance for everything. If you look at the literature, for example, Einstein had something happen with one of his dreams that had to do with the EMC squared equation. Elias Howe, he dreamt of a camel and the way it happened in the dream gave him the inspiration to put the eye of the needle for the sewing machine. I personally have learned how to drive a stick shift car in the dream. You know, I had

couldn't get it done during the day and at night I dreamt about it and I was able to feel the difference in the different gears, got up in the morning and I immediately drove the stick shift car that my brother and I bought, our first car. So it has a lot of practical applications.

Nancy (02:37.328)
Wow. So you said that dreams can be super weird. And I think we all know that. I mean, I've had dreams where I couldn't move and all types of weird things. What would you say to somebody who is beginning to or beginning to want to start to decode their dreams and what they mean without them spiraling or overthinking it?

Judith (03:00.908)
Well, it takes a little bit of diligent effort. I recommend that folks get their sleep hygiene, their bedside area prepared, because when we make a commitment to understand our dreams, if we don't have our tools ready, we probably won't be that successful. We can't fool our subconscious anyway.

If you want to understand your dreams, it's no different than undertaking maybe a better nutrition program or an exercise program. You got to put some effort into it. And it's very simple in the long run. It's a clipboard with a pen, no lights, and you train yourself when you wake up after a sleep cycle, if you have a dream, to record it. And I go through this in my Navigating Your Dream World book where I tell and show people that you can

You can write on a clipboard in the dark using your other hand as a guide and you won't cross over so that when you wake up you have a record of that dream. And then you can take the next steps in terms of understanding it. But you don't want to lose it. At the end of sleep cycles we have various lengths of REM sleep and it's at the end of these REM sleeps that the dreams are the most vivid.

So we can actually dream more than once during the night if we train ourselves. And sometimes those are significant and sometimes they're just, you're in the tech field. Think about our dreaming time as kind of a computer overload and at night we go through the different files and we can delete some and we keep some. But the ones that are really important.

are the ones that we tend to remember at the end of that sleep cycle.

Nancy (04:51.623)
Wow, would that answer the question as to why I don't remember a lot of my dreams because they're unimportant or is it for another reason?

Judith (04:59.886)
I think the reason most people don't understand their dreams is that we're not trained to do so. Because I, when I made the commitment to study my dreams, let me step back for a minute. I have been a dreamer all my life. I have remembered dreams since I'm five years old. And those dreams were significant enough.

to tease me as I got older to understand more. And then when the shows came out that, you know, that talked about ESP and metaphysical ideas, those first stages in our awareness in a mass produced, you know, media way, I realized that it got conversations going with me and my friends at the time. And the more we talked about it, then the more I would dream over the next few days and actually remember them.

So what I decided to do is get my clipboard, get my pen, and I made a commitment in a prayerful way that I was ready to listen to my dreams. And it was kind of like riding a bicycle. I'd have a few dreams, but I couldn't remember them. And then a couple days would pass and I'd remember one. And then another couple days I would remember another one. And then before you know it, I started to get this rhythm going.

where I was actually able most nights to remember something.

And that's what really, no, it's okay. That's what fed my curiosity.

Nancy (06:30.416)
any of your

Nancy (06:37.265)
Were any of your dreams recurring?

Judith (06:41.326)
In a difficult period of time in my life, yes, I did have a recurring dream and I realized after the third time I knew what I had to do. And people ask me that. It's a very good question. People often ask me about a recurring dream. And my answer in general is a recurring dream wants our attention. It's something that we're either not doing or not paying attention to enough.

that our, I call it our dream power that is trying to get a hold of our subconscious, our deep subconscious is trying to get a hold of us that there's something we need to act on, we need to follow through on, we need to think about differently to move our life in the best way possible because it's my deep, deep belief that our guidance from our dream power is really on our side. And what

makes people afraid is that because dreams can be scary, weird, or even frightening, there is a general kind of a feeling that they should be dismissed, that they're really not important or it's really not a positive experience. And I can tell you, it's really the opposite.

Nancy (08:02.215)
So how do we, let's talk about symbols. I'm really interested in learning more about the symbols. How do we start noticing the patterns in our recurring dreams and distinguishing the symbols that we're seeing in our dreams? How do we start making sense of them?

Judith (08:22.21)
Well, first of all, you have to understand that our divine self reaches us through our imagination, our creativity, and symbols. It's a symbolic language. And wherever you're at in the moment with that dream is going to be what's the most relevant. Even if 10 years from now you have a different orientation. So, for example, I have a Native American.

background, my elders taught me a medicine wheel and I have learned colors based on that wheel, which is different than say an art therapist would learn about colors or the psychology of colors, for example. So for me, orange means learn the truth based on this medicine wheel. But orange is a very

bright color, but it's not as bright as red. It's a very attractive color. It tends to attract a little bit more men, so you see it like on a Home Depot sign, that type of thing. So it's where you're at with the dream in the morning that really matters. And so what I recommend for people to do is I like to just scribble my dreams at night, and then I have a dream journal that I write them out in. And I typically

write the dream out first and then I have a couple questions that I ask myself based on the process that I learned. And again, that isn't my book, but I also created a journal with these questions so people can answer the questions without having to, did I get all the questions right or whatever? It's just a really great tool. But anyway, when I go through that process, if I see a color like orange or I see a dog or

I see a building. You know, in the Jungian world, I, in my, this dream journal that I've created, there's a circle. And mandalas are what Carl Jung did with his dreams. So you could get a little bit more of a spatial recognition, but you could also get the understanding of north, south, east, and west, which has specific lessons in learning. So it's, for the beginner, you start with the dream journal.

Judith (10:46.316)
You write your dream and what I did in the beginning is I cut the page in half, my dream went on the left and all my thoughts and what I thought these symbols meant went on the right. And then if I looked something up, and today we have so many more resources than we used to have, but it's really important for us to click with our first intuitive response because it's your dream. It's your symbol. It's your symbolic world. It's not mine.

The most I can do is give you some keys and help you maybe decode what you've gotten. But it's really ultimately up to the dreamer to really understand what their symbols mean to me. So for example, we could both dream of a cat on a lake. Same looking lake, we could describe it to each other, we could say, yeah, was that this lake we're reminded?

Let's just say you and I had a common experience growing up. We always went to this lake and it was the same lake. However, what that lake, the pier, the dock, the water, the land, and the cat, what that would mean to you could be extremely different from what it means to me. So I actually don't recommend dream dictionaries. I really feel people need to trust their intuition more because working with symbols,

stimulates our intuitive radar and it strengthens it so that we become really sensitive to things and our world is symbolic. Our whole world is symbolic. When we had the earthquake here in Virginia, what happened? The Washington Monument cracked and that was a symbolic obelisk that our founding fathers deliberately placed in the construction of

Washington DC. And so I start to look at things more symbolically when things like that happen. So that's a good beginning place. And if you start keeping your journals, you can start seeing maybe you see the same person over the span of six months. And you realize that that person could be positive or negative. And our subconscious wants to reveal to ourselves

Judith (13:08.654)
the best for us, but also where we're hiding out from the best of us. And so it's revealing. so some people don't want to face themselves. So that's where the some of the not controversy, but some of the, don't think I want to do this kind of comes in, you know, because it's going to make us more authentic. Carl Jung was all about authenticity. How can we be the

best person we can possibly be to contribute to the solutions on the planet, not the problems on the planet. And that's where I feel the power of the dream is on a very broad but practical level.

Nancy (13:56.104)
Wow, I wanna go back to something you said earlier about dreams being, sometimes being like scary or feeling heavy or sad, because it took me back to when I was a little girl having these reoccurring dreams. And I want to say that it coincided with me seeing a scary movie. And so I was having these dreams and then there was this one scene in the movie that kept playing out in my dream.

And so can sometimes dreams be the result of something that may have happened during the day, a trauma that you haven't let go of that's coming up in a dream that's reminding you or telling you, hey, you're stuck in this place. We want to help you out. Could that be an interpretation?

Judith (14:47.074)
Well, again, that's up to you and what your experience is. In the long run, that's really, it really truly is up to the dreamer. But I will say this, I've worked with people that have had some tough dreams. And once we sit down, and we're not in the dream when we're talking about it, right? So we're in a safe place. And one of the things that I like to do is create a safe place for anybody that I talk about with a dream, because I feel our dreams are sacred. They come from that.

Nancy (14:49.499)
Right.

Judith (15:16.776)
Holy sacred part of ourselves. It's really trying to guide us from fate into our destiny if we choose to do that so We are influenced by TV and all of that and it can be Put on a loop where we can't let it go I mean think about a song that you hear two days ago, and you're still hearing the same lyric over and over again Well, I think the dreaming time has some of that same opportunity and

definitely with PTSD, any kind of trauma, it's going to take a while for our psyche to work it through and that's different for each of us. I counsel people to not be afraid of it because if you can work with it in a place that's safe, those types of dreams, you can start to uncover the deep meaning behind it.

The system that I like the most comes from Malaysia. I really resonated with this system years ago and it always made a lot of sense to me. It was a tribal community that was discovered in the 20s, 30s, and 40s where psychologists from Europe went to visit them because they were a dreaming society. And what they noticed is that they had no crime on any level. There was no crime. And they said to them, well,

That's because we work everything out in the dream time. So one of the examples I like to give is let's just say, you know, I'm going to work today and in fact I did. I had a very unpleasant phone call with somebody that I was working with this morning not related to this. But what if I dreamt about that person? And I saw in the dream time that that person was involved

with something and I saw them sad, then I would wake up with the understanding that their reaction to me had nothing to do with me, that there was something going on in their life. So I can release the judgment of that person. The second thing is in the system, if that person was just, I'm gonna say a prick for lack of a better word, just really somebody that, oh God help us.

Judith (17:43.872)
and I dreamt of them and saw them that way in the dream time, then in their culture, I would have the responsibility to tell them when I saw them in the morning because that would actually give them an opportunity to clean up their act. Can you imagine us doing that in the workplace?

Nancy (18:06.983)
That's hilarious. It's funny that you say that because I actually used to work with somebody who was a vivid dreamer and she would come to work all the time telling us about her dreams and I can only imagine if they were work related and she was saying her piece at work based on something that came to her through a dream. That would be an interesting scene.

Judith (18:30.946)
Well, I'll tell you, my commitment to the dreams is such that I've actually walked away from a couple of relationships because of what I saw in the dream. And I felt I got a warning. And so something that I wouldn't have known, to this day, this one person, I have no idea what the consequences would have been if I had stepped another step closer to this person. But I trusted the dream and the dream said to me, don't go any further.

And so I didn't. And I just trusted to the universe to take care of that.

Nancy (19:09.341)
Speaking of relationships, you've talked about dreams as being sort of a relationship, which I love. What does that look like in real life and how do we build that relationship?

Judith (19:21.762)
Well, we build the relationship by consistent diligent practice. However, you can do it. You know, I know some people who are very strong dreamers, but they only record that one dream. They're not worried about it every night. I had a window open for me several years ago and I was dreaming four to five dreams a night. And after a while, I just said to my dream power, you know, can I get some sleep? You know, I was not that I wasn't sleeping, but.

I still felt like I was interrupted a lot. So things quieted down, you know, after that point and they listened to us that way. The other thing is, you know, when we get guidance for something, we all love it, don't we? We love to be able to find a person that can give us a clue, give us some meaning, you know, and we really enjoy having that nugget. It kind of sparks us up a little bit. But one of my elders said to me, you must

act on it because if you get guidance and you don't act on it then your subconscious says, they're not serious why should I bother?

Judith (20:33.368)
So I feel that there is, so it's like dieting, it's like exercising, it's like setting goals for business. If you don't take appropriate action, how do you accomplish what you want two months from now if you don't take a step today? Every step we take today creates the morrow, if you will. But we forget that with the long-term vision that everybody wants vision boards and blah, blah, blah, blah. What I love about the dreams is it tells me

Today, what do I need for an action step? And that's a part of the dream process that I teach, you know, what action can I take today based on this dream? Sometimes for me, it's making sure I go look up. I love Ted Andrews, animal speak. I dream a lot of animals and I love going back to see.

the mythology and the different cultures, it refreshes my memory and I can say what really speaks to me because it's not everything that speaks to me. It might be only one line or two. But I make sure I record that and I always give thanks, you know, always give thanks for what comes in.

Nancy (21:40.606)
Do you feel like there's a window of time that you need to record these dreams before you forget them? Because I find that I'll wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night and I'll remember bits and pieces of a dream that I just had and then I forget it a few hours later. Is that commonplace?

Judith (21:59.404)
Yes, yes, it is. Clarissa Pincola, STs would say, the dream is like a wisp of smoke. And if you don't capture it, it is gone. It's gone. So what I teach my clients and students to do is record the dream, even if you wake up at 2 o'clock or 4 o'clock in the morning, don't worry about it. Because what happens is if it's a dream that's got your attention, if you don't.

Jot it down so you'll remember something in the morning. It stays with us and then we don't get a good quality next stage of sleep. It's kind of like we don't really let go enough. So if you record it then, you'll have enough, and I've done this a lot, you'll have enough to work with in the morning. And even if your chicken scratches look a little bit blurred, you'll figure something out enough to get the nugget for it. So, and then in the morning,

I recommend getting to them as soon as you can. So if you have a cup of coffee in the morning, you can keep your dream journal there. You can make some notes in there. If there's a symbol you want to look up, you may not have time in the morning to do that, but on that right side of the page, can say, look up, you know, the.

Red-winged blackbird, it's got red on its wing, it's got black feathers, it's got a little bit of yellow. You can look it up later to see what all those different points of that bird and its habitat, where does it live, what does it do, what is its function in ecology? We get caught up in some of the Hollywood stuff where we romanticize things, but everything has a light and a dark. Everything has a light and a shadow.

And so I try to be open to understanding my shadow stuff because it makes me a better person.

Nancy (23:57.284)
it. It's really interesting. I was just thinking about my mom when you were talking about this. My mom is a vivid, vivid dreamer. She dreams every night. She remembers her dreams. And she's even told me that if she goes up or gets up rather to go like to the restroom and she comes back to bed, she can go back to the exact same place in her dream that she woke up from. It's like she can go right back to that spot and start over.

or pick back up where she left off, I should say, which I find is fascinating. I feel like I may have done that once or twice, but I feel like my mom does that on a regular basis. I just don't know how open she would be to interpreting her dreams. I wish that she would though, because I feel like based on this conversation that we're having, if she's having dreams that are so vivid night after night after night, that there might be a message in there for her that she's, you know, not getting to benefit from.

Judith (24:54.926)
I would guess that there is a nugget in there, you know? Sometimes I find for me, this is for me, it's not for everybody, but when I have these long involved dreams, usually there's a nugget in there. It's not, I don't have to get caught up in the whole drama of the long dream. On the other hand, there are times when I see a certain blank background and I'll have an image.

I wake up and I know that that's really significant. So, and we're all in between both extremes. So, yeah, I'd like to see her do that. It'd be interesting.

Nancy (25:37.553)
I think so too. So what would you have to say to somebody like my mom who might be skeptical of dream work or who might just be starting out? What do you wish people really got about the power of dream work?

Judith (25:56.162)
I think when we connect with our higher power through the dreams, and it's a symbolic language, I'll say that again, it's not always easy to decode it. Our life is enhanced. I've had guidance for going to a master's program. I've had guidance for driving a car. I've had guidance for relationships. I've had guidance for moving.

guidance for big decisions and all I can say is it's really impacted my life in a very positive way. And unfortunately, we're not taught about that. My ideal group, I'd love to work with teenagers. I had a small dream circle group with seniors in high school and the problem with seniors in high school is that they're very, very busy. It's hard for them to fit one more activity in.

So I would love to work with the 14, 15-year-olds who are just starting out because with puberty, they're just starting to come into their sense of self. And we can solve the problems of the world if we have more access to our dream time. And that doesn't have to be a nighttime dream. We forget that the intuitive world of symbols can happen in a daydream. It can happen in a meditation.

It can happen in a gut feeling. It can happen through paying attention to synchronicities as well as the night dream. So there's this whole GPS system that we have, but it's latent because our society doesn't really encourage it. When you go to indigenous groups, like when I went to and met one of my

met one of my elders and went to a woman's council at the Seneca Reservation in upstate New York. I was talking to a couple people about dreams and they were one of the Native American women, you know, that lived there and they looked at me and they said, yeah, so what? Everybody dreams.

Judith (28:09.964)
And I went, really? I've had all this stuff. And she goes, yeah, well, you're not special. Everybody dreams. But it's what we do with it, how we learn to understand it. You know, I have one elder who will not share many of her dreams. She feels they're sacred and that she should hold onto them. I have had what I call sacred dreams, and I won't share them with anybody. They're for me. But I've also had dreams that are cleaning up the files.

You know, I was busy working on different committees and I would see people during the night and it was like, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it, delete, delete, delete. And our brain doesn't, it's not our brain, I think it's our heart because our mind can only process a finite amount of material, but the energetics of our heart is much broader, so we pick up a lot more that our mind isn't aware of. And at night, we get to see some of that interplay between the mind.

and our heart. And to me that is just absolutely fascinating.

Nancy (29:13.713)
It is fascinating. I just love hearing hearing you talk about it. So for people who want to begin decoding their dreams and journaling their dreams, I know that you have some resources available. Could you tell us about your book and your workbook? And you have another book coming out too. So why don't you tell us about all of all of what you have to offer?

Judith (29:17.166)
Thank you.

Judith (29:36.046)
Well, my first book was based on my students at the university telling me to write my book about my herbs. That's one of my passions is herbal medicine. And so I did, but I used the medicine wheel that my elders taught me and I put 12 plants based on the teachings on the wheel. So it's a little bit more Native American in its way of teaching, but it's also about being grateful and working with the earth. So for me, it's like the earth.

pillar of what I do. So my biggest passion was the dreams. This is the book I really wanted to read. And it's called Navigating Your Dream World. It's available in eBook and in softcover at Amazon, as well as people can contact me. But what I did in this book is I worked with the four directions. And so I have workbook pages. So there's a color and an animal and very traditional.

There's a season, there's a life cycle. And I ask you to think about what it means to you. So there's actually workbook sheets in here. And then you can keep it by your bedside as a reference book. I wanted it to be very practical. And then I teach a system of keeping track of your journal. so it's the same name, Navigating Your Dream Work Journal, also available on Amazon. And the system that I teach.

If I were to work with you one on one, it's all outlined there and you just have to fill in the blanks. And then at the end of the month, what I try to do is I do a summary, the date, the dream title, and maybe a message. then I, so I have it as an easy reference in the front of each journal so I can go back and look at it. And then the new book that's coming out at the end of this month is the gift from Chiron.

And the dream book talks about archetypes. But my story with Chiron and the wounded healer was too big to put into the dream book. So what I decided to do was keep the story out of that and create another book that goes into Chiron a little bit more depth. What does it mean astrologically? What does it mean astronomically? What does it mean for us and our natal chart? And how does that apply in our everyday life? So it's.

Judith (31:58.926)
Part of it's my story and how I felt it impacted me and how it, what's the right word? Arctypes are these incredible dynamic energetic patterns. And we have full choice and free will to put a spin on them and however we choose in our lifetime. So what is, but what does the broad archetype mean and how can we interface with it? So.

I tend to go into that in my next book coming out. And that also will be a soft cover and an ebook on Amazon. August 26th.

Nancy (32:36.807)
How exciting. And I'll be sure to put links for your books in the show notes so that people will be able to find them easily. Thank you so much for your time and wisdom today, Judith. It's been so much fun chatting with you.

Judith (32:38.659)
Yes.

Judith (32:51.426)
Thank you, Nancy, for having me. I'm really grateful.

Judith (32:57.154)
So sweet dreaming.