How Dreams Make You Smarter
Are you fascinated by dreams? Your dreams offer you a powerful portal to your subconscious thoughts and feelings — and a vast reservoir of wisdom to guide you through every aspect of your life.
In the following guest post written by Nancy Neff, LifeForce Energy Healing® Master-Grad Student Teacher, you’ll see how deciphering her dreams opened Nancy to higher wisdom and a whole new guidance system. I hope Nancy’s story inspires you to delve deep into your dreamtime too — for healing, knowledge from the multidimensional universe, and an ever-expanding experience of life.
Growing up fiercely logical and analytical, I didn’t want to have anything to do with feelings.
I distanced myself from the other girls, who I saw as frivolous. I obtained degrees in math and computer science, then tried hard to keep my focus on my corporate job, which felt more and more restrictive over time.
When the dreams started coming in my mid-forties, some were alarming, and I didn’t know what to do with them. What did it mean when I dreamed that my mother was a Nazi, terrorizing everyone… yet I went to help her when she stopped breathing and fell over? What did it mean when I dreamed that the irresponsible but harmless guy I was dating was avoiding the police?
This was new territory for me, which nothing in my math or science classes had prepared me for.
Setting off on a dream-exploring adventure
Since there was no Google yet, I started reading about dreams, then found a teacher and group to work with. I was used to being at the top of every class I joined, but I felt totally out of my league surrounded by artists and other creative folks who were very comfortable with their intuition. All I knew was how to figure things out, and that part of my brain was no use in this setting. I still remember the panic I felt when my dream teacher asked us to draw something from a recent dream; I was sure I would get the wrong answer.
As the right-brained intuitive side of me developed more, I began to feel more at home there. I made connections that were not based on the logical left-brain world of words and facts and data.
While I was working to improve my eyesight, a dream of broken plastic contact lenses led me to transition from contacts to eyeglasses. When a friend asked why I made this change, I answered that I just knew it was right. I was surprised to hear my own words. I was starting to trust my intuition.
Tapping into the unified field
When I joined an energy medicine class with Deborah King, it really gave me the opportunity to bulk up my intuition muscles. She taught me to meditate, which does wonders for calming my lifelong anxiety. It also feels like it opens the channel wider to greater wisdom, from what Deborah calls the Unified Field of All Information. I started reaching a point where I “just know” what’s good for me and what’s not.
Meditation benefits the corpus callosum — the part of the brain that joins the right and left hemispheres — physically connecting your intuition with your logic and analysis. For me, dreams do this too, as long as I don’t dismiss them as “just dreams.”
Dream journaling
I let the dream images come to me, then write the dream in my journal, which engages my left brain. I pay close attention to any right-brain feelings about the dream. Then I brainstorm about any associations with those images or feelings. Working with dreams is a whole-brain exercise!
If I look back at old dream journals, I can spot repeated themes about a long-standing challenge or about some familiar role I play — the athlete, the teacher or student, the friend, the lover. I also often have a precognitive glimpse of something in a dream that appears in my waking world days or weeks later. Often I’ve forgotten the dream by then, so I go back to my journal to review it and make notes.
Ignoring my dreams seems as self-limiting as ignoring the input from one of my senses, like walking around with my eyes or ears covered. I thought I was smart years ago when I was using only my analytical brain. By learning to use my intuition, I now have the chance to develop true wisdom.
Nancy Neff was the highly anxious over-achieving daughter of the high school principal. She worked as a computer nerd for many years. Trying to decipher her vivid dreams, she was forced to get out of her head and recognize the fundamental role of her emotions. She now honors her feelings, using their wisdom for guidance, and has become a compassionate coach and energy teacher, with a knowledge of many healing tools.
Nancy trained as an Abundance Coach and as a LifeForce Energy Healer® and coach; she is currently teaching in Deborah King’s LifeForce Energy Healing Master-Grad Program. Nancy helps people improve their eyesight naturally, better understand themselves and others, and remove obstacles to having an abundant and joyous life.
