Dream a Little Dream of Me |
Have you ever dreamed about someone you know?
Dreams are a mix of the strange and the familiar. While sometimes in nighttime dreams we interact with people we’ve never met before, often we find that we know the people we see and speak to while asleep. Is there something for us to learn in these interactions?
Perhaps surprisingly, the material in our night dreams and even daydreams offer unexpected ways to improve our existing, waking relationships. With a little reflection, they can help us expand our self-awareness and provide insights about the ways we interact with others. Here are three tools for using our nighttime dreams and daydreaming to improve our relationships.
Challenges are inevitable in any relationship. However, when we encounter relationship roadblocks, we usually retreat to our most familiar scripts, seeing the other person through a narrow lens. When we’re angry at a spouse, for example, it may seem impossible to remember them as the person we fell in love with; a flare-up with our boss and we forget what a chance they took on us early in our career. Yet our nighttime dreams can help return us to a more expanded view.
While we dream about people we know in waking time, rarely do the familiar faces in our dreams behave exactly as we would expect them to in waking life. The staid, strict mother is........