Life’s experiences sometimes rubs us the wrong way. When something happens that contradicts our sense of ‘what oughtta be’ regarding our view of right or wrong, good and bad, it can make us pretty unhappy and affect our outlook on life. Unfulfilled wishes and desires are another have much the same effect.

Through our dreams, the subconscious mind tries to provide us with just the right dream at just the right time, to compensate for the many things that cause our peace of mind to get out of balance.

If we have fears, it tries to feed us those fears little by little in coded dreams to help us overcome them. Occasionally it uses the brute force of a nightmare to get its point across.

If we have unfulfilled desires it may provide us with a substitute to alleviate the sense of lacking.

Some of these dreams are pretty straight forward and at other times they are embedded in deeply symbolic presentations taken from our own memory bank of experiences. To solve the riddle of our dreams we need to sort out the feelings, meanings, and the memories of what all these symbols mean to us from our experience.

Here are a few simple examples:

Right and wrong.
Art is a hard working and honest immigrant from Hungary who scrapping to make ends meet. He has a Hungarian friend named Hector who made a false claim for a faked injury on a train platform in NYC. Even though he had no witnesses to his fall, the city paid him a large amount of money to settle the claim. Art is dismayed and almost delirious with anger. How could his friend be rewarded for dishonesty while he worked so hard just to get by. He became discouraged and his outlook on life and sense of right and wrong suffered.

Several months later Art had a vivid dream. He witnessed his friend Hector being arrested for fraud, the police handcuffed him and a nearby judge ordered him deported back to Europe. End of dream.

Was his friend really arrested or deported? No. It only happened in Art’s dream. But as he told the story of the dream, there was a sense of relief in his voice that somehow justice was done. His subconscious delivered Art back to his old cheery self through a dream. It gave him a substitute for justice in a dream which he accepted.

 Her fear overcome.
The upper bridge in Margaret’s mouth became loose one day. It didn’t actually come out, it just loosened a bit. The thought of it falling out in front of other people petrified her. She didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t get it repaired. She lived in constant fear of this happening and for months ate liquid foods hoping to prevent it from happening. Then she had a dream. In the dream the thing she feared most happened. The bridge fell out in front of a lot of people. Then she just took it and pushed it back in her mouth and it stayed there. End of dream.

She stopped worrying about her bridge falling out. That was approximately five years prior to the telling of the dream and it still hadn’t fallen out.

These are examples of how the subconscious mind helps to keep us in balance psychologically. Although the actual cause for the worry and concern was not really resolved for these two people, a dream provided them with a substitute for the real thing.

Other dreams may not be so straight forward and may require the use of the divide and analyze technique.