Honoring Your Children’s Dreams

As a psychiatrist who specializes in intuition I encourage parents to honor their children’s dreams and listen to their own dreams too. For me, dreaming is a direct line to a place where magic abounds and nothing is without meaning. It is a pristine state of awareness, unpolluted and clear. Direct guidance for lies in our dreams, the natural territory of intuition. Here, time and space are non-existent and anything is possible. Like a blank, white canvas, our dream world is a spacious medium where intuition can freely express itself about healing. If children listen to their dreams, they are a potent form of empowerment and guidance.

In my book “Guide to Intuitive Healing,” I discuss dreams as a potent form of healing and guide to everyday life. In it I teach you you and your children how to remember dreams and benefit from their knowledge. You are in partnership with your dreams. I suggest initiating an ongoing dialogue with them. It’s like consulting the wisest person you can imagine who knows you inside out. You can ask your dreams anything. How can I communicate with my child better? What school system is ideal? Are there ways to stop catching so many colds? You can teach your children to ask question before they go to sleep too. Whatever they’re concerned about or want answers to is fair game. No question is trivial if it is meaningful to you or them.

Dreams provide answers. But first you must retrieve them. How many nights have you awakened with the most amazing dream you were certain you’d recall? Then, the next morning it was gone. Our memory deceives. During sleep, we suffer a kind of amnesia. Dreams are not of the rational mind. Your intuitive memory is what is needed. Here are strategies you and you child can use to remember your dreams.

4 Ways to Remember Dreams

Keep a journal permanently installed by your bed
Write a question on a piece of paper before you go to sleep. Formalize your request. Place the question on a table beside your bed or under your pillow.
In the morning, do not wake up too fast. Stay under the covers for at least a few minutes remembering your dream. Luxuriate in a peaceful feeling between sleep and waking, what scientists call the “hypnogogic state.” Those initial moments provide a doorway.
Open your eyes. Write down your dream immediately, otherwise it will evaporate. You may recall a face, object, color, scenario, feel an emotion. It doesn’t matter if it makes perfect sense–or if you retrieve a single image or many. Record everything.
Keep repeating this method for a week and answers will come.

When you awaken remember the question you asked the previous night. See how your dream applies. Solutions will surface. It’s fun to have conversations with your child at breakfast about dreams. What did he or she dream? What do you think it meant? How can the information from dreams help them? Talking about dreams is a wonderful way to stimulate your child’s imagination, support their intuition, and forge closeness between you.