Last night I was running with my wife in a park. We had a really nice pace and had a line of animals like geese following us. Then I saw someone who was shot by a gun, at which time, i organized the people around me to get him some help. The overall feeling was positive with very little negative energy. I have had a lot of running dreams lately.

Since my wife doesn’t actually run in real life as a form of exercise, it just shows that “running” in the dream is a metaphor. It stands for being able to do the activities in your life that are related to goals at a good pace without a lot of resistance. The wonderful thing about a positive dream is that it tells you about the energy you need to make your life work bundled in a metaphor. When you embody the energy from the dream and then act as if you have the energy, the magic begins to happen in your life. A positive dream tells you that the energy in the metaphor is now available, so start to use it.

But what if you are married and you find yourself having sex with another woman or man? Does it mean that you should just go out and find the woman or man and have sex with them? Of course not. This is the problem the fundamentalists and a lot of scientists have. They take everything literal and then it gets them in conflict with the world. Sex is a metaphor and so is the other woman or man. Sex is the symbol of intimacy or closeness, and the other person in the dream stands for qualities that you haven’t fully actualized in your life. The dream is saying to embrace or be intimate with the positive quality that the other person has. Maybe they have enthusiasm or courage or calm or strength. When you have a dream like this one, you need a lot of self discipline. You can’t be in a literal mindset even though your body will feel up as if you are ready to have sex. You are being asked to be up with the new quality.

Sometimes what we think of as very dangerous animals like grizzly bears or lions appear in a dream without any fearful energy attached as if the animal is friends with you. This tells you that the quality that the animal represents is available to you to start putting into practice in real life right away. With a bear it would strength, and with a lion it is courage.

What happens if your dream has a lot of positive, but also some negative in it. Many dreams are like this. For instance, a lot of people dream that they are flying wonderfully for awhile then they either crash or get grounded or run our of gas. What this kind of dream tells you is that while the positive energy of being up and going for things is available, to get amazing results you need to address the issue that the negative gives to you in the dream. In the above scenario you might ask yourself how you start flying on a project and then crash emotionally or run out of energy. You get the dream to tell you that you do not have a problem in accessing and embracing the up energy, but if you don’t solve the crashing problem, you are going to crash again in real life. The dream comes before your next crash so that it doesn’t happen. If you solve the crashing problem, then the you will have much more positive “air” time. You will be able to maintain your energy.

The all positive dreams tell you that you are like a child with the new energy. You are free to play with it so that you can learn it and make it a permanent fixture in your life. But just as a child runs into obstacles in learning, you can expect obstacles to appear shortly after the positive dream. Each new obstacle strengthens the energy until one day it becomes part of your identity. Don’t get hung up material identities. Material things come and go like the blink of an eye. Focus on the inner non-material, qualitative identity like creativity or playfulness or strength. Then everything works.

The dreams that we call nightmares, the ones that wake you up terrified, where you were happy that you woke it and that it wasn’t real, require the most amount of skill to work with it. They come because an energy that you were supposed to be developing was blocked by something that happened in the past, usually a traumatic event. When soldiers come back from war and have the same dream repeatedly night after night, it means that the energy that they are supposed to develop in themselves like peacefulness or compassion, is stuck in the memory of the battlefield. When children experience violence in their families, their dream lives are going to be terrifying. What they are supposed to develop, like playfulness, is stuck in the fear of the violence. The difficulty in dealing with the negative dreams is that the mind thinks that the negative is going to happen again, that the conditions are not safe. The work is to get the mind to believe that it is safe to develop the missing quality. It would be wrong to assume that if you are in the middle of a battle again in a dream, that the quality you need is the courage to fight. The qualities that are needed are the ones that caused the fighting in the first place, most likely cooperation and compassion.

When you have nightmares, you know that you are at the beginning of new process of growth, but unlike a positive dream, you have to deal with the trauma in order for it to develop. When there is a feeling of safety, then you can run with it.

The tendency in the culture is to tell a child or an adult that it is just a nightmare, to try to go back to sleep and forget about it. The reality is that the child’s mind is not going for forget the negative energy that they feel in real life. The best thing that a parent can do is to provide a safe environment where the child is free to be honest with what they are feeling. The same is true of returning soldiers.