Another cool way God reveals issues in your life is to take you back to where you used to live.  We’ve all had dreams that take place in scenes from our past, and one common dream scene takes place in your childhood home. What could that be a picture of? What age or ages were you when you lived in that house?

Those dreams are often speaking of issues that took root at the time you lived in that house. What’s the condition of the house? Where in the house do the dream’s actions take place? It’s not imperative that the house be precisely the same as the actual house, or even that you actually be in the dream the age you were when you lived there. So when you have a dream that takes place in one of your homes, past or present, think of the home representing your life, and proceed from there.

One of the hidden mysteries of dreams involves time — how God reveals our past and how He reveals the future. In Genesis, Joseph interpreted the Baker’s fate and the timetable of his demise in an amazing way. The baker was carrying bread in a basket on his head and birds came after that bread three times. From that, Joseph knew those three confrontations meant three days.

Why three? That’s simple,  it happened three times. But how did he know it referred to a period of time? In the days in which this event took place, bread lasted one day. Bread was a major part of the Hebrew culture, and “give us this day our daily bread,” not only meant the Word of God figuratively, but actual food for the table in the most literal sense.

So, in looking over your dreams, see if God may be giving you a timetable of when an event might happen by having the same thing occur over and over again.

Thanks everyone for your comments to this blog. It’s great to hear your excitement in learning more about dream interpretation. In reading your comments, many of you have asked if it’s possible to have a dream be both intrinsic and extrinsic. Some of you are quite certain it is possible, and I don’t want to issue any blanket responses without specifics.

In my personal experience of interpreting my dreams and the dreams of others, if I am participating at any point of the dream, I label that dream as intrinsic. Remember, intrinsic means the dream is about you; extrinsic means it’s concerning someone or something else. The point of dream interpretation is not in the rigid tagging of the dream, it’s discovering the meaning and learning from the hidden wisdom.

For example: Sometimes I’ve noticed I’ll be participating, and then suddenly find myself removed from the action of the dream yet still privy to what’s going on or what’s being said. I don’t consider this now to be an extrinsic dream. The dream is still about me. It’s just not important for me to be there when that information is revealed.

Or, sometimes you just “know” things in a dream. The back story of how you found this out isn’t important to the meaning of the dream, so it’s excluded.

So for clarity, I would suggest tagging any dream you participate in at any time as intrinsic, and any dream you are strictly observing, extrinsic.

One of the DreamBloggR commenters asked if it was important to look up the meaning of a person’s name if they appear in your dream. Of course you can always look up the meaning of a name if that’s important to you, but whether or not that name’s meaning is significant in the larger scope of the dream itself, depends upon several factors.

Does the name itself play an important role in the plot of the dream? Does the name seem out of place, or a name of someone you’re not familar with in the natural? Is the name spoken out loud or used in a way other than to describe a person taking part in the dream?

If you answered yes to any of the previous questions, there may be significance in the meaning of the name beyond identifying a specific person. Look it up and apply the action surrounding the name to the cultural meaning of the name. Names were incredibly significant in Hebrew culture and dreams always involve symbolism. Thus, the names themselves are fair game.

By the way, the most accurate name book I’ve found is “The Name Book” by Dorothy Astoria.

The simple answer to that question is almost always. That is to say, that almost always — about 95 percent of the time — the dream you have is about you. For instance, say you’re consistently having dreams that take place at work and involve coworkers. You may have the tendancy to think that dream is about one of those coworkers, but your participation in that dream should point the finger back to you. It doesn’t matter that the majority of the action is being done by the coworker, the dream is revealing an issue about you and using that coworker to establish a location, context or symbol to pinpoint that issue.

So ask yourself, ‘what does that coworker symbolize to me? What characteristic do I attribute to them? Try replacing that coworker with just the characteristic and then observe how the context, or storyline, deal with that characteristic. How did you respond or interact with that coworker or characteristic? As the mirror unfogs, a new reflection of yourself emerges and that silly dream isn’t so silly anymore.

So “I had a dream about you last night,’ would probably be better said, “I had a dream about me last night and you were there.”

One of the most important things to remember about your dream — and it’s important to do this right after waking up — is how you felt during the dream and what lingering feeling you had after waking up from the dream.

Sometimes “how you felt” about the dream can be subtle. And it’s on these occasions where it’s most important to include this somewhere in your dream entry. For example (Feeling: When the dream started, I felt a little apprehensive, but as it progressed, I felt more and more comfortable).

In much the same way as the three most important parts of real estate are location, location and location, the three most important parts of the technical side of understanding your dreams are context, context and context.

We’ll talk about some of the other aspects of context in later blogs.