The Town Herald

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Dream Cards - Interpretation & Inspiration

By [Chimes]

'To die, to sleep— / To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub! / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come [...]' (Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, ll. 71-73)

Dream therapy is a sometimes-used way of gaining emotional well-being and balance and an alternative to normal therapy. It makes use of dream recording, interpretation and sometimes the employment of lucid dreams. Some find it very helpful, others don't – some dream a lot and have impressive dream-recall, and others say they don't dream. It depends on what sort of person you are as to whether it could or would actually work for you.

Now, this is all very interesting (else I wouldn't be writing about it) but what does it have to do with our current theme, cards? Dream therapy relies on the gradual understanding of your dreams – of course, this can be argued against, some might say that you can't understand your dreams and that they are merely projections of your mind as it tries to rest and who is to say that they are wrong? A tool that has been created to help with this is Dream Cards.

Dream Cards can vary, some can be complicated – I am looking at some on Amazon as I write this and I do not understand how they work or how you use them, which could be a downfall and cause difficulties for those who buy them – while others can be glaringly simple. The cards I own, for example, are simple and easy to use. For anyone interested in which cards took my fancy in the early years of my teens, I own Julia Parker's Dream Cards.

There are 52 two cards in the pack, 26 of these are positive and 26 are negative. For each positive card of a certain dream-theme – for example, crowds, water, possessions – there is a negative and each card has a list of questions, which, hopefully, only involve a yes or no answer. (The backs of the cards have pleasing artwork so not only are they helpful but they also look good.) There are 25 different dream themes; the other two cards are the 'starter' cards which tell you which of the two relevant theme cards to look at but these aren't always necessary as it is generally easy to tell whether you've had a bad dream or a good dream.

That should still sound simple, despite my somewhat convoluted explanation.

The cards also come with a book, which, once you have answered the questions, offers some explanations of what was going on in your mind when your subconscious decided to thrust whatever colourful, or grey-scale, images upon you as you slept. 

I find dreams fascinating; there is no limit to my interest in them, hence my purchase of the Dream Cards. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article these aren't just useful for your average dream enthusiast, they can also help people enrich their emotional well-being or even in some stretch of the imagination help them deal with certain emotional problems or tragedies – dream therapy is often used to help rape victims, for example.

It makes you wonder how much of this is the card and how much of this is your mind – yes, the cards trigger you to think and understand but how much do they really help? I should probably use mine more, so as to give some form of answer to that question but quite often I am too wrapped up in noting them down and getting some idea from them (normally for some story or other) that I forget to analyse. Sure, this analysis could be completely unreliable and a far-cry from the actual meaning, if there is one, but surely it should set my mind forth on some journey or other, right?

As someone who writes, I find that dreams are often very important in my process; they stem all kinds of fantastical ideas that, with some tidying and developing, could become some quite interesting stories. Perhaps with the employment of the cards a dream-inspired story could become a more developed and interwoven plot line simply because I understood why I dreamt what I dreamt. Could these cards be used not only as a tool for therapy but as a tool for writers? I think they can.

Perhaps those seeking dream therapy, writers or even the general public should pick up a pack and start looking deeper into their own subconscious; to quote Christopher Nolan's masterpiece Inception: 'Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realise something was actually strange.' Give it a try; you never know what you might find.




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