Creating a Dream Guide For Your Unconscious Mind

July 11th, 2007

This article is part of the series Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming. If this is your first visit to the site, I recommend starting at the beginning of the series.

Just as you can create your own ideal dream teacher, you can also create a dream guide — a dream character created specifically to provide your unconscious mind with a walking, talking personality with which you may converse during your dreams.

Allowing your unconscious mind to take on the form of a dream guide offers a way for your conscious mind to communicate directly with your unconscious mind. Dreams are rich with symbolism and metaphor driven by the unconscious mind, and over time you'll learn how to interpret those messages by reviewing your dream journal entries, but with this technique you can communicate with your unconscious mind in a straightforward manner to pose specific questions. By calling upon your unconscious mind in the form of a dream guide, you'll give it a way to interact with you in a much more direct and less metaphoric way.

You may wish to ask your unconscious mind for answers to particular questions, such as "What should I do about such-and-such situation?" With your unconscious mind taking on the role of a dream guide, you'll have the opportunity to obtain very specific answers. In conversing with your dream guide, you'll also have the chance to request additional details or ask follow-up questions to probe for more detailed information.

The dream guide technique takes the previously described problem solving technique one step further. Rather than presenting a single problem to your unconscious mind at bedtime and requesting that a solution manifest in your dreams, you'll have more opportunity to expand on your questions. You can converse with your dream guide for as long as you're able to maintain lucidity in the dream, so you'll gain the advantage of engaging your unconscious mind in a lengthy question and answer session.

You may wish to ask broad questions, such as, "What is my purpose in life?" When that is the case, meet your dream guide and ask him or her to lead you into new dream scenes that present information relevant to your question.

You'll need to use a combination of techniques to call upon your dream guide. First, use the dream incubation technique to program a dream in which you encounter your dream guide. Incorporate a selection of lucid dreaming techniques to ensure you become lucid in the dream. (If you've read this far in the series, hopefully you are already practicing those techniques on a regular basis.) Then, use the technique to create a dream teacher but modify the steps to create a dream guide who specifically represents your unconscious mind.

When using the dream teacher technique to create your dream guide, don't be too rigid about planning your guide's appearance or personality in advance. Allow your unconscious mind to create an appearance and personality on its own. The results will vary greatly from person to person and may surprise you.

After posing your question to your dream guide, remain in control of your own actions and responses but release control of the dream environment to your dream guide. In doing so, you'll allow your unconscious mind to generate dream scenes in response to your questions while you remain consciously aware and able to navigate those scenes. When this happens, pay special attention to the scenery. Your dream guide may not necessarily spell everything out for you in words. Some of the answers may appear around you in the dream scene instead and may take on many different forms.