Using Your Personal Dream Symbols For Lucid Dreaming

June 1st, 2007

This article is Part 7 in the series Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming.

Every person has his or her own personal dream symbols — objects, events, people, or places that appear frequently within dreams. One person may dream often of a specific animal, while another may find himself or herself frequently visiting the same location in dreams. These commonly appearing phenomena vary from person to person and are known as personal dream symbols.

Discovering your own personal dream symbols can be of great help in achieving conscious dreaming. Once you have discovered your personal dream symbols, you will be able to use those objects and events as cues for a reality check in order to trigger a conscious dreaming experience.

In order to discover your personal dream symbols, it is necessary to keep a dream journal. (Refer to the previous entry to learn the best methods for recording your dreams to encourage lucid dreaming.) Over time, you will begin to notice patterns emerging in your journal. Certain keywords will appear more often than others. You will discover certain events and situations occur frequently in your dreams. These are your personal dream symbols.

Keywords may be as simple as school, attic, purple, running, or any other one-word description of a dream detail. They do not necessarily need to represent dream details that stood out or were prominently featured in the dream. You may find a specific dream symbol appears frequently as a background detail — something you notice or observe but do not necessarily focus on during the dream. My dreams frequently feature water in some form, but water is not always the focal point of the dreams.

In your dream journal, you should note important keywords somewhere on the page when making each entry. Designate a section at the top or bottom of the page to note key aspects of the dream using keywords. You can also elect to use the outer margin of each page instead. Noting keywords in the same place on each page will make it easier for you to flip through the pages later to determine which words appear most often. You may also elect to circle or highlight specific keywords in your dream journal entries to make those words easier to find later.

Because your dreams are often influenced by details and situations from your current waking life, and because your waking life may vary significantly from month to month or even from day to day, it is important to examine your dream journal on a regular basis in case new dream symbols begin to emerge.

When determining which dream symbols will be most beneficial in helping you achieve lucid dreaming, it is also important to note which symbols appeared in dreams where you felt the most lucid or consciously aware.

If you've been using the dream journal methods described in the previous entry, you've been noting your overall level of lucidity for each dream journal entry and you'll be able to easily determine which of your personal dream symbols are most likely to be of use in triggering a lucid dreaming experience. Examine the details of each journal entry for which you noted a sense of lucidity or conscious awareness within the dream. Review the keywords you wrote down for each of those entries, and determine if specific symbols appear more often in dreams where a sense of lucidity or conscious awareness was also noted. For example, if you experience a sense of lucidity more often when dreaming about a certain place or object, take special note of those dream symbols. They will be the ideal dream symbols to use when practicing other techniques to trigger a lucid dreaming experience.

Don't feel bad if at first your journal contains few or no entries for which you noted a sense of lucidity or conscious awareness. Achieving conscious awareness in your dreams takes time and a bit of practice. The techniques described in the upcoming articles on this web site will help you greatly increase your lucid dreaming skills.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series, which will describe several techniques for performing Reality Checks to help you realize when you're dreaming.