What's in it for My Dream Life?

In last week's column, I talked about the core benefits of dream work: how dream work offers you an original perspective on your waking life. That's like asking ''What can my dreams do for my waking life?''

This week's column says you will do even better if instead you ask ''What can I do for my dream life?''

It makes sense that everyone wants to improve their waking life. Nevertheless, I believe that it makes more sense to put aside your waking life interests. Rather, focus on how to have a better dream life. When you do that, you allow dream benefits to percolate. They slowly seep into and improve your waking life. Sometimes the indirect route is the fastest.

The best way to help your waking life is to treat your dream life as a real, quite separate life. Here's why:

1: You are Only as Good as Your Last Dream

Your morning starts with the last dream of the night. If you had a great dream, you are probably going to wake up in a great mood. A lousy dream, you are going to have to shake it off. The quality of your dream life sets the mood for your entire day.

2: How Do You Know How You are Doing?

Your dream life is a better measure of what's going on in your head than your own self-assessment, which is always part of the problem.

In your waking life, you can over-intellectualize, hide from problems and avoid blame. Everything you are in denial about will seem to be rational But your Dream Self can't run away from problems or avoid responsibility - that is why so many dreams are unpleasant.

3: Your Dream Will Repeat

If you allow yourself to accept that unpleasant, stressful dreams are inevitable, it's quite likely that you are condemning yourself to spending 90 unpleasant minutes a night for the rest of your life.

Even though each dream may be different, dream themes repeat. The subjects that occupied your dreams when you are/were twenty are much the same as the subjects you will be dealing with when you are seventy (Themes). If you don't attempt to change your dream ''habits'', it's quite likely that that they will endure. If you are dreaming about arguing with your mother, your mother is likely to be there for the rest of your life. You would rather have her as a dream-ally than as an adversary.

For Most People Dreams are Like the Weather: No One Can Do Anything about Either.

If you don't have any means to change something, then the easiest course is to give up. That's what most people do with dreams. If it's a good dream, they have no idea how to utilize it; if it's a bad dream, they just hope it won't return. Even people who interpret dreams have no clear way of addressing future dreams.

The concept of working with and for your dream life is unusual. The benefit - that the 90 minutes a night you spend sleeping will be enriched - takes some getting used to. The key to how to do this was described in Dream of the Week #29.

Dream RePlay is the only entire system that enables you to directly affect your dream life. When you can do that, the benefits to your waking life are a powerful side effect as your dream life blossoms.

On Monday and Tuesday I will again be holding more 1-hour dream groups on a telephone conference call.

Whether you live far away or close by, a phone group allows you to get a sense of dream work in a very convenient way. With this new work, I hope to communicate the pleasure and the excitement of dream work to many people.

• Day: Monday October 23rdh
• Time: 5pm-6pm Pacific Daylight Time
• Dial-in Number: 620-782-2200 (Kansas)
• Access Code: 707172#

And

• Day: Tuesday October 24th
• Time: 7pm-8pm Pacific Daylight Time
• Dial-in Number: 620-782-2200 (Kansas)
• Access Code: 707172#