SO I GET THE CONTEXT, NOW WHAT’S THE MESSAGE?
Your dreams do not use words to “speak” their message. Yes, there is often verbal dialogue in your dreams, but such dialogue is comparable to an accent within a language, and should not be regarded as the actual language itself. The language of all dreams is Emotion. And seeing as how this is a language we are all born naturally comprehending, interpreting your dreams is not really a matter of translation, but differentiation. 

For example, I’m from Boston – the home of the drop all R’s accent. Have you ever heard Ted Kennedy speak, or seen the movie Good Will Hunting? Now of course this is a generalization because not everybody in and from Boston speaks this way (myself included); but because I was born, raised and have lived in Boston all of my life, I can readily process the Bostonian accent without a pause. Whereas when I travel “down south” (to Virginia, North Carolina, or wherever), there are moments when I find myself repeating what someone has said to me in my head before the words they spoke make clear sense to me. It’s not that I don’t understand the words a southerner speaks or know what the words mean, it’s simply that (because I’m hearing words spoken in an accent which I am, in general, unaccustomed to) I sometimes process the words a little slower. I understand the language, but I’m not used to their particular accent of the language; therefore, I sometimes need to go over the words a southerner speaks in my mind in order to differentiate them. I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences, and I also think most of you would agree that making this type of “language adjustment” is not a big deal. In like manner, figuring out what your dreams are saying to you is also no big deal; you already know the language spoken by your dreams, you just need to learn to get passed the “accent.”

So what is the dream “accent” exactly? The “accent” of your dream has nothing to do with enunciation or inflections. The “accents” in your dreams are the symbols or elements in your dream (the people, the things, the places, and the activities) and whatever dialogue is spoken. All of these occurrences (the people in your dreams, the setting of your dream, the things in your dream, the activities in your dream, the dialogue spoken in your dream) are orchestrated by your unconscious mind to excite certain emotions. Your emotions are what tell the story of what your dreams is trying to get across; the symbols and dialogue in your dreams merely add flavor to the story.

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The Practice of Emotional Overlaying(Getting passed the dream “accent”)
The practice of Emotional Overlaying simply involves matching up the emotions you feel in your dreams with the emotions you feel in waking life. When you are dealing with Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, and Problem-solving / Information dreams there will always be an exact match between your dream emotions and your waking emotions. Any lack of success you have in determining where a match is does not indicate the absence of this match, it merely means you simply have not recognized it yet (kind of like hunting for that last backwards spelled word in a word puzzle). Maybe you haven’t recalled enough of your dream to make the recognition of an emotional match clear to you. Maybe you are still in denial about certain emotions you’ve been feeling in your waking hours and this is why you can’t see a match. If it is the latter, your dream has just imparted to you an opportunity to have a “get real” moment. If you haven’t been being honest with yourself about something going on in your life, and you have a Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, or Problem-solving / Information dream that you can recall in detail but for which you have failed to find an emotional match to in your waking experience, this tells you that you are in denial about something going on in your life. That understanding, in and of itself, is a valuable message. Again, however, this scenario only applies to Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, and Problem-solving / Information dreams because in the case of the Prophetic dream, the practice of Emotional Overlaying takes on a slightly different context. As it applies to the Astral Travel dream, the practice of Emotional Overlaying is wholly unworkable and thus obsolete. 

Astral Travel dreams are the most literal of all your dreams because in an Astral Travel dream you are literally creating and participating in a new experience while you are sleeping – as opposed to merely reviewing your waking experiences while you are sleeping (which is what you are doing in a Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, or Problem-solving / Information dream). So since you are actively creating and participating in new experiences in an Astral Travel dream, the emotions you feel in these dreams won’t necessarily coincide with the emotions you experience in your waking hours. How could it? It’s all brand new. That’s why the Emotional Overlay procedure does not apply here. With respect to Prophetic dreams (which are also Astral Travel dreams as you remember), the Emotional Overlay procedure does work, but not in the same way that it does for Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, and Problem-solving / Information dreams. Oftentimes (for remember, the future is not a fixed preset) you “grow in to” the emotions that you experience in a Prophetic dream because the events being prophesized in the dream haven’t yet occurred in your waking life. Therefore, you haven’t yet experienced those dream emotions in your waking experience. The Emotional Overlaying procedure with regard to Prophetic dreams merely verifies the accuracy of the Prophetic dream you had. For if the event in your Prophetic dream does come to pass in your waking hours, the emotions you felt in that dream will mirror the emotions you will experience as you physically live through the event. This is why our Prophetic and Astral Travel dreams can oftentimes feel somewhat “other worldly,” for in them we are actually experiencing real events outside of the physical dimension, so of course it feels extraordinary. Now that we understand why we won’t be using the Emotional Overlay procedure on Prophetic and Astral Travel dreams, let’s look at how-to carry this process out on Conflict, Wish-fulfillment, and Problem-solving / Information dreams.

Emotional Overlaying is not at all a complicated procedure. The biggest thing you have to do in order to be a successful practitioner of this procedure is be attentive to your emotions, both in your dreams and as you’re going about your day. If you do this, the two step process of an Emotional Overlay procedure will seem like child’s play. The two step process is as follows:

Step 1: Identify the emotions you felt in you dream.

Step 2: Examine your waking life emotional experience until you find an exact match to the feelings experienced in your dream. 

It’s that simple. Emotional Overlaying is simply about overlaying your dream emotions on top of the equivalent waking emotions you’ve experienced; and through this superimposition, you gain the gift of viewing your thoughts and emotions from a different perspective (the perspective of your unconscious mind). How cool is that!

To get you started on the practice of performing this procedure, refer back to the Dream Worksheet you filled out. Review the feelings that you listed in the Emotional Response column, and the feelings that you listed under question 2 on the back of the worksheet. The emotional experience in your dream should resonate with an emotional reaction you’ve had in your waking experience. Finding this match tells you where exactly, in your waking life, your dream is referenced from. And bear in mind that the term “waking experience” does not merely refer to the events that happen to you while you are awake, but also the thoughts you give your Attention to while you are awake. For example, let’s say you had a dream in which you felt lost, powerless and frustrated. And as you reflect on the emotions you feel in your waking hours you recognize that these same feelings (feeling lost, powerless and frustrated) match exactly how you feel when you are thinking about the direction your life is heading in. From this Emotional Overlay procedure, you now understand that your dream is talking to you about the thoughts you’ve been giving your Attention to as you consider your life’s direction. Do you see how this works now? It’s just that simple.

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Putting it all together (the context and the message)
Let’s take the preceding example of the dream where you felt lost, powerless and frustrated (all negative emotions) even further. Let’s say this dream also seemed erratic and incoherent; and that the elements within the dream came from your Present Time Reference. This information tells you that this was a Conflict dream. And we know Conflict dreams are always about pointing out to us where our thoughts are out of alignment with our Spirit’s intent. So in this example, your dream is trying to shake you. It is essentially saying, “Stop thinking about the direction your life is moving in, in the manner in which you have been thinking about it because these thoughts are not serving you well; these thoughts are not in your best interest. Did you feel just how intense those emotions in the dream were? Well this is the same power of intensity you are imparting to these thoughts which are out of sync with what your Spirit knows to be best for you. And as a result, look at what you are creating and inviting into your experience if you do not now change the way you thinking about your life’s direction.”

So do you see now how the context of your dream and the dream message itself works collaboratively to provide you with your unconscious mind’s perspective on your waking life experiences? You cannot separate the message of your dream from the context in which it was sent, to do so only muddles the intended meaning of the dream and invites confusion and inaccurate interpretations of these priceless messages from your unconscious.

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