Layne Dalfen’s book, Dreams Do Come True, is aptly described by its subtitle, “decoding your dreams to discover your full potential.” “I believe that the ability to understand our dreams provides us with the opportunity to be completely in touch with our whole selves when making decisions”, she says in her introduction. “Interpreting our dreams is not only fun and interesting, it is important.”
A terrifying dream in which she’s trapped in a freight elevator often invades Layne Dalfen’s sleep when she’s feeling stressed.
“The space is so big, I can’t hold onto the walls and the floor is wobbly,” says the 50-year-old Montrealer who analyses other people’s dreams via her home-based consultancy, the Internet, and radio phone-ins.
If he were alive today, I am sure American Philosopher Henry David Thoreau would have liked to meet Montreal author and dream interpreter Layne Dalfen.
Dalfen, a self-proclaimed ‘dream worker’ who in 1997 established the Dream Interpretation Center here in Montreal, has written Dreams Do Come True, a 300-page book filled with helpful hints, tricks and insight into understanding what happens when our heads hit the pillow and our minds begin to freefall.
Dreams are the way the subconscious mind gives solutions to conflicts, says Layne Dalfen, a Montreal dream analyst.
The trick, she believes, is to translate the metaphors in a dream in order to identify what each person or thing in it represents and what message is being given by the dream as a whole.
Counselor helps interpret meaning
– For most of the time we’re sleeping at night, we’re dreaming. Our dreams are chiefly about something with which we are preoccupied, perhaps unconsciously, expressions of our deeper selves.
– And the best way to understand dreams is to want to, says Montrealer Layne Dalfen, who helps people to find out more about their dreams.
Layne Dalfen, dream analyst and author of Dreams Do Come True: Decoding Your Dreams to Discover Your Full Potential, explains that dreams are connected to your life and can be a useful problem-solving tool. Dreams can highlight a problem, alert you to a desire, make you aware of a strength and urge you to face fears or conflicts. “This is especially useful in relationships, where there is so much fear and hope connected,” says California-based psychotherapist and dream interpreter Michael Lennox, M.A.
War has also crept into my patients’ dreams, and into their psychotherapy sessions, more than any other event since Sept. 11. I ask teens and adults what their dreams mean to them. We try to use that material in the context of what else they are going through. But my dream work with them is pretty basic.
A man walked up to me screaming in rage. I ran as fast as I could, but he chased me. I realized he had an axe and wanted to swing it at me. He was running faster than I was, and I knew he would catch me. The screaming wouldn’t stop. It happens to every one of us each time we sleep. We dream — hopefully not a nightmare. Some dreams are wonderful adventures; others are frightening. Some dreams reach our most primal emotions, while others are just plain weird. Many people believe our dreams have deeper meaning relating to our personal lives and the world around us.
Like many people, you may have dreamed about people you love who have died, or about dying yourself. While these dreams can be sad or frightening, they don’t have to be. Dreams of death and visits from deceased loved ones are not necessarily about death in the literal sense. To find out what these dreams mean, you need to investigate how you have used the imagery of death in order to say something to yourself.
For 22 years, while Norman Gulko slept, his dreaming brain went on dates with his late wife. Her name was Flo, and they had been married more than three decades when cancer claimed her life in the summer of 1980. Two weeks later, she showed up in his dreams. She was standing in profile, her brown eyes young again, urging him to be happy.