THE DREAMOSOPHY APPROACH: In addition to helping you remember your dreams, this guidebook by dream educators Paul Sheldon and Elizabeth Eagar is all about making your dreams your own, rather than just being there. It’s about being free in your dreams and understanding and realizing your dreams. Many people go to bed and have a dream without remembering it. In many instances, they are really missing out on some of the cool things and some of the lessons and deeper experiences that can come up in dreams. The five basic Dream Opportunities, which are discussed in more detail throughout each chapter of this guidebook, include: How to be free in your dreams; How to feel good in your dreams; How to speak up in your dreams; How to make friends in your dreams; How to understand and realize your dreams.

Each Dream Opportunity is divided into three parts–noticing, identifying, and transforming or changing, to help you deepen and expand your experience of your dreams in a manner that is steady but slow enough not to cause too much strain for you. You will monitor your dreams for a week and write down how you feel in each of the dreams. By asking questions about how you feel, you can start to notice a few patterns. Then you are invited to identify these same feelings in your waking life, to invest time identifying the feelings that you have on most days and comparing them to your dream life. At this point, you still aren’t taking any actions, just noticing the patterns. Finally, you will be invited to explore transformation, to shift some aspects of how you experience your daily life. The aspiration is to recognize patterns in your dream life and your waking life, and then consider what it would be like to make changes in your waking life. This guidebook goes into more depth about how these three levels work and what you can do with them based on the Dream Opportunity in each chapter.

The authors’ ultimate aspiration is to invite people to become Dreambassadors – spokespersons for the value of dreaming – an opportunity that allows you to interact with others, who may need or want help with the different aspects of their dreams, so they can get the most out of their waking and dream lives.