One forgotten tool in the mystical journey toward enlightenment is the interpretation of dreams. An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter from God according to the Talmud. I myself have been opening these letters and reading their contents avidly since I was a teen. My father being a gestalt therapist and my mother a Transactional Analysis counselor meant that we would regularly discuss and explore our dreams in the evening before dinner.

There are basically five easy steps for you to be able to interpret your own dreams. I must warn you though, that it is usually best to work with a therapist, partner or dream group to begin with as the basic premise of dreams is that they deal with issues that you are uncomfortable with on a conscious level.

The five stages of dream interpretation are:
• Retrieval
• Symbolism
• Metaphors
• Emotion
• Completion

Retrieval
The big difficulty people have is the ability to remember dreams. Scientists have proven without doubt that pretty much everybody dreams and the key to dream retrieval is to be able to catch the tail of the dream as you wake up. If you can remember the last sequence of your dream, you should be able to unravel quite a lot of the storyline if you take a few moments of concentrated effort immediately on waking up. Keep a pen and paper next to your bed and write it down immediately. I myself regularly retrieve 4 -5 dreams a night if I care to pull them out. And with years of practice can now hold on to them for half the day before I punch them into a document, spreadsheet or occasionally record them as MP3 files on my laptop. It is best though to record the dream as soon as possible to ensure that you capture all the nuances that begin to disappear through the day.

Symbolism
My preferred method to capture dreams is on a spreadsheet. I create two columns that fill my laptop screen. One column extends about four inches and a second that covers the rest of the screen.

I record the dream on the left hand side, with one concept on every row.

So for example one of my spreadsheets reads like this:
Row 1: I am standing outside
Row 2: a church
Row 3: I see my friends from
Row 4: Business School
Row 5: praying inside

Once I have completed writing down my dream I then start teasing out the symbols. For example in the example above you could target the words 'church' and 'business school'. I use a Gestalt methodology to work on the symbols. You ask yourself how you would describe the symbol to a Martian.

So church would be a building or structure where people pray/pay homage. A Business School is where people go to learn how to run companies.

You go down the spreadsheet and work on each of the concepts. Put in as much description as possible on each row.

Metaphors
Once you have finished with the symbols, start looking at the metaphors. Clearly I see myself as an 'outsider' for example. You could also imagine that 'Business School friends in a church' could indicate 'the church of commerce'. This is a critical part of the dream analysis process and the need to have a quality therapist or intuitive friend working alongside you is vital if you are to be able to honestly unbundle the dream language into something useful.

Emotions
I am especially keen about recording the emotions around each of these rows. Are you happy about being an outsider for example? Or are you sad, angry, frustrated, surprised or perhaps relieved? The emotive content of the context can vastly change the relevance of the storyline.

Completion
Finally, you need to run through the dream again using the second column as your storyline.

In this case it could read; 'I am an outsider to the church of commerce that my friends attend and I am not too sure why that is the case'.

As I run through this storyline in my head on the tube to work it strikes me that through my childhood Corporate figures and commerciality in general has been mocked by one of my parents and this has made me antagonistic towards fitting into Corporate structures. I realise that I do not necessarily have to continue with this behaviour and I feel a huge release.

Conclusion
This is an extremely simple to use process and can be used by pretty much anyone with the capacity of rational thought.

A couple of warnings though.

a) If you capture multiple dreams, don't waste your day going through every one of them as earlier dreams often resolve issues and move on to deeper issues later on in the night. Focus on the last dream of the night, unless of course you had an extremely vivid dream earlier on, which you believe of some significance.

b) Second, don't interpret your dreams every night, it puts a lot of pressure on your subconscious and could result in restlessness in the night. I usually work on my dreams once or twice a week.

c) Finally, don't waste your time on dreams on nights when you are drinking or taking drugs. They tend to be far too lost in fantasy and not very easy to work with.