# DREAMS


## Posts

- [Bridging Dreams to Reality: Discovering Uniquely Personal and Practical Meaning](https://delaneyondreams.com/bridging-dreams-reality-discover-personal-practical-meaning/): Dreams can offer powerful insights, but only when we look beyond vague, or traditional interpretations and superstitions.
- [How to Remember Your Dreams Much Better!](https://delaneyondreams.com/how-to-remember-your-dreams-much-better/): Everyone dreams vividly at least 4-5 times a night.
- [Dream On It TONIGHT!](https://delaneyondreams.com/dream-on-it-tonight/): Dreams have long been recognized as sources of inspiration, with many artists, inventors, and thinkers crediting their ideas to the subconscious insights they gained while sleeping.
- [A Sample Dream Interview - Big Fish](https://delaneyondreams.com/a-sample-dream-interview-big-fish/): Matteo dreamt: "I was fishing off the coast of Sicily and had been out almost all day.
- [Why do we dream about animals?](https://delaneyondreams.com/why-do-we-dream-about-animals/): After 50 years of working with thousands of dreamers, I still think dreams about animals are the easiest to understand.
- [People have the most amazing cars in their dreams!](https://delaneyondreams.com/people-have-the-most-amazing-cars-in-their-dreams/): Everything from dad’s car, to the cars they drove years ago, to the car they dreamed of driving as a teenager.
- [Ideas for Sleeping Better & Awakening Refreshed](https://delaneyondreams.com/ideas-for-sleeping-better-awakening-refreshed/): Getting 7-9 hours of sleep a night is the key to these well-researched benefits.
- [Slowly, dreams move into mainstream health and psychology](https://delaneyondreams.com/slowly-dreams-move-into-mainstream-health-and-psychology/): Dreams: out of the dustbin of nonsense and superstition and into the mainstream of health and psychology publications. Slowly, but surely!

## Pages

- [The Dream Interviewer’s CUE CARD of Questions that Execute Each Step - Copy](https://delaneyondreams.com/the-dream-interviewers-cue-card-of-questions-that-execute-each-step-copy/): This list of essential Dream Interview Method questions is the result of fifty years of refinement, as I and my Dream Center colleague, Loma K.
- [Remote & In-Person Dream Groups and Pairs Training](https://delaneyondreams.com/remote-group-pairs-training/): The most efficient and heart-warming way to learn DIM is in small groups.
- [Intensive Programs](https://delaneyondreams.com/intensive-programs/): Our Brief Intensive Courses are tailored to each individual and pair or group of students according to their preferences for length and intensity of study from 2 to 5 days to several months, or years.
- [Private Sessions](https://delaneyondreams.com/private-sessions-with-gayle/): HOW DO PRIVATE SESSIONS WORK?
- [Book a Session](https://delaneyondreams.com/book-a-session/)
- [My account](https://delaneyondreams.com/my-account/)
- [Books](https://delaneyondreams.com/gayles-books/): Gayle Delaney, PHD, Co-Founder and Founding President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and for 20 years, the Co-Director with Loma K.
- [DIM CUE CARD](https://delaneyondreams.com/dream-interviewers-cue-card-questions-step-by-step/): This list of essential Dream Interview Method questions is the result of fifty years of refinement, as I and my Dream Center colleague, Loma K.
- [Delaney’s Dream Interview Method](https://delaneyondreams.com/delaneys-dream-interview-method/): This method of interpretation is intended to be used alone, between two people, or in a group.
- [Flow Sheet for Dream Interview Method](https://delaneyondreams.com/flow-sheet-for-dream-interview-method/): This flow sheet outlines the structured steps for conducting the Dream Interview Method (DIM).
- [How I Came to Study Dreams—And You?](https://delaneyondreams.com/how-i-came-to-study-dreams-and-you/): 1969: I was living in Paris, studying to become a Soviet Studies specialist when I had a life-changing dream.
- [Pajama Party Blog and Retreats](https://delaneyondreams.com/blog/): In the morning, coffee in hand, or in the evening, cozy in your robe and slippers, come join us to explore breakthrough dreams that solve problems, nightmares, common dreams that hold individual meanings, and dreams that flood your mind with joy.
- [Home](https://delaneyondreams.com/): With Dr. Gayle Delaney, pioneer in modern dream interpretation and Founding President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. For decades, Dr.
- [Contact](https://delaneyondreams.com/contact-me/): 1969: I was living in Paris, studying to become a Soviet Studies specialist when I had a life-changing dream.

## Products

- [Living Your Dreams: The Classic Bestseller on becoming Your Own Dream Expert](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/living-your-dreams-the-classic-bestseller-on-becoming-your-own-dream-expert/): This is my first book, first published in 1980, and revised twice after for new editions over 30 years. This is my favorite cover from the last edition. Here I focused on the use of dreams to solve problems and generate ideas using my Phrase-focusing Dream Incubation or pre-sleep suggestion for problem-solving in sleep. After Dr. Loma Flowers, MD read the book, she suggested we start a dream training center (The Delaney & Flowers Dream and Consultation Center in San Francisco) and thus began the happiest and most fruitful collaboration of my career. Almost all ancient and medieval dream incubation centered on religious ritual and the Priests and Priestesses who controlled the rituals. I think that letting so called “wise ones” direct your dream life and try to convince you of the necessity of their rituals and dogmas, results in turning the dreamers, and followers into naïve, children who renounce their personal rights and abilities to find their own meaning in life, free of feeling they must be obedient to a superior force of reputed “wisdom.” I wanted to create a modern, secular, do-it-yourself method of using pre-sleep suggestion to target your dreaming mind with the intention to SLEEP ON IT to discover a solution or gain insight into the dynamics of a current problem or creative challenge. All the dreams I tell in this book are real, none are made up. You can try to incubate a dream tonight, without any clerics, gurus, or know-it-all leaders. Of course, if your dream is not a simple easy-to-interpret one, Rather one full of particular, private metaphors, it would help to learn how to interview yourself about the dream BEFORE you decide whether or not you were successful on your first try at incubation so that you don’t toss your responsive dream that might be talking to you in metaphors that you do not yet recognize. This book will get you started with my method of interpretation (DIM) that is also designed to free you from the shackles of fixed dogmas and interpretations from people who do not know you from the inside! Here is a footnote that might be of interest to you: I was a senior in college in 1971 when I created a non-denominational, secular, DIY, at home, dream Incubation technique that I called Phrase Focusing Dream Incubation about which I wrote in my doctoral dissertation, in 1976-7. The method was very effective, working almost every time I or my friend tried it if we asked questions of current concern and did not ask general huge questions such as, “What shall I do with my life? Or make a request for future knowledge. I introduced incubation and my method to my boyfriend, Henry Reed who was teaching in the Psychology Department. I don’t recall that Henry did any dream incubation in the year we lived together. We went our separate ways after a 1972 Fall semester in Zurich where we attended the C.G. Jung Institute for lectures as we went to therapy to earn our 100 hours in order to enter the Jungian training system. That was in 1972. I stayed on in Zurich when Henry back to Princeton to teach for the Spring semester. We lost touch over the next five years. Henry left Princeton and moved to Virginia Beach connected to the Edgar Caycee Foundation/Center. Henry apparently developed a very GURU-centered practice of Dream Incubation in which he was the guru with a sacred place for dreamers to come to perform rituals and incubate dreams. While I suspect that some or many of his clients got some good out of the rituals, he was not forwarding the independence and resourcefulness I like to encourage in my clients. His sacred incubation practice appalled me because it is the opposite of my goals—to leave the power with the dreamer, and to have no gurus in sight. In the first, or one the first issues of Henry’s Sundance Dream Journal, published around 1977, I was shocked to read in his journal, his words that he had taught incubation to Gayle Delaney! Too many women in the history of discovery and innovation have just rolled over and been polite and modest when their colleagues claimed their innovations as their own, so I telephoned Henry and refreshed his memory! He sheepishly promised to write a correction in the following, I think, the second issue of the journal. And he did, very nicely. I have lost my copies of the journal, but I imagine the Edgar Cayce Foundation has those. I write this here because that myth is being handed down even this year and remains un-corrected since Henry died in this last year, and the author I contacted, who wrote an obituary for Henry and who told me she had no personal knowledge of the matter, declined to correct. I want to encourage women to stand up to such tiny thefts that thrive on the common female reticence and overdose of politeness. Now you know the REST of the story! May you find fruitful insight in your dream incubations!
- [SENSUAL DREAMING: How to Understand and Interpret the Erotic Content of Your Dreams](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/sensual-dreaming-how-to-understand-and-interpret-the-erotic-content-of-your-dreams/): We live in what is still a puritanic culture. Fear and embarrassment keep us from talking about and learning about human sexuality from well-informed people. We suffer greatly from our prudishness, often without realizing it. Sexual harms, abuse within families, as well as rampant transmission of STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) thrive in the Dark Closets where we hide our cries of anguish, or desire, or fear. This book sheds an unabashed light on how we can shed some of this awkwardness, embarrassment and shame. Once we do that, we can use our sexual dreams to understand our sexual issues, injuries, and those unnecessary inhibitions to enrich our lives, our ZEST, and our relationships.
- [SEXUAL DREAMS: Why We Have Them, What They Mean](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/sexual-dreams-why-we-have-them-what-they-mean-in-paper/): (in paper same book, new title) SENSUAL DREAMING: How to Understand and Interpret the Erotic Content of Your Dreams We live in what is still a puritanical culture. Fear and embarrassment keep us from talking about and learning about human sexuality from well-informed people. We suffer greatly from our prudishness, often without realizing it. Sexual harms, abuse within families, as well as rampant transmission of STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) thrive in the Dark Closets where we hide our cries of anguish, or desire, or fear. Where does sexual abuse of children thrive? In dark, hidden closets in a world where young children are not taught about it, where families keep secrets, few dare inquire and then tell the truth when they suspect abuse in a family. This book sheds an unabashed light on how we can overcome some of this awkwardness, embarrassment, and shame. Beyond the darkness of sexuality, there are unexpected benefits and happiness. We can use our sexual dreams to understand our sexual issues, injuries, and those unnecessary inhibitions. Our healthy sexual dreams enrich our lives, our ZEST, our humor, and our relationships. My publisher (again without forewarning me) changed the title because “The Americans , even the young ones, felt embarrassed to buy and perhaps have co-workers see that they were reading a book on sex! The Sexual Dreams title was just “Too In Your Face!”
- [Breakthrough Dreaming: How to Tap the Power of Your Dreaming Mind](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/breakthrough-dreaming-how-to-tap-the-power-of-your-dreaming-mind/): This is my most detailed manual on working with the Dream Interview Method. Published in 1991, but now OP, but you can find it online. I am now working on a revision and looking for reliable editor to reformat it for publication in digital form. I would appreciate any leads you might offer! I use Breakthrough in my classes and workshops and enjoy watching students become much better interviewers as they practice along the way. This book is enriched by my happy and fortunate partnership with Loma K. Flowers MD, a brilliant psychiatrist of exquisite sensibilities, verbal, and therapeutic. As my husband accurately says, “Loma is the most insightful person I have ever met.” Loma’s years of teaching at University of San Francisco Medical School and a very busy private practice added much to my work and joy to my life. We have run training workshops together, and I enjoy greatly being “in sync” with Loma as we teach. You will find here: How to work with very long dreams How to get out of dead-end lines of questioning How to recognize when you are leading the witness with your unseen prejudices or theoretical preferences What are the most common pitfalls in dream work
- [New Directions in Dream Interpretation](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/new-directions-in-dream-interpretation/): I edited this book over nearly a decade. I asked experienced therapists, to: FIRST, describe the school of dream theory or method they practiced, and how their years of experience had developed and modified their work with patients or students. SECOND, I asked them to describe their methods and tell us just what happened in a session of dream interpretation by audio recording the session and including a very slightly condensed transcript in their chapter. THIRD, I asked them to compare their methods of working to that of the other authors’ chapters in this book. Well, I returned most chapters many times to most authors asking them to get past the first part and give me parts two and three. It took over 10 years before I said, “OK.” At the time, many practitioners followed their heroes such ad Jung or Freud and little was written on actual methods of working, of who said what when, and some therapists were offended to think their highly symbolic, and “spiritual” work could be “reduced” to methods with practical applications in the dreamer’s life. Many therapists taught that good dreamwork could only flow from their hero’s and their own “Wisdom” after decades of learning at the feet of the wise ones. Furthermore, most therapists did not read the work of others of different persuasions. I chose authors whom I admired as people as well as more open, creative, and energetic and who had made important contributions to the field. Each chapter shows you a different POV on dreamwork. While Loma Flowers’s chapter uses the Dream Interview Method, focuses on the use it in her San Francisco psychiatric clinical practice.
- [In Your Dreams: A New Kind of Dream Dictionary](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/in-your-dreams-a-new-kind-of-dream-dictionary/): “At last, an intelligent “dream dictionary” by an internationally renowned dream expert who has battled the dictionary approach to dream interpretation for 50 years. Gayle provides tools that you can personalize to uncover the unique meaning in ‘your’ dream images and themes.” My Publisher’s description. I want to tell you more! You’ve probably heard the complaint that “If you tell your dream to five different interpreters, you will get five different interpretations!” Well, that is true if the interpreters fail to ask the dreamer key descriptive questions BEFORE asking for, or worse, suggesting connections with waking life! Since the 1970s I have pleaded with so many bookstore owners to refuse to carry Dream Dictionaries and on TV shows like Opera and GMA, I have looked right into the camera and said: “You know those Dream Dictionaries that tell you what a frog or car in your dream means? Throw them out!” The book sellers always respond, “We know how you feel, Gayle, and agree, but we sell so many of these; people just want a simple answer even if they usually comment that pat answers don’t seem to ring true in THEIR own dreams and lives.” Such books have kept the study of dreams in the Dark Ages for too long! How can anyone other than you know why you dreamt of that green car of your sister’s, or what it means to dream of a horse just like the white speckled mare in your dream? Unless you learn how to interview yourself or, if you are very lucky to have a friend or therapist who knows how to draw out from you these crucial details by asking you to describe these images, you will never fully benefit from the clues they offer to the richness and specificity of your dreams. In Your Dreams has an unusual organization. Arranged by theme and particular images like Cars, Sexy or threatening aggressors, dogs and cats, Mafia, Mothers, and Flying, Finding Lost Treasure, Visiting New Houses, Being Lost, or Teaching Others How to Fly in Their Dreams. My goal was to demonstrate, again and again, that even the most common of dreams are highly individualized by the context of the dream action and feelings they evoke in the dreamer. These details serve to help the dreamer understand something important in his current life experience. You can go straight to the image or theme of almost any of your dreams, but what you find inn this book is …. Section one of each entry is: VARIATIONS OF THIS DREAM which describes several of numerous versions I have heard of this dream element or theme. Most will soon recognize that the vast differences of these dreams simply COULD NOT mean the same thing! Section Two: WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID gives brief descriptions of how several therapists, grandmothers, and theorists have interpreted similar dreams---differently enough to make you laugh! Section Three: WHAT MY CLIENTS HAVE SAID in which you will read two short dream variations which when interviewed came up with idiosyncratic interpretations light years away for the prescribed meanings in section two, and from each other! Section Four: WHAT DO YOU SAY? QUESTIONS YOU CAN ASK YOURSELF about any dream of this image or theme. So, this book is meant as a bait and switch, a benevolent Trojan Horse-kind of Dream Dictionary! If puzzled dreamer just can’t resist the urge to look in a book and find a particular image listed with an interpretation all done without the dreamer’s input, this book offers a tricky twist: Look up mafia men, and you will see very different ways others have interpreted them, then you find questions you can ask yourself to find out what why YOU chose this image for your particular dream---at a particular moment in your life. Reading these examples will give you a feel for how to conduct your own dream interviews, devise your own questions, custom tailored to your dream, and why it is best to put aside hand-me-down interpretations. I hope reading these examples will give you a feel for how to conduct your own dream interviews, devise your own questions, custom tailored to your dream, and why it is best to put aside hand-me-down interpretations. As I looked over the redwood valley to San Francisco writing my book, I imagined it to sell mostly to beginners; but I was surprised to hear from therapists who wrote to say they kept the book beside them in therapy sessions so that when a patient brought up a dream, the therapist could look up the key dream elements or category of element, and immediately find a few questions they could ask their client that would drill down into the special particulars of almost any dream image. You see, most therapists have never been trained to ask the dreamer questions before jumping to conclusions about how the Dreamer had experienced and felt about a given dream image in a methodical way. In Your Dreams became their tool kit of interview questions! Other readers use the book not only for their own dreams, but to interview their friends! Enjoy!
- [All About Dreams](https://delaneyondreams.com/book/all-about-dreams/): Welcome to an overview of my long career in teaching and training thousands of people in efficient, transparent, and REAL-LIFE dream work that helps you target and obtain results. See what I have to say about Jung and Freud and the existentialists who have shaped our views on dreams. Read about ways to open our horizons and make dreams a part of our daily lives so we can mature before it is too late and learn how to make better choices in choosing a mate, a partner, a career, and how to get on better with our family members and our friends. This book covers my decades of work with dreams and includes chapters on my system of categorizing 6 different approaches to modern and ancient dream work so that you will recognize often unappreciated characteristics of these main styles and how they differ. I shuffle the pack differently from others. There are chapters on the Dream Interview Method, Sexual Dreams, Dream Incubation, and so on. It is a good introduction to the field of dream interpretation and will show you why I chose to develop a Dream Interview dialogue method. By the way, I had nothing at all to say about the subtitle of this book which I first saw post-publication and was embarrassed at its arrogance! It should have read, All About Dreams: “An appeal for liberation from hero worship and intrusive interpretations from Others” I can understand that such a sub-title might have seemed too outspoken to my publisher, but don’t you think an editor and publisher should ask the author what she thinks of a title or a sub-title? Still, I love this book.


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