Wake Up to Your Dreams:
Transform Your Relationships, Career, and Health While You Sleep
By Justina Lasley

Available at: Amazon

In this guide to exploring and interpreting dreams, the author examines the reasons individuals fear the unconscious mind and why, instead, one should embrace the messages dreams convey. Debut author Justina Lasley, founder of the Institute for Dream Studies, explores dreams as tools, indicators and escapes. Her self-help guide begins by deconstructing how dreams can positively affect waking life and are a way of examining the self and one’s patterns and habits; e.g., a woman’s nightmare about Nazis reveals her unconscious urges to hide, find cover and resist cancer.

Once the woman recognizes that fear is holding her back, she can begin facing reality. Pleasant dreams can also alert readers to their inner desires and passions. One woman dreams about nurturing a baby boy, and she realizes that the dream is her recognition of the value of her animus, her masculinity. The author believes that examining emotions felt within the dream will lead to more clues than the actual figures and beings seen within the dream – a sensible, practicable strategy for understanding the mysterious workings of the subconscious. The book supplies many methods and ideas for deconstructing and using our own dreams, including journaling and tracking reoccurring symbols.

Tackling belief systems, she argues, is crucial to this process of change. This requires examining the characters that appear in our dreams and determining which beliefs they represent, such as deficiency or abandonment. Reading more like a conversation than a guidebook, the book offers a helpful, focused primer for self-analysis. An organized, approachable theory on dream interpretation, examination and progress through self-attention.

Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744