I have had some dreams that did not stay with me long enough to make an impression. I have other dreams that to this day I still remember as if they just happened.
I am seeing a psychic therapist and she is helping me to better interperate those dreams that make such an impression on me.

I have learned that regardless of the graphic imagery of the dreams the underlying message is ususally not so horrific.

I would like to know if others or anyone has a clear way of finding those underlying messages from the dreams.

Claire

Sometimes dreams are a literal interpretation of a familiar expression. The expression itself gets lost in the emotion and images of the dream, as the mind "plays" with the concept of it.

For example, I had a recurring dream for a while, in which I would be in my house, and the lights would go out. I would try to switch on the lights, but they wouldn't work, and the darkness was terrifying, as I felt that something was doing this deliberately, as if to attack me when I could not see to defend myself.  In one such dream, I managed to find my way out of the house, and ran across to my mother's house next-door (across the back yard).

There, I told her what had happened, but she didn't believe me.  She accompanied me outside, and look!  All the lights in my house were on!  But I knew that as soon as she had gone back in to her house, the lights in mine would go out again, and I would be alone in the dark ....

I would wake up, sweating and terrified with this one, scared to try to put on the lamp by my bed, in case it didn't work ....

But what the dream was actually about, was simply that someone was "keeping me in the dark".  There was a complicated, unhappy relationship going on, in which I needed to know what the other person wanted, intended, was thinking ... but he was not telling me.

So, I find it can help to try to summarise what was happening in the dream in general terms.  This may then lead you to the "message" or the mind's expression, in the dream itself.