How Can Our Dreams and the Unconscious Mind Help Us?

By Fonya Lord Helm, PhD, ABPP

First, what is the unconscious mind anyway?  Is it a storage unit full of scary, negative and bad memories?  Yes, they are in there, and they are important, but they are not most of it.  Most of our unconscious mind is very positive.  Not only does our unconscious have all the happy memories, it also helps us every day as we process and integrate the most important events into our minds and use them to create our dream life.

Second, how does the unconscious do it?  Subliminal perception experiments show how our unconscious starts turning these events into images almost immediately after an event takes place.   These images get used later to create our dreams.  We have four or five dreams each night, lasting from ten to forty minutes.  We don’t even have to remember them to notice how we feel when we wake up.  The integration takes place anyway.  Our unconscious then can help us with an important decision when we “sleep on it” and notice how we feel when we wake up the next day.

Third, what else can we do?  If we even remember part of a dream, an image, all the better, because we can think about it, either by ourselves in a meditation or we can talk ^about it with another person.   We could even form our own dream study group, and Montague Ullman’s  Appreciating Dreams is a detailed guide about how to do that.  We could also work with a therapist like me to learn more about dreams and solve some problems along the way.  Dreams offer creative solutions to all kinds of problems, as scientists, artists and writers have discovered.

If you want to know more about the experiments in subliminal perception and how the unconscious mind works, please visit my website www.drfonyahelm.com and download the .pdf titled “What is the Unconscious Mind?”