Dreams are prepared to teach you how to interpret them. All you have to do is use your dreams to improve your life in some specific way. Your dreams will respond by becoming easier to understand.

A home study research project confirmed this proposition some 25 years ago. Developed by Dr. Henry Reed, who was at the time Assistant Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, the project challenged some 2000 adult volunteers who were members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment to pick a problem or area of concern and to apply insights from dreams to improve that situation. The project manual provided some simple steps to follow to interpret the dreams and to apply those insights.

The project provided the first experimental evidence ever published in a scholarly journal showing that people working on their own could make constructive use of their dreams to improve their lives. This result was important to the skeptic who believed that if dreams had any value, they would require professional help to become useful. Additionally, the participants' daily diary checklist showed that applying dream insights did make subsequent dreams easier to understand. The effect of applying dream insights was, in fact, statistically more powerful than the positive effect of meditation on the next day's dreams.

The project manual is now available as a book, Dream Realizations / Dream Solutions (Hermes Home Press). To get your dream solution in four weeks or less it suggests you pick a target area for improvement, meditate to get one small thing you can do now to improve that situation, do it, and record your dreams for a week. Examine these dreams for insights about false ideas you may have about your situation, revise your strategy for improving the situation, and apply it. Examine your next week's dreams to think up better endings to them. Use these insights to develop a still better approach to your situation. By applying the little you have in hand, Cayce promises, more will be given.

Dream Solutions has been in use as a text in university courses on dreams. One student, for example, wanted to stop obsessing about material concerns. In one dream she experienced herself as a mystical being who happily creates and receives. She learned to respond to her need or self-compassion, positivity and moment to moment enjoyment.

"Be true to your dreams, says Henry Reed, and they'll be true to you!"