In the last eight years, I've become very aware that my Unconscious Mind has stopped me from making my dreams a reality. In this Hub I will share how I learned to get inside this part of my mind and clear out the negative blocks that were holding me back.

This method has worked for me. Mainly because I've certainly dedicated a lot of time to it. It's also worked for me like nothing else has, and I hope that everyone reading this Hub can have a better life because of it.

The Unconscious Mind, from what I understand, is that part of ourselves that is like a memory bank of everything we've ever experienced since we were born. It remembers every big thing and every tiny thing that we've ever done or experienced. And it remembers it like it was yesterday.

As we go through life we 'filter' our experiences. Some of those experiences that we need to stay current remain in the Conscious Mind. The rest get filtered into the Unconscious Mind. Painful events also get filtered into the Unconscious Mind. The stuff that's too hard to deal with. The stuff we put on the back burner. The stuff we stay to ourselves "I'll deal with it later". There are also times in life when we can't process life experiences properly because we've got too much outer world stuff happening, or we don't have the emotional maturity to process it properly. For instance, children are very good at filtering out things that happen to them, and perhaps this is a natural protection mechanism as well.

The other thing to contemplate about the Unconscious Mind is that it might be far more powerful and play a larger role in our lives than most of us have considered. I say this because as it remembers everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, it has a way of alerting us in life whenever we are about to make the same mistake again. The problem is, it believes that because last time you went to do something and it didn't work out, it's going to happen this time around. In waking life, most of us aren't even Consciously aware that the Unconscious Mind has done it's "heads up" thing. Alert, alert..."she's gonna try and make one of her dreams come true"...Alert Alert! However, this will translate itself with feelings of anxiety, or apprehension or unsureness in waking life, this time around. Depending on the level of anxiety, it might also kick in a good course of nightmares, just to get you really rattled. At the worst end of the spectrum, we can Unconsciously sabotage ourselves from achieving or goals.

There are two ways that I know of to get inside the Unconscious Mind:

1) Look At The Patterns In Your Life

Most of us are aware that in some areas of our life things pretty much always work out well for us, but we've all got an area in our lives where it seems like it's a continual stream of bad luck. If you can notice that something is just not working out for you on a continuing basis, this is where you need to go looking. What happened the first time? Traumatic and painful events can be so powerful they create a mind template where we continually attract the same situations over and over again. If we can figure out what that one thing is - we can undo the damage. Awareness is the key to moving forward. Transforming those old experiences "as if they didn't happen" also help.

2. Dream Interpretation

The thing that has worked for me, and I stumbled into this by accident, was learning how to interpret my dreams. I read a book, joined an online dream forum and before I know it I'm getting the best natural and free mental therapy without seeing a psychologist. It was awesome. The facilitator of the forum was also awesome. She was born to bring dream understanding to ordinary people like me and it began to blow me away when I realised my dreams were actually showing me things that I'd consciously long forgotten. Suddenly I'm going "oh wow, that's why that never works out for me" or "wow, that's why I turn into a bucket of jelly when that situation happens". Etc, Etc, Etc. I'm still in awe of my magnificent ability to forget things, and let me tell you, my life hasn't been all that bad or traumatic. Still, as ordinary as I am, I still managed to pile up a great collection of negative mind junk. Clearing it out was wonderful. It was like getting clear of something that's been controlling you. Unconscious beliefs are perhaps just as powerful as addictions.

Once we become aware of how we operate on a psychological level, and we understand why we just can't seem to make an area of our life work for us, we can then transform that scenario so that it no longer has any effect on us.

I'd like to suggest here that all of us have the ability to make our dreams come true. The only thing standing between us and our dreams is our unconscious processes at work.

To share a story, when I was in my last career I had to do some study units of a particular diploma course as the government were making those courses mandatory for people in my industry. No matter what I did, whenever it came up that I had to do those courses, I just couldn't get going on it. I'd procrastinate on filling out the paper work. I'd miss the deadlines and then have to wait another six months before they came around again. Then I'd self sabotage to the point where I didn't have the money to pay for the courses. As the time was ticking by to get these courses done, I continually failed to even enroll.

During the time when I was paying a lot of attention to my dreams I started dreaming about people from the industry that I worked in, and I was always in this venue where another bad thing happened. An old boss of mine was in these dreams. These dreams started to drive me nutty. I kept thinking about what these dreams were trying to convey.

Then one day, out of the blue this memory hits me like a sledgehammer. Rewind back to the mid 1980's. I had enrolled for that exact same course that I had to do now. My boss had been away when I enrolled so I never got a chance to run it past him. The classes were being held across the road from where I worked, and were held early in the morning before work. However, they finished right on my starting time which meant two mornings a week I'd be 5 minutes late for work.

What I did not expect is that when my boss came back from holidays and found out what I was doing, he hit the roof. He dragged me into his office, locked the door and in a red faced fury, began to insult me and threaten me about it. He was like a man gone crazy. I'm young, about 26, and I can't for the life of me think what was so wrong about it, so I continue to argue with the guy for the next few hours. I tell him that from where I sit, one day these courses are going to be mandatory but "oh no" he comes up with every counter excuse why I shouldn't do it.

I could have left that job. I'd only been in the job a few months and back in those days it was only my third full time job so I was conscious that it wouldn't look good on my resume if I left after two months. That's how I thought back then. Also my parents had just moved overseas, I was single at the time, and I didn't have anyone close to talk about it with to see rationally. I honestly felt like I'd done something wrong. What I also couldn't see back then was that the boss was mildly cheauvanistic, and he was also recovering from a breakdown. I think he thought that if I got qualified I'd leave his firm and go to one for higher pay, and then he wouldn't have me to run his department, which took a great deal of pressure off him at the time. I can see that now, but I couldn't see it back then.

Now, I don't think I ever would have remembed that if I had not been paying attention to my dreams. It was suddenly so illuminating for me to see why I couldn't do those damn courses now. Now that I had remembered the past, I realised that the anxiety I felt was exactly the same as what happened early in my career. I felt like I was going to get into big trouble! What also blew me away was how conveniently I filtered that painful experience into my Unconscious Mind.

Once I got over that I had no problem getting the mandatory courses done. In fact I discovered that I enjoyed studying. Eventually I left that industry and followed a new dream. I wanted to get into IT, and so I said goodbye to that industry, enrolled in a new course and haven't looked back.

I would not be doing what I am doing now if I had not unblocked that experience. This is huge really. I am so happy in my new career. I pinch myself sometimes that it's real. I am now equipped with the psychological knowledge that I can study whatever I want to, and follow any path I want to. However, I couldn't do that before. I was stuck in anxiety and fear.

Another time I was doing a training course for a particular job, and I noticed that one of the women in the course was getting sick. I mean this sickness came on so quickly, and not only that, she seemed very distressed. Still, she tried to push on with the course and it was becoming really distracting to me and everyone in the group. Her level of distress was permeating the room like a bad smell and I could literally feel all her bad energy.

I usually don't take people on but I'd had enough of this woman, so during a break I asked her if I could talk to her. This is all I said to her.

"Look, I've been watching you and I've noticed that you are really distressed. Sometimes sickness is just our body's way of telling us that we are really REALLY uncomfortable. I know this is going to sound crazy but perhaps, just perhaps, something that is going on in your life is triggering this".

I went on to explain to her how past painful experiences can trigger those old emotions when we are currently reminded of something in the present. Now, please understand I had no idea what was up with her. I just new it was something. I also talked her into going home and getting some rest, because she was really REALLY unwell.

The next week, she comes bouncing into the training room and throws her arms around me. She's a different person now. She shares with me that the last time she had to do one of these training sessions, she failed the tests and didn't end up getting employed. She also felt like a massive failure.  She was then unemployed for many months, and worked in shitty jobs for many months. She'd forgotten all about that. But when she went home she starting thinking about what I said and as soon as she realised that past experience, she resolved that this time around she was going to study extra hard and get through the course! All visable signs of her cold had vanished. Instead of being in a state of distress, she was alive, vital and over the moon. Thank god she was open enough to at least consider what I had suggested.  She passed and got employed.

The story above is only one of my stories. I could write a novel the length of War and Peace about this subject, and how other things in my life have dramatically improved because I've been able to get into those dark crevices of the Unconscious Mind and transform events, emotions and beliefs taken on from the past. You only need to work through a few things like this to find yourself well on the path to a dream life! I wish I could give everyone here a little red pill so you could just download my eight years of knowledge and experience in dreaming. Its so illuminating and awesome.

However, this has to be condensed because it's a Hub.

If you are interested in learning to interpret your own dreams, here are the books I read, in order.

1. Sleep On It And Change Your Life by Jane Teresa Anderson (now available as Ebook download).

2. The Shape of Things To Come by Jane Teresa Anderson

3. Dream Alchemy By Jane Teresa Anderson.

Jane Teresa's website is www.dream.net.au

There are also hundreds and hundreds of pages of resources about dreams on Jane Teresa's website. And I think I've read every single on of them.

For people who are not interested in dreams, Jane Teresa has just published a new book called The Compass. It will give you similar results, you can just bypass the whole dream thing altogether. The Compass website is http://www.thecompass.com.au .

I'm also a huge fan of Clarrissa Pinkola Estes, Judith Orloff, and Dr Dream Himself, Carl Jung. I've found it easier to read Jung, after reading Jane Teresa's books. Jung's material can be quite deep and academic and difficult to wade through at first. I think that Carl Jung was a genius and I think he was in a sense somewhat over shadowed by Freud. Freud was obsessed with sexuality, whereas Jung saw dreams as something illuminating and transformational, if people could understand them. He believed that people could become whole, by understanding their dreams.