From the author: The article was published in the Segodnya newspaper on 08/18/16 Even people who don’t believe in the interpretation of dreams can say whether they watched a good or bad story tonight. Usually, sorting into positive and negative is simple: you dreamed of butterflies, flowers, beautiful places and smiles, which means the dream was good, but if there is a chase, shootout, blood/death, it is bad. And it would seem that such a gradation is logical, while we are ready to retell a good dream hundreds of times, but we try to forget a bad one as soon as possible. However, practice shows that dealing with bad dreams often leads to important changes in life. Psychotherapist Lesya Rybakova will tell you why this happens. OTHER MOVIE Before dealing with the plot of a dream, you need to understand the main thing - any part of it speaks about the dreamer’s life, about what is happening in life and about what is hidden deep in the psyche. A number of specialists who work with dreams try not to separate sleep and reality, because both daytime events and nighttime scenes happen to the person himself, and therefore are a full-fledged part of life. Simply put, a person lives on the way to work and at home at the stove/on the sofa, dancing and being sick and rejoicing and suffering, falling asleep and waking up, so why is his life at night worse than that which passes during the day? Moreover, dreams can tell a lot about the unconscious part of the biography, which remains out of reach day after day, but nevertheless has meaning in life, otherwise it would not have been dreamed of. GOOD OR BAD? “Recently, a woman came to me, alarmed by a dream in which she had to bury corpses,” says the psychotherapist. – In the dream book, the woman read that such activity means a change in the weather, which confused her even more and pushed her to figure out what was happening. An interesting fact is that at the beginning of the conversation the woman called her dream scary (after all, there were corpses there), but it turned out that this dream did not cause any negative emotions in her and in fact, according to her, there was a feeling that she was just doing the job that she had to do . Simply put, the “scary” dream did not cause any fear. And in a further conversation, it turned out that this dream speaks of plans that did not come true and lay dead for a long time, but were not forgotten (buried). That is, from time to time the woman returned to the unfulfilled hope and was upset that the dream would never come true. The dream showed that it was time to bury what had died and put an end to it, accept the fact that something would never happen again. Turn over this page, move on with your life, without stumbling over memories and unfulfilled dreams. Needless to say, such subtext of the dream had nothing to do with the change in weather.” SLEEP LABORATORY What to do with your dreams is, of course, up to the dreamer. And most people usually ignore dreams that do not cause anxiety: I ran all night after a unicorn through a field with lilies of the valley, flew among the stars, danced with a beautiful fairy, woke up, washed my face and went to work in a good mood. Another thing is dreams, conventionally called bad, when you spent half the night doing something nasty or running away from an enemy. Even the most unbelieving Thomas will try to secretly find their meaning in the dream book. And here you need to be careful: after all, the very desire to understand the meaning of a dream is commendable, but the dream book is more likely to do a bad job. Therefore, if you want to get to the bottom of the true meaning of a dream, it is better to go to a specialist with a dream that greatly impressed/frightened you or is a regular dream..