It is not uncommon for people to not recall details of dreams as it has been our cultural experience to not give them a lot of attention or importance. In First Nations cultures historically it is really different and the significance Baha’u’llah places on dreams also says that in the future people will clearly use dreams more often for their spiritual development and material advancement.

To wake up with your heart racing is likely a sign of a dream with fear in it which your dream wants you to wake up from. The process for dreams like nightmares is to look at the metaphor in a dream and flip it to its positive opposite. So for my nightmares for example, I once dreamed a flood was coming and I was trying to save my family.

The positive opposite of a water flood threatening to kill would be to “flood” my life with positivity. I’ve also dreamed of being shot at which is a metaphor for a lot of clear and direct negative words with the intention to kill or harm, so the positive opposite of that would be to be clear and direct with positive words that uplift and encourage.

To be tired but unable to sleep, is a sign of the conscious mind not wanting to look at some things that the unconscious mind is holding. To have slept and awaken without remembering the dream is a sign of the ego trying to cover up things which are painful to look at.

Simply put, we forget our dreams in order to forget negative emotions.

That’s why Dreamwork is so important. When we remember our dreams we can notice where negatives are and we can process them and then let them go. This releases long-held fears and anxieties so much that there is almost no fear left at all.

This truly is one of the greatest struggles which humans face as the dreams are there to show us really great things about ourselves but fear becomes a veil between our conscious and unconscious selves, or the self we are now and the self we are expanding into. The most common fear by far, according to Richard Hastings who is a Baha’i who has studied thousands of dreams for the past twenty years, is the fear of being isolated or left alone, being excluded. The solution to this fear is building connections with others, and in our collective efforts towards unity we collectively and individually overcome these fears.