indiayogi may be the first to offer dream interpretation through the Tarot on an organized and systematic basis. As with our Tarot channel, there is an assurance that your dream will be personally looked at and an actual physical reading performed by one of our experts. No quick-fix software readings or standard clustering of dreams will be offered. Each dream, like each dreamer, and each Tarot reading is unique and will be respected as such; not explained away. This is NOT an analysis of your dream but an interpretation. The distinction is necessary even though we do have a practicing psychiatrist on board. Analysis is a long drawn out process requiring time and a structure not suitable for what is being done here. By submitting your dream for interpretation through the Tarot you may gain some valued insight, some direction as to how to proceed, some tools to equip you in the adventure of life.

Please read on to understand the thinking behind this channel.

Dreams...
Everybody dreams.
It has been speculated that a human being could not stay alive for very long if dreaming stopped. Thus, dreams are mental hygiene. Dreams are both a species of thought as well as a language. It is not a verbal language, which is why we can understand the dreams of all humans even if we don't always grasp their conscious cultural speech. Dreams are, of course, driven by culture and environment, but they also seem to operate out of a universal template, a language of visual variety and surreal logic that anybody can recognize and learn from with just the slightest effort.

The importance of dreaming as an altered state of consciousness has always been recognized in societies which are not overtly intellectualized. The dream has been one of the standard patterns of communication for the intuitive self, even perhaps for the soul. Even in the context of modernity, the dream has acquired fresh relevance. Freud and Jung have based a large part of their systems on the analysis and interpretation of these messages from the unconscious. However, it is not only in the psychological sciences that paying attention to one's dreams has tangible benefits. In the most famous example from chemistry the pioneering organic chemist, Friedrich August Kekule von Stadonitz, was struggling in the 1850s with the nature of benzene, a chemical which seemed to defy analysis. He fell asleep in front of a fire and in a vivid dream he cracked the structure of benzene. He saw a whirling serpent that was swallowing its tail, and realized that benzene was structured not in a chain, but as a ring.

In the extremely urbane civilization of classical Sanskrit in India, the dream was the single most important source of communication with the divine. Vivid and plentiful dreaming is often regarded as a sign of spiritual progress in the Cultural Unconscious of India. The Ancient Greeks held that from the Gate of Horn, creative dreams were released by Morpheus, god of sleep; while dreams that were nightmarish, or delusional, used to issue from the Gate of Ivory. The Greeks even used to practice healing with dreams at the Temple of Asklepios, physician to the gods, in Epidauros.

Dreams are very often both a warning signal of a crisis of soul as well as a way out of that situation.

...And The Tarot
So what does the Tarot have to do with all of this?

Actually, I can conceive of no other tool that is quite so suitable to grapple with dreams as the Tarot. Like dreams the Tarot is applicable across cultures and across time spans. In terms of surfacing the latent and unexpressed aspects of mind and psyche, the Tarot is swifter than word associations or Rorschach blots. The Tarot is a schematic substratum that arouses the imagination and projects into the schema the images or thoughts that dominate the unconscious. By surfacing these thoughts or images and interpreting them in the light of the Tarot tradition we learn to understand ourselves better. Where dreams are concerned, the images have already been aroused and they require only interpretation now - a task the Tarot is well equipped to do.

This is finding increasing relevance across the world and the number of people using the Tarot to understand their dreams has suddenly gone up. The enormous importance of dreams in their own right is the reason we have a channel dedicated to it.