If you have asked a question when you have had a particularly vivid dream about whether that dream might be trying to tell you something, you are not alone. Most of us have the kind of dreams every so often that seem full of meaning. The feeling of waking up feeling a sense of urgency because our dreams were trying to communicate something important to us is a common experience in all people.

We don’t often talk about how powerful our dreams affect us like this because we don’t want our friends to think we are crazy. But we store away these questions in our minds and in our hearts and the wondering about what we dream can become a haunting area of missing knowledge that you would feel so much better if you understood it all.

It helps to think through where dreams come from in the first place. Psychologists tell us that we have another entire side to our minds, which is our subconscious side. We know that is true because that side of our minds is so active all the time. In fact, experts in sleep and dream research tell us that when our conscious mind takes a break, the subconscious mind is very active processing all of the information and events of the day and what is going on in our lives.

They tell us also that the subconscious is as much a part of how we make decisions and “think and feel” about things as the conscious mind we think with. Both sides of our personalities are always communicating in ways that we cannot always understand or even recognize. Sometimes that feeling of having a “gut feel” about a decision is coming from your subconscious mind. But psychologists also tell us that dreams is another way that the subconscious is presenting information to the conscious side of our brains and that there can be a lot of information and meaning in those dreams.

It might be pushing it to say your subconscious is “trying to tell you something” in your dreams. Instead, there is good reason to believe that your subconscious is always communicating to you and dreams are one of the ways it expresses itself. That means there may be lots to learn from dreams that can tell you about yourself and about your “true feelings” in regards to relationships, job, you worries and stresses and what is going on in the world. And if there is information in your subconscious that can help you cope with those big challenges in life, why not understand it and put it to work by learning what dreams are saying and what we can learn from them?