Introduction to Temenos Dream Interpretation App

Welcome!

What is a Temenos? A Temenos is a sacred space. We created this app to have a sacred space for working with dreams. We wanted a place to easily log our dreams, try to understand some of our symbols, and to make it easy to share dreams with friends and sometimes to invite a larger conversation.

First, about privacy:

By default your dreams are safe and private. Any dream you enter is encrypted. NO ONE (including our developers) can see it but you. If you decide to you can share the dream by changing it's privacy level to public, or for friends.

How to get started

Create a profile: choose a username and password. If you plan to share any of your dreams you can make the username something familiar to your friends, or you can keep your anonymity by choosing a name that won’t identify you. After choosing a username, you can fill out as much or as little of your profile as you’d like. (We will ask your age though since dream content can be inappropriate for kids.)

Record a dream: Click the red button and speak your dream. When you’ve finished recording the dream press the red button again. The system will create ‘New Dream 123’, transcribe your dream for you, and save your recording for future reference.

Identify Symbols: After recording your dream the app will highlight words that you might want to explore as symbols. Just tap a word to add it to your symbols list for this dream. Tap two words consecutively to add them as one symbol, such as ‘Black Dog’.

Context: Next, make note about the context for your dream. What happened the day before? What has been on your mind lately? Dreams often speak to us about our daily lives but in a symbolic language. By making notes in the context, by keeping track of what’s happening in your regular life, you might gain insight into what a seemingly cryptic dream is commenting on.

Your Associations: Next, click on the symbols tab, lower right. Now it’s time to write down your associations for each symbol in your list. What does your symbol remind you of? Try to be detailed about your associations, no matter how unrelated they might seem. These associations will help you understand parts of your dream later (you may not have associations for every symbol, that’s fine). Finally, scroll down and Click Next to review the symbol meanings.

Symbolism Review: The app will show you potential meanings of the symbols you have identified. Remember, these symbols are coming from you; from your dream, from your psyche. They are relevant to you only. So you are the ultimate judge of whether any symbol ‘meaning’ makes sense or resonates. You will see meanings that don’t resonate with you. Simply throw them away and move on. (You can click the ‘-‘ sign and remove any symbol definition from that dream.)

Use Frameworks to analyze your dream: After reviewing your associations and the symbolism definitions, now you can try out the Frameworks. There are various ways of looking at dreams that have been developed over the years by CG Jung, Jungian or Depth Psychology Analysts, dream enthusiasts, and even Ancient Greeks. None are the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to look at your dream. One Framework may suggest a dream is trying to communicate one thing to you, another Framework may suggest the exact opposite. In my experience dreams rarely mean ‘X’ – usually they mean X, and Y and the number 7, and the color purple, and, and, and… Jung said that if we could understand one dream completely, we would understand all dreams. And as Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself! I contain multitudes.” We all do.

Sharing a Dream: Finally, try showing a dream to a friend who knows you well. Ask them what they see in your dream. We all have huge blind spots, areas where we remain unconscious. Your dreams talk to you from those blind spots. Often it is easier for a friend to see your blind spots than it is for you to see them. And sometimes, even hearing a ‘wrong’ analysis, one that doesn’t resonate with you, can bump you into understanding something you hadn’t before. (For more on this, see the story of Jung’s Gardener)

Know that working with dreams can be very uncomfortable. Some of these symbols, these themes, are unconscious for a reason. It takes work to engage with this. No ‘Dream Symbolism Dictionary’ can do this for us. Working with our dreams challenges our comfortable day to day view of the world, of ourselves. We are developing a community of Dreamers and it is our hope that together we can increase our level of consciousness just a little bit. And maybe that little bit will be enough to make our world a little better.

Be kind. We are all trying to grow, expand, transform. It is a difficult process and one that can make us feel very vulnerable. Let us all keep this Temenos a sacred space; as a place that we can safely learn, explore, expand, experiment, and transform towards being our true Selves.